Starseeker Wants to Be an Ethical Live Service Game

I had the chance to play Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions at PAX West this year and chat with Creative Director Adam Bromell.  We get into what Starseeker is, why it is not Astroneer 2, and just what makes it different from your normal Astroneer experience. 

Playing Starseeker is immediately familiar if you’ve played Astroneer. You have tools you know and can move around the word tearing up terrain and making it your own just as normal. You’ll even have a sweet glider that has a lot of control to get around quickly, too. 

The most interesting parts of Starseeker are what surround the game and how it’s structured. It is not just another sandbox with some new mechanics, as that would be more of a sequel to Astroneer. Bromell wanted to make sure I knew that this is definitely not a sequel and Astroneer will be getting a ton of its own updates for years to come. 

Ethical Live Service Design

Well, Bromell told me it is a live service game, though he didn’t want to call it that. It is a living and breathing universe that focuses on cooperative gameplay and really wants to respect your time. 

For Bromell, he wants people that have thousands of hours in Astroneer to be happy with Starseeker just as much as those that only play for a few hours a week or month. Not only that, he doesn’t want the people that don’t play as much to feel like they’re left behind either. 

Ideally, Starseeker will be easy to jump in and out of and you’ll never feel the need to grind out some kind of season pass or some equivalent to get in on the newest and coolest thing. The last thing Bromell wants is to give players chores or make it feel like a job.

Bromell talked about how some other games have certain things in them to generate revenue that don’t feel right, that they take advantage of players. He said that Starseeker will never ask for money from you for any piece of content. The only thing to purchase will be cosmetic DLC, and he made sure to note that there are still a ton of cosmetics to earn just playing the game. 

So, the Starseeker approach will be one that wants to respect your time and not make anyone feel like they need put in a ton of work to just catch up.

What is Starseeker?

Where Astroneer is a sandbox, Starseeker is more mission-based and narrative-driven. You’ll spend a lot of time on the eponymous ESS Starseeker with other Astroneers. Here you’ll find missions, talk to NPCs, and you’ll see up to 100 other players running around as well. 

Talking with Bromell, we mentioned Helldivers 2 some in how they want to approach the live service. That there’s an overarching story players will be working through as they work on these missions together. 

When it comes to missions, Starseeker will task you with doing a lot of things from discovery to extraction. There will be plenty of resources and other things to collect outside of just what missions send you on as well. Mission design, however, does place a big emphasis on cooperation.

In the quick mission I played with Bromell, we were tasked with repairing a relay station and had to bring a sensor to the top of a huge pillar off in the distance. That meant one of us would have to carry that sensor with us on the way there. 

We worked together with me leading the way to dig a corkscrew through the terrain as we climbed up the tower to place the sensor up top. Along the way we ran into several different creature types we had to take down, with me using the terrain gun to shoot terrain at them to take them out.

That was one way to do it. We could have threw the sensor back and forth between us as we climbed as well. Really, anything you wanted to get up to the top.

Mission-based But Focused on Player Choice

I only had a brief 15 minutes or so with the game and the rest we talked, but everything I played felt very Astroneer and the idea of using this mission-based structure centered around the ESS Starseeker is intriguing.

Nothing about the mission design or content railroad you into playing any particular way, but we did talk some about how giving players just a little bit of direction can be great for some people. For me personally, I love when a game gives me a task and am often at a loss when just in a big sandbox, so taking the sandbox elements of Astroneer that work well and crafting goals for players with those strengths in mind is a great idea.

We didn’t talk too much on the story, but the idea of Starseeker is that you’re part of the group of explorers willing to go forth where no one has before, risks be damned. 

Content will roll out over time as the Starseeker will be parked in a solar system, exploring the planets in that system before it moves to the next system with more planets to explore. 

Will taking a sandbox and packaging it with a narrative and missions work out? Only time will tell, I suppose. I can’t wait to see how it all comes together when it comes out next year.