Stellaris: Star Wars had earned a reputation as the uncrowned king of real-time strategy games on Earth.
Its closed beta had received outstanding reviews, but a public release never came, and yet its name had spread far and wide through the strategy gaming community.
The hyper-realistic simulation technology, the painstakingly detailed art direction, and the sheer scale of its war sequences turned heads everywhere.
But what truly caught players off guard were the NPCs.
These NPC factions operated with extraordinary intelligence, their combat behavior so identical to reality that some players had given up on walkthroughs and started studying actual military strategy instead.
A high-caliber real-time strategy game like this naturally drew hardcore enthusiasts, and it exploded in popularity almost overnight.
Closed beta slots had been listed for as high as a hundred thousand on the secondary market, with almost no sellers to be found.
Then today, the virtual war servers went dark without warning.
Almost immediately after, Stellaris dropped a new DLC announcement.
In under half an hour, tens of thousands of players had already flooded the forums, some using auto-clickers, all of them racing to snag one of the limited closed beta slots.
Drool was a gaming streamer known for his FPS skills.
He had heard about Stellaris through his live chat, and out of sheer curiosity, rented an account to try it out.
The moment he got his hands on it, he was hooked.
He had been trying to get into the closed beta ever since, and had privately offered as much as two hundred thousand for a slot, but still came up empty.
“The new DLC is called Lost?”
Just one word added in the title, but no one doubted the sincerity of the Stellaris development team.
“Only ten slots?
Why so few?
Hold on, what do you mean FPS players get priority?”
Drool let out a sly little laugh.
He was, after all, a streamer who made his name in FPS games known as “Porridge Senior.
“Heh, funny how that works out.
But what does FPS priority even mean?
Isn’t Stellaris a space combat game?”
“Whatever.
I’ll apply first and think later.”
“Gods above, if you let me get this beta slot, I’ll go play Warhammer the very next second, I swear it!”
(T/n: lol)
Congratulations, player Drool: closed beta access granted.
“Wait.
No way.
I actually got in?”
“Brothers, hehe, finally I can eat something hot!
Let me taste it, slurp…”
His live chat exploded with question marks.
“Seriously?
How could someone who’s drooling over porridge like you actually get it?”
“Stellaris, you’re not playing StarCraft anymore, are you playing FPS now?
Why is there an FPS prerequisite?”
“What does it mean to prioritize shooter, tactical, and battle royale players?”
“Transaction complete.
Drool, I curse you to Warhammer forever.
I said what I said.”
Players had their advantages, and clones had theirs.
Since the co-op function ran inside the mod system, certain mod privileges could be shared with players.
Things like the minimap, for instance, and friend-or-foe identification.
The players who stepped out of the stasis pods all wore the same expression: complete bewilderment.
“Wait, where’s my warship control interface?
Why did I just walk out empty-handed?”
They had braced themselves for a sleek, jaw-dropping starship.
Nobody expected a field of wreckage.
“Come on, guys.
This game went off-script hard.
Isn’t Stellaris supposed to be space combat?
How did we go from space battles to ground fighting?”
“Honestly?
This game has style.”
Still a little unsteady on their feet after leaving the pods, the players slowly found their footing and drifted toward Aldric.
“Fellow soldiers.
Our fleet has taken catastrophic damage.
We have lost contact with headquarters.
We are stranded on an unknown planet.
Your mission is to adapt to ground combat conditions as quickly as possible.
Our primary objective is to collect energy resources.”
“I’ve prepared weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, and companions for each of you.”
Each player’s partner was a clone soldier, who would also serve as their subordinates.
Assigning clone soldiers to the players was partly to ease them in.
With clones backing them up, minor threats could be neutralized before any player got picked off alone.
“You are the finest warriors I have selected.
I’ve chosen companions worthy of you.
They will be your most loyal allies.”
“Now, take your companions and explore this planet.”
“For the Human Federation!”
“I’ll be waiting at the camp exit.”
Aldric turned and walked off to give the players space to settle in.
“No way.
The Stellaris dev team really delivered.
The art direction alone is insane.”
Even with some mental preparation, the near-photorealistic environment still left the players stunned.
“This level of realism is basically indistinguishable from the real thing, isn’t it?”
“If the warship visuals were already this good, how is the ground mode this detailed too?”
Most of the ten players this round were FPS content creators, and FPS creators tended to be naturally talented players.
So when the new DLC storyline launched, a sizable crowd had already gathered to watch the streams live.
“Dev team can go to hell for only giving out ten slots.
A new mode?
I’m dying for it…”
Two solidly built men stepped up in front of Drool and fixed him with steady, unwavering stares.
“Hold on.
Something about those eyes feels a little intense.”
“They’re not about to interrogate me, are they?”
Both of them snapped to attention in unison.
“Sir!”
Drool let out a long breath.
“Thank goodness.
Scared the life out of me.
I thought Stellaris was pulling a soap opera nonsense on me.”
Once the players had found their footing, one of them spoke up.
“Wasn’t that the commander of the Federation’s Fourth Fleet?
He’s in the Lost DLC too?”
“He’s probably the main character.
We all served under him back during the fleet campaign.”
“They gave us two companions each.
So the game wants us to command troops?
Like a Mount and Blade style war mode?”
“Why do these guys seem kind of…
stupid?”
“Alright, enough standing around.
Didn’t expect this to be an exploration DLC.
I’m already itching to get out there.”
The players, now adapted, quickly gathered around Aldric to receive the opening briefing.
“We know nothing about this place.
Stay alert and gather any useful information you come across.”
“Our top priority is collecting energy-type items.
Batteries, fuel, organisms compatible with the bio-power grid.
Weapons, ammunition, and food are also worth picking up.”
“Avoid exposing our presence whenever possible.
If you encounter what appears to be an intelligent being, either leave them completely alone or leave no trace of them at all.”
“In short: spread out, search, and return to camp with anything valuable.”
“Watch yourselves out there.
Resources can be found again.
You only get one life.”
The players murmured among themselves.
“Isn’t this basically a search, engage, and extract mode?”
“No wonder they prioritized shooter game players.”
Clone soldiers far outclassed players in tactical discipline.
They could execute orders flawlessly, even at the cost of their lives.
But their thinking was rigid, barely a step above a combat drone.
What clones lacked, though, was greed.
And when it came to looting anything not nailed down, whether supplies, weapons, or food, that was where players truly shined.
Aldric split the ten players up and sent them out with their squads to scout the surrounding area.
He needed to understand what they were dealing with.
The moment the players left camp, their perspective shifted.
[Entering Semi-Immersion Mode]
“Semi-immersion is just mouse-and-keyboard mode, right?”
Outside the camp perimeter, player movement and combat followed standard mouse-and-keyboard controls.
It was designed to let players get comfortable as fast as possible.
Full immersion would have made even raising a weapon feel clumsy, and snap-aiming would be out of the question.
But in semi-immersion, the input method remained mouse-and-keyboard.
Only the display changed, wrapped around the player’s vision like a pair of 3D glasses.
One thought was all it took to bring up your sights in under a second.
That was the particular magic of the Online Combat module.
No matter how fast a player moved, the clone body kept pace perfectly.
As the players pushed outward, another advantage revealed itself.
As part of the co-op mod, every area a player explored populated the minimap with real terrain data and marked hostile units.
The minimap was a system function.
Without satellites or reconnaissance drones, unexplored zones stayed blanketed in a fog of war, the same kind found in classic real-time strategy games.
One by one, the players peeled back the fog.
“Commander, detecting an energy signature underground ahead.
Coverage area approximately ten square kilometers.”
“This structure leads underground?”
Aldric’s eyes settled on the wall.
A thick layer of something coated its surface, like the charred remains of a fungal mat that had been burned away.
He found a gap and dropped through it, landing in a tunnel below.
The floor was blanketed in a thick layer of dark substance, different from what was on the surface.
Viscous.
And beneath the stale air, the sharp, metallic tang of iron.
“Is this blood?”
“Something happened here.
A massacre.”
But despite the evidence, there was not a single body in sight.
Either eaten, or burned.
“There’s a carnivorous species here.
And it’s been fighting something else.”
“All players, converge on my position.”
He had barely finished transmitting the order when the tunnel ahead filled with sound.
Rapid footsteps slapping against wet ground, splashing with every stride.
“Hah, hah, hah, hah…”
Short, desperate gasps of breath, laced with terrified cries.
“@$?&@$&@$&”
“System, load a translation module!”
“No…
no…”
“Help…”
Aldric moved toward the sounds.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
A sharp, crackling hiss followed.
Gunfire.
Faint but unmistakable.
Flashes of light strobed through the tunnel as explosions lit up the passage, throwing everything into sharp relief for a split second.
Two figures in tattered black robes sprinted through the corridor.
Aldric drew his black baton, eyes locked on whatever was chasing them.
If they were running, something worse was right behind them.
And sure enough, two black silhouettes, each standing over two meters tall, were closing in at their backs.
WAAAGH!!!
Waka Waka Waka -Packman sound fx.