Raph Koster is reaching for the stars with a big idea called Stars Reach.
Koster is one of our industry’s most credible designers. His contributions to MMORPGs, notably Ultimate Online and Star Wars Galaxies, are seminal, and he has been a steady design influence for many years, whether speaking at industry conferences, his blog (it’s been around forever), or his books, especially A Theory of Fun for Game Design (a delight).
On the heels of a successful new Kickstarter campaign, Stars Reach is starting to look as if there is more there there, and it’s the most excited I’ve been about an MMO in years. Originally announced last June, Koster and team at Playable Worlds have been full speed ahead with dev blogs, pre-alpha tests, and a YouTube channel.
The game is a single-shard sandbox MMORPG with strong procedural elements, thousands of planets, spaceships, space stations, destruction, rebirth, housing, and ecosystems running in the background (planets have health bars that can drop to zero!). Much to my delight as a long-time Unity developer, it’s using Unity.
There is an inevitable comparison here to No Man’s Sky, but the approach appears quite different. Stars Reach is more focused on creating a collaborative, living galaxy of sorts, with a deep skill tree and a horizontal progression system. There is a broader simulation system at work, too, with community-driven goals and cooperation at the core.
I can’t help but feel that something pivotal lies in the direction of Stars Reach. While having a clear structure and a predictable gameplay loop is fundamental to most video games, marrying that to the effects of fun, well-executed dynamic environments and emergent behaviors on choices and outcomes is a tall order. Stars Reach is getting a complex weather simulation, on top of allowing players to modify and destroy elements in the game world (using cellular automata, not voxels), purportedly without lasting negative consequences.
It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. Koster seems fully aware of the challenges of a deep sandbox. This is definitely a project to follow as it moves toward release over the next few years.