For years, I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see what Raph Koster and his team over at Playable Worlds have been cooking up. We’ve seen teases of design philosophies in the form of blog posts from the CEO himself, as well as interviews that talk about leveraging the cloud to help power their upcoming game, but we’ve had very little concrete information about what exactly the game they are making would be.
Well, the team has opened the floodgates, so to speak, and revealed their upcoming MMO, Stars Reach. This is aiming to be a sandbox MMO, aiming to create a truly living and breathing world, where everything from the density of the soil and the humidity of a biome to the river currents flowing through Stars Reach’s planets. This is a persistent world where everything is terraformable, allowing players to truly create and live in the world around them.
Koster calls Stars Reach a “Star Wars Galaxies 2.0,” so to speak, with many of the features that have defined Koster games being expanded on with Stars Reach. While it’s clearly inspired by the games that have come before, from SWG, Ultima, Minecraft, and EVE Online, for starters, Koster tells me in an interview this week that Reach looks decidedly forward.
“[T]his is not a game that looks backwards. This is a game [which] we basically looked at MMOs, looked at the dream of what they could be as alternate worlds, and did a lot of redesigning things from scratch rather than just taking what works in WoW, what works in, you know. That doesn’t mean we don’t take things from a lot of other games - we do. But we are absolutely looking forward with what we’re doing rather than looking back.”
Playable Worlds
The studio's name is apt here when looking at the alternate world Koster and his team of developers are building. Stars Reach’s world sounds like the ultimate expression of player freedom in a game.
A ton of games, from survival crafting games to MMOs tout the ability for players to make an impact on the world around them, whether it’s building bases in ARK: Survival Ascended to the promise of a player-run economy in Pax Dei, Ashes of Creation and so on.
In many of these MMO worlds, you can make an impact on them, from cutting down a forest for the lumber needed to build your base to mining extensive labyrinths underground to recreate Moria in Minecraft. Yet, at least for me, many of these experiences feel more superficial than actually world-changing.
Stars Reach’s developers describe a truly living, breathing universe where player actions will unquestionably impact the game.
“It’s a game about players working together in order to settle these worlds and make them their own. [...] This is a game where players can move in on a planet, strip mine it to bare rock, drive all the creatures extinct, set up a government on it, and build it into a giant, planetary shopping mall, and make it a net import economy.”
Raph describes a galaxy in which everything from the types of soil to the metamorphic processes of lava flows settling into new rock is simulated. According to his description, this is a fully simulated galaxy that is partially running via the cloud-native architecture his team has spent years building.
Many of the teases the Playable Worlds team has been throwing out on social media the last week leading up to today’s announcement hinted at these possible interactions. From pulling the poison gas out of the air and freezing it with your freeze ray to shocking a portion of the beach and turning the sand into glass, to even simulating the way water evaporates into vapor when superheated, only to float away and become precipitation in another corner of a planet, the team isn’t cutting any corners it sounds like.
I think what really hammered home how dynamic this world could be, at least for me during our discussion, was this idea of irrigating a desert by damming a nearby river. We can irrigate cropland in games like Minecraft by placing blocks of water near the soil we’ve tilled, but the idea of turning my in-game world into a recreation of the Nile civilizations is appealing to me. With rivers having their own currents - actual currents, not simply a water shader that looks like it’s moving, damming these rivers and redirecting their flow to where I want it to go is a clear-cut example of making more than a superficial mark on the world.
Setting the stage for the lore behind Stars Reach, it starts with a powerful alien civilization who terraformed the galaxy of Stars Reach, calling it The Garden. These aliens, referred to as The Old Ones, are gone and no one really knows what happened to them. They left behind the planets, robotic life (yes, life) called the Servitors, and other experiments, namely us humans.
As the MMO starts, the Servitors are still tending The Garden, allowing players to venture out and inhabit the worlds of this galaxy to escape the ruined ones we began on. As Raph explained the role the Servitors play in Stars Reach, from enforcing PvP rules, rules against smuggling Old One tech around and more, I started to think of The Sentinels in No Man’s Sky or Concord in EVE Online - and in fact, throughout the presentation, No Man’s Sky kept coming up in my mind.
It does help that Koster himself compared this to an “MMO No Man’s Sky,” so to speak.
Players will be able to settle on these planets, with cartographers mapping them out as they go (though maps and landscapes do change in Stars Reach, so an explorer’s job is never truly done), but they are also able to simply build their base on a nearby asteroid, build their own space station, and so on. The choice is theirs.
Visually, the trailers showcase a more colorful take on sci-fi, something that was deliberate, according to Koster. While he stresses that the visuals in the materials released today are far from the final product - they’ve got work to do on that front, and the team knows that, all with a simple goal.
“We wanted to do to sci-fi what World of Warcraft did to fantasy and make it colorful, welcoming, accessible. We think the real world is grim dark enough, right?”
Part of this is dropping the need for realistic visuals, and instead finding a target that could both look good, but also be performant considering all the simulations running under the hood here. As a result, the team is aiming for something that is along the lines of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact - colorful, optimistic, and highly stylized.
Entering The Sandbox
Stars Reach will be a single-shard, sandbox MMO where players can explore the stars, planets, and be who they want to be within this alternate world. The upcoming MMO is classless, instead going with a skill progression system where when you work at something, you’ll get better at it - and conversely, if you fall out of practice with a discipline, you might have to practice a bit to get back into it later on.
Interestingly, in our conversation, Koster doesn’t say that you’ll get “stronger” when building your skills, rather you will get “more capable” in his game. And this philosophy ties right into one of the major driving forces behind its design: never keep players from being able to play with each other.
“This is a classless game, where you can learn all kinds of diverse skills,” he says. “We use skill tree progression rather than levels. In fact, your character does not get particularly strong over time; it gets more capable because one of our core pillars is ‘never prevent players from playing with each other.’ That’s a core pillar. That means that all of the ways to play are on equal footing, which is not something that most MMO players are used to.”
In another example, Koster describes a situation where a player might have been out in their starship, mining ore from asteroids, and is on the way back to a forward operating base to start trading, with the literal ore being dragged along behind the ship. However, the player gets a call from friends who might need their help in a contract or to fight off an alien infestation.
That player can effectively download a clone of themselves to the surface of the planet and help their friends out, though this means leaving their ship and their ore where it is in space. Once finished, the player can easily get back to their ship and continue from there. This is a clear example of removing roadblocks from players engaging with one another.
While the MMO will have PvP, Koster says they are focusing hard on the PvE experience right now. Peaceful gameplay and combat-oriented gameplay are both important aspects to play, as everything feeds into each other. The farmer tills the ground and grows the food necessary for the cook, while a miner supplies the raw materials for the weaponsmith to craft that powerful weapon the adventurer takes on their next journey.
Koster says there will be over forty-ish professions for players to jump into when the MMO launches, from combat specializations to crafting, scouting, and more. He highlights the way professions worked in Star Wars Galaxies, and says that the team is taking the same path with Stars Reach. However, your role when you’re out on an adventure is tied to your toolbelt
“When you’re out on an adventure, you can only have a loadout of so many different tools on your toolbelt at a time. So you effectively choose your multiclass for your gameplay session.”
Skills are learned, though ones that aren’t being used for a while will require your character to practice with them, just like in real life. If you spend years playing the Saxophone, then don’t pick it up for ten years (I’m talking about myself here, by the way), you’re simply not going to be as good as you once were. This is true here, and Raph says this is by design.
“You can learn all of the skills, but you can’t have them all active at the same time, because some of them fall out of practice. We don’t make you go relearn them all, you just have to flip them to being in practice, which takes a little bit of real time. That way, you can’t cheat the system just by flipping everything around willy nilly.”
Combat and gameplay in Stars Reach will feel like an action RPG, according to the developers, though it’s not leaving traditional MMO gameplay behind. Interestingly, Koster mentions “tab targeting guns” in our interview, and I am incredibly interested to see how that plays alongside someone who might be leaning more into the “bullet hell” aspect of combat.
“We use actiony combat,” Koster tells me, describing a weapon customization that utilizes what he calls a “socket system.” He states that combat in Stars Reach is straight-up inspired by older arcade games to bring that sense of “instant fun.”
“So we draw inspiration from things like SmashTV, Sinistar and arcade games like that are part of the DNA of this game - so combat with even some bullet hell qualities to it, active dodging, all that kind of things. Homing bullets and tab-targeting guns. So action players and traditional players can play side by side.”
How your tool belt is set up will decide what skills and actions you can take out in the wild as well, so if you’re only equipped for combat you won’t be able to tunnel through a mountain, for example. And this could actually be a boon or a detriment, especially as Koster explains how combat and problem-solving in Stars Reach isn’t as straightforward as just shooting the things, thanks to the persistent simulation of literally everything in their universe.
“Everything is consistently simulated. So that opens up all kinds of gameplay. Combat it means collapse a cliff onto the enemies. But in farming, it means there’s like a dozen soil types with different pH and different drainages, and that affects your farming game.”
Revives work a bit differently in Stars Reach, with a one-touch system in place to make it rather frictionless in combat. Additionally, grouping is more “soft grouping” in Reach, with some skills just getting better as players are near you.
The idea here, according to Raph, is to break down some of the tropes of the MMO genre and make things frictionless for players new and old alike.
“Rather than needing to go do the whole handshake and key exchange of forming a party, people in the leadership tree just pick up AOE benefits that they can just activate and their tool is a flag they can raise. So we’ve really gone back and looked at the tropes of MMO play and said, ‘How do we make this more accessible? Easier to get into, less complicated, right?’”
Koster says a massive inspiration for Stars Reach - and the studio’s founding itself - was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the team at Nintendo’s ability to “cram an entire sandbox game with all this gameplay into a game with no HUD.”
“That was a key inspiration, and part of what made me found the company was saying, ‘Oh we can do this.’ That and the fact that it was clear the audience had been wanting this, and that the tech was ready to do it now.”
Larger Than Life Galaxy
The world that Playable Worlds is building sounds massive, and by all accounts, is a playground for highly emergent gameplay. What happens if you accidentally hunt an animal to extinction? Did your guild prepare and save genetic samples of the species in order to reintroduce it to the ecosystem? Did you even know you could do that? Well, I guess now you do.
Can you mine and damage the ecosystem of a planet so severely that you kick off your own little climate crisis, one you and your guild will have to solve, especially if you govern the planet? What happens if the Servitors come to your world’s doorstep, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style and tell you that you’ve allowed a sentient alien infestation to run rampant on your planet’s backwaters and now your world has been slated for destruction if you and your guild don’t do anything about it?
“So you and your guild, please vote, we may be stopping by next Thursday at 7pm to sterilize it back to bedrock,” Koster explained with a chuckle.
What happens if a world pops out of existence and the maps that have been carefully created no longer make sense?
All of this, and so much more, sounds like it puts players right in the driver's seat for incredibly emergent gameplay. This is, honestly, one of my favorite things about sandbox games - and one reason I love covering EVE Online, for starters. Emergent gameplay, where players dictate what happens and not some predetermined storyline with a predetermined outcome, is king in sandbox titles, and Stars Reach sounds ripe for this.
As a result, everything in Stars Reach is player-driven, and it can create some very interesting situations for players to work through together. Players can form guilds, and those groups can eventually govern planets, set tax rates and PvP zones, build permissions, and more, and control their own individual fiefs. There are plans for guild warfare, a full faction system with faction perks, and more.
Yet it’s the little interactions that Koster explained that intrigue me most. What happens if you mined minerals and it left a giant gorge in the landscape - what do you do then, especially if this newly formed scar on the land is in the middle of some prime homesteading real estate?
It is possible also to kill your planet, even if by accident.
“Your planet has a health bar, by the way, because it’s possible to drive all the creatures extinct and chop down every tree, right? So there’s a health bar for your planet.”
Don’t worry, though, if you ruin a planet.
“We’ve got more.”
Setting Expectations
If there is one fanbase I’d argue has been abused and burned over the years, it’s hardcore MMO fans. From games that get canceled well before their time to crowdfunding projects that sit in development hell - and, in some cases, just never release - hardcore MMO vets have been waiting for a return to the glory days of the genre.
Koster isn’t promising that here, but he is keenly aware of the skepticism that might come from an announcement like this - a game that promises a ton of emergent, interactive gameplay. Now, as his team well knows, it’s time to deliver.
“I know [there] will be skepticism, right? These are a lot of lofty promises, and for that, I’ll say, ‘I know.’ And frankly, MMO audience - you have been burned. You have been burned and scalded and oh my God. I get it. I get the cynicism, I get the skepticism. Our target is that we’re going into testing this summer. We play to invite people along on the journey. We’re not done. You know, Pre-Alpha is stamped over all the visuals. We know the visuals aren’t there yet. But this is a game for players, they should be able to participate in shaping it.
“So we’re going to be moving from the quiet mode we’ve been in so far into a much more open development where we’re talking about features with the user base. [...] So all I can say is we know you’ve been burned. All we can ask for is the benefit of the doubt and come watch as we build it.”
In the trailers revealed today, many of the things Koster has promised are already in there, apart from two exceptions where they captured the gameplay using dev tools, such as the facial emotes and a rock falling into a nearby river.
Stars Reach is a game that is already five years into the making, though, and Koster explains the team waited until now to start showcasing it to allow them the ability to “prove” everything they’re promising.
This doesn’t mean that the MMO is entering early access, or even releasing into 1.0 any time soon. Koster didn’t directly answer yes or no when asked whether the plan was an early access release down the road, but rather pointed to the fact we’re at least a year and a half away from anything like a full launch. Rather, the timeline and release is going to depend on how testing goes from here.
“Testing determines when we’re ready to get out there.”
That said, the team does plan on starting that testing this summer, though with small groups to start and then ramping up from there.
Personally, everything that Koster and his team have laid out looks like the MMO I’ve waited to see for years. It’s hard not to get excited personally as a fan of the genre and what it can be versus what it’s become, and while we’ll have to see for ourselves when we finally can jump into The Garden for ourselves, I’m incredibly optimistic to see what Playable Worlds does here.
For Raph, however, this is a game that is thirty years in the making, possible now because the technology has finally caught up with the visions of the developers.
“I have been making online worlds, including engines from scratch, since 1993,” Raph tells me when I mentioned that this truly sounds like the game old-school MMO vets have been dreaming of since the original Ultima Online.
“This is the bulk of my career. It’s what I’ve spent so much of my time dreaming about and working towards. And yea, there are some things that are benefits of having gone through all the generations of it, and seeing how things evolved and change, and knowing what the original dreams were reaching for were, right? Because for me, its a game I’ve been trying to build now for thirty years.”
