Announcing Stars Reach
It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach.
This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back, to reinvent what an online world can be. I believe it does things that other games just can’t do.
The most alive game world ever made
Stars Reach uses simulation to a degree never seen in an MMO before. We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.
The whole game environment is modelled this way. It gives us not just those examples of gameplay, but many more. And it makes the whole experience that much more immersive, because everything acts like you expect. Melt the sand on the beach, and it becomes glass.
Humanity’s second chance
Long ago, an incredibly powerful alien civilization we know only as The Old Ones terraformed arms of our galaxy to make their Garden, a place where they could play with their superscience powers and their genetically engineered creations — such as us humans. They’re long gone now — and we should probably be pretty terrified of whatever chased ’em off.
But they left behind robot Servitors who roam the spaceways tending the planets and their various lifeforms. The Servitors fight off the tentacled spores of the hivemind Cornucopia that infects worlds. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds, each with their own unique gravity, minerals, creatures, landscapes, seasons, and even lengths of day.
Unfortunately, we humans have ruined our homeworlds. Nuclear winter. Peak oil. Climate change. Even global pandemics, if you can believe that one. And so it is that the Servitors have felt obliged to let us out of our cozy planets and into the wider Garden.
It’s our chance to do better this time.
A classic sandbox world
This is a sandbox online world featuring all the things that players of those games love.
- A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat
- An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune
- An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting
- In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house
- A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want
- The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all
But we’re also doing a lot of new stuff. Like, we are aiming for sessions as short as five minutes. A fresh take on horizontal progression. Making an MMO with hardly any HUD!
We’re not done yet
We’re announcing today, but that’s because we are finally ready to decloak. It’s time to move from stealth to bringing the community along on the journey. We have a lot left to build, but we want to do it in public, with the help of the players that this game is for.
The graphics need a lot of work. Combat isn’t balanced. We haven’t fleshed out all the skill trees. But we’re going to start testing with players this summer. Because this game is for you, and you should be involved in the choices we make.
The stars are yours
You’re being given a galaxy. The question is, what will you make of it?
Follow along with the project at any of the links on this linktree: https://linktr.ee/starsreach — and I hope to see you in the Discord or on Reddit, or just in the comments here! I’ll be doing an AMA at 10am Pacific today in r/MMORPG and answering questions, too.
16 Responses to “Announcing Stars Reach”
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The cartoonish bright graphics are a questionable choice… Why? Is it for kids? If not, then why does it look like its for kids?
We have a lot of work to go on the graphics, and it’s still in pre-alpha. Expect them to continue to change. You might want to look at the gallery on the game website to see how much range we have explored and where we are trying to go. Our target is in the realm of Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact, etc.
This looks so fun! Well done, Raph. 🙂 FWIW, I don’t mind the bright graphics.
Loving this.
Every cubic meter of every planet??? That is a LOT of cubic meters. Will this be persistend for every player or instanced? I am curious and if this is true I do not care about the gfx at all…
In Koster I trust, after SWG. But a big part of SWG and social MMOs is the central hubs, the third spaces and the hangouts. With too large a galaxy/worlds too large, would players not fragment into cliques and shut-in discord servers off on their own tasks like with many other MMOs? I’d love to hear if there are plans to actually force the larger population together for organic interaction (a la SWG’s player-run free market economy, or SWG’s city growth requiring broader communities, or things like HAM wounds requiring visits to central hubs for skilled professionals).
Registered for the game, excited to try it out in alpha if the keys will go for sale 🙂
Help us, Raph Koster. You’re our only hope.
I think it’s good when games aren’t afraid of using bright colors and stylized designs, so many games aimed at adults look super dull and unappealing in their efforts to look “realistic” and “mature”
Everyone can have a noninstanced house? Sounds like big empty suburb, a social wasteland.
It seems I can’t sign up yet to play without a Google account, but I’m very much awaiting the opportunity to flag myself for participation in this galactic experiment. If at launch, you still require Google for safety or business reasons, I will register one just to check out the game — something I very much do not want to do, but I downloaded that seagull flapping game back in the day so how can I not play this.
Thanks for taking risks and building something people can’t easily categorize yet; I very much hope that it pays off for everyone. I suspect this will be one of those games where playing it feels very different from watching it because of how much autonomy is afforded to the player, so it’ll just come down to luring people in to give it a try.
Double extra thanks for your influence on me as a thinker and designer.
More forms of signup are coming soon!
We actually have a ton of mechanics that work with and around that. First, we have as many worlds as we need, thanks to generating simulated planets. The way the game works is almost like private servers that all exist in a single MMO. So you and your guild can settle a planet, build your homes there… and it’s up to you how you manage that. If a planet is abandoned, the spacelanes to it suffer from neglect and the wormholes can eventually even collapse.
Yes to all of those. 😀
Persisted!
Further details in this video we dropped today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeY4ERLhNjc
First, we have as many worlds as we need, thanks to generating simulated planets. The way the game works is almost like private servers that all exist in a single MMO. So you and your guild can settle a planet, build your homes there… and it’s up to you how you manage that. If a planet is abandoned, the spacelanes to it suffer from neglect and the wormholes can eventually even collapse.
Have you forgotten your own lessons? With this design there will be initial influx of new settlers but as people are quitting the game, you will end up with half-empty settlements. The remaining active people will log in to their half-empty settlements and discover they have noone to group with, and the economy of their settlement is ruined.