A true story of what happened in the pre-alpha testing last night in Stars Reach.
It began as an upwelling under a basement.
Oh, ever since the crater lake next door had overheated and spewed a geyser far into the sky, water was everywhere… condensing on every surface. But this was something more. It bubbled up from under Leric’s house, right there by the fountain in the middle of the settlement on Gaiamar.
I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them.
One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago. They are often quite confident that I have not adjusted or updated my opinions on griefing at all in the intervening time, despite the fact that Star Wars Galaxies did not have a playerkilling problem like UO’s — and I designed that PvP system personally.
There is something jarring about getting confronted repeatedly with this. Of course, in my mind, I made a pretty definitive statement on playerkilling back in like 2001 or 2002, in an article for the SWG community called “A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling.” The key takeaway:
The point of this little exercise is to clarify what the fantasy that you are trying to fulfill in your game narrative is, clarify what the mechanics in your game point towards, and see whether they line up well.
I’ve got a blog post up over on the Stars Reach website that walks through applying this to that game — check it out if you are curious to learn how SR is essentially a climate change metaphor!
Remember, you can always wishlist on Steam, sign up for the Discord, or even to playtest — tests start this summer, and if you have noticed, summer is ending pretty soon so that means testing must be pretty soon too!
Something that I meant to dig into in that article, but totally forgot to, is that all this talk of forms of accessibility really needs to include a factor that has hugely affected the development of MMOs over the years: the time commitment.
Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.
As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.
In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.
It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.
Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.
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