Stars Reach - new sandbox MMO by the lead designer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Club Penguin

[ADL]

Brought to you by the designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, STARS REACH is all about fulfilling the promise of what online worlds can be.
It’s a single shardless galaxy full of living planets to explore, settle, and rule with your friends. Thousands of planets and space zones, each persistent whether you’re online or not, all connected into a single galactic online multiplayer game.
It’s a massively multiplayer sandbox RPG with a deep skill tree horizontal progression system, dozens of professions, and no classes, gender locks, or annoying rails. If you decide you want to change your build, just let some skills fall out of practice and go learn something else. It’s built for immersing you into an alternate world of adventure.
This huge galaxy won’t get in the way of having instant fun, though. Download your brainwaves into a clone body close to your friends. Have fun in a five-minute session – or spend hours decorating your house. It’s a modern online game that respects your time and preferred ways to play.

Here's what he said about it on the Reddit AMA

Hey everyone! For those who don't know me, I was the original lead designer for Ultima Online, and responsible for most of the sandboxy features in the game. I was also the original director of Star Wars Galaxies, so you can blame me for dancing Wookiees and player housing (but I was off the project by the time of the NGE, so you can't blame me for that... )

I have been working away at a new MMO called STARS REACH, and we just announced it this morning. You can find info about the game at http://www.starsreach.com.

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.

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. And this works everywhere, it's not special-cased handcrafted moments.

It is also NOT DONE. The graphics need a LOT of work still, there's plenty of development left to do on gameplay in general, and loads of optimization ahead. But we feel it's important to get players involved in the dev process, and it's time. We're gearing up for testing this summer, and will be doing fairly open development from here on out.

 

[Myobi]

Every post you make is a mistake.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Looks gay as fuck.

Pretty much any MMORPG releasing nowadays is doomed for the graveyard (and that will also include Camelot Unchained). It's a genre of a bygone era, only played by people old enough to have been brought up while community building was still a thing and Streamers was not. Thus, for sake of sheer familiarity, convenience, or sunken cost effect, they stick with their old darlings. Also, trying to catch up content wise with behemoths like WoW or FFXIV, which have generated content for 10-20 years, and still going, is futile.

 

[Turbo normie]

I watched the trailer with a dick in my mouth and I found it gay.

 

[Ryzer]

I watched the trailer with a dick in my mouth

But why?

 

[Turbo normie]

I've lost my pen cap

 

[ADL]

Aesthetics aside, he's not asking for money so why not give him a shot? He's my favorite game designer and everything he's saying about it sounds good and fun.

• Koster says Stars Reach is more accessible and casual-friendly than SWG, which is sort of like saying it’s slightly less hot than the sun, but he means it: This is a universe built explicitly for a wide range of time-investment levels. “I think of it as the spiritual successor to both UO and SWG,” he says, but he adds that he doesn’t want to just repeat those old games; he wants to build something modern that takes logical steps forward with fresh tech and ideas.
• For a good example of balancing casuals and hardcores, look no further than how Playable Worlds is handling the key mechanic of traveling in this truly huge galaxy. Koster has a “people fast, goods slow” philosophy, so while it’ll suit casuals who need to quickly teleport a version of themselves to join their friends (the five-minute play session thing), you can’t take a ton of stuff with you – meaning, you can use the system to team with friends but can’t use it to disrupt the more realistic trading economy. And there is very much a trade economy! Koster assures me that yes, we can play space trucker in this game.
• If you’re hoping for a SWG-style resource system, however, don’t get too excited. Resources will be different on each planet, but they won’t be constantly shifting. Of course, it’ll still be possible to strip a planet (and therefore the whole galaxy) of a resource if you don’t tend the planet properly. The studio doesn’t lay out biomes, but we can definitely terraform everything, and when we go to harvest resources, we aren’t dropping machines and digging up generic mats. We’re harvesting specific trees that we can grow ourselves.
• The game does not offer classes; it’s a skill-based design. Koster wouldn’t give me a whole list of skills, but the current build has around 40, on par with SWG (and he hinted several times that the types of skills are comparable too). Players will be able to learn and level up all of the skills, but they’ll have to set a specific five-skill loadout before heading off on an adventure, choosing to let others “fall out of practice,” though players can still easily revive their old skills too. Skills have different methods for leveling; some of them are attached to collecting, while others (like crafting) even increase as other people use the crafted stuff you make. (Koster wanted to do this specifically in SWG but couldn’t. Now he can!)
• Among the skills are xenobiology (sounds like WildStar again) and cartography. Well, technically he didn’t confirm cartography, but he grinned really big, and it just makes sense because charting the galaxy will be a big deal for explorer types, and it won’t be easily circumvented with wikis, as everything about the planets, from their biomes to their exports, will change according to the players’ decisions.
• You can catch a glimpse of the current stage of combat development in the video; Koster calls is arcadey, and it looks a bit like a hybrid system to me. Everyone gets rez, and it’s super easy to rez people who die.
• The player customization system sounds massive. Koster seems to have buckets of distaste for things like gender-locking and weak customization, so that’s exciting. He also mentioned that players will be able to genetically engineer species-changes; just note that all of the character models are humanish, which is an intentional design choice to keep down the development costs of flooding the game with wearables.
• Koster says the team is still debating how many characters we can have per account. My SWG friendos will know that it was limited to one per account, so I did wonder. He is clearly well aware of all of the reasons for and against it in the modern genre (he rattled them off super fast before I could), but they’re still working it out.
• Yes, there is PvP in the game, but the studio wants to get PvE done first. The devs are still debating PvP mechanics like a SWG-style TEF (temporary enemy flag) system and faction-based PvP for uncontrolled, wild planets and space. However, the fact that players can band together and form governments to take over planets means they’ll be able to set rules for PvP within those jurisdictions, so it’ll be totally possible that players create their own FFA planetary zones with their own unique rulesets.
• Intriguingly, Playable Worlds is actually more focused on the potential for griefing unrelated to PvP. For example, he points out that if the designers aren’t careful, a player could grief by damming up a river that players nearby use for irrigating their crops, all thanks to the fact that the environment is so manipulable. The team aims to solve those “edge cases” before addressing consensual PvP, but it is definitely happening.
• The studio is adamant about offering meaningful peaceful non-combat roles in the game for players who aren’t into murderhoboing. It really, really sounds as if the devs are borrowing specific templates from SWG. I’ll be shocked if we’re not getting entertainers at the least. I asked about poets and gardeners, but he didn’t directly confirm. Either way, everyone and every skill will be needed in the game’s ecosystem.
• Koster assured me that it will not be possible for a single person to take over an entire planet. That content is aimed at large groups. He couldn’t go into too much detail here yet, so I don’t know how many people we’re looking at here. Fun fact: Planets have their very own health bar.
• SWG’s economic interdependence philosophies will return in Stars Reach when it comes to crafting, and there will indeed be asynchronous interdependence for trade. Yes, he confirmed player vendors! However, there won’t be a galaxy-wide auction hall; the devs want players physically moving goods. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me whether a galaxy-spanning search system is in play.
• I asked about dungeons and raids and quests – all things even a sandbox will want. The quest construction mechanics sound less like Cryptic’s Foundry and more like a vehicle for players to essentially pay each other to transport goods, target bounties, and collect resources, but both the developers and players can use it. As for dungeons and raids, there’s nothing like the sort of structured instanced dungeons you’d find in a linear themepark, obviously, but there are certainly group challenges all over the galaxy; the dungeons are just going to look more like open-world dungeons with lots of people crawling over them – more like old-school dungeon in Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call than World of Warcraft.
• Sandboxes aren’t usually known for their lore and storytelling, but this game most definitely has “extensive” plans for both, and it’s not just “the player is the story” stuff common in so many empty sandboxes. The extremely brief version is that this galaxy has been abandoned by its gods, and players are tasked with finding out why as they explore, restore, or pillage the ruins of the galaxy, aka The Garden, under the “guidance” of robot intermediaries. Koster’s loremasters have apparently peppered the storyline with nods to the likes of Isaac Asmiov, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. LeGuin, Leigh Brackett, and Becky Chambers. Hopepunk is the specific word Koster used. “Ultimately this game is a climate change metaphor,” he says. “You’re leaving the homeworlds because you ruined them.” Will we ruin the rest of the galaxy too?

https://massivelyop.com/2024/06/28/...h-and-yes-its-basically-star-wars-galaxies-2/

So what is the key tech? The honing of what Koster calls “cellular automata.” You don’t need a biology degree to understand this; it’s basically the building block of the game world, with each block having a long list of states and stats, working in conjunction to form a massive simulation that literally spans every cubic meter of the galaxy – and makes possible all the environmental interaction and dynamism the press pitch is promising. It’s not quite voxel tech, but it’s in the ballpark (fun fact: Koster hired EverQuest Next’s Dave Georgeson to work on this, and Koster spent time working on this sort of AI at SOE too, so if it’s giving Landmark vibes, that might be why).


“Our world is actually a giant cellular automata simulation,” he told me. “Every cubic meter of the world: We know the humidity. We know the temperature. We know the materials. The materials know their structural integrity. They know how to hold hands with the AI next to them. When you pour water on a hillside and it flows downhill? That is actually a little bunch of water AIs holding hands running down the hill.”


“What the hell?” I sputtered – because this whole thing sounds insane, doesn’t it? Even now, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it; it’s as if Koster has taken the absurdly deep SWG resource system and not just tripled but cubed it until it’s far beyond the level of what games even dreamed of two decades ago.


Let me note here for clarity that when Koster is talking about deploying AI – something Playable Worlds has been open about – he’s not talking about what he correctly demeans as “intelligent autocomplete” devices that slurp pilfered datasets. Instead, Koster suggests his team has the “most advanced proc-gen system on the planet for generating environments.” Essentially, the thousands of planets in the game are developed with a combination of dev-designed parameter input and AI-based procedural generation. These planets begin as a unique entity with a range of resources, seasons, temperature, all tracked and governed by cellular automata, and then players who discover those planets can do as they please to terraform a world into a lush garden, strip-mine it for its special resources, or turn it into a concrete Coruscant – and the environments respond accordingly.

 

[anvi]

He is a legend but yeah.

 

[Baron Tahn]

I'm getting significant Molyneux vibes off this guy, although UO was good times back in the day.

 

[Tweed]

Designer Dildo up to his old tricks again, I see. Any interest I might have had in this went away the moment I saw the artstyle.

 

[ADL]

We have definitely heard the feedback. We have at least three major areas to work on as regards the visuals:

1. Style
2. Lighting
3. Avatars (and associated anims)

We will be iterating on all of these, and yes, it can evolve pretty dramatically as we continue development. We are still pre-alpha after all.

 

[thesheeep]

That character art is an extremely tough sell, no matter what the game actually offers in gameplay.

I'd get it if this was aimed at kids, but I don't think it is so... wtf?

 

[anvi]

It is really impressive to have the environment actually change based on what the players do, including using lazers to cut tunnels through mountains and stuff... and all done in an MMO. Very impressive. No other MMO has come close to even attempting that, except Landmark which was never made it, and even that didn't look like it had the same level of freedom. And it was voxels. I think this is probably what causes it to be cartoony looking. It's easier to create and for PCs to process if it's not having to do it with high detailed textures and shapes.

Also some of the environment shots look quite good. But it is cartoony and childlike, maybe they could redo some things to fix that.

 

[ADL]

Hopefully the avatars land somewhere between Wildstar and The Old Republic. Say what you will about the WoWification of MMO visuals but vanilla WoW-WotLK holds up extremely well compared to more 'realistic' games like Age of Conan and Vanguard despite releasing several years later.

As Raph said, their lighting system isn't doing their current assets any favors. That being said, I'm glad people reacted the way they did to the look. Now they know what to dial in, it's not like the mechanics are the problem.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm the manliest man on earth, and 30 seconds through that video i felt the urge to suck a cock.

 

[luj1]

making an MMO in 2024 lol

gg

 

[luj1]

with an overwatch style no less

is he trying to fail as hard as possible?