Here's what he said about it on the Reddit AMABrought 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.
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.
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