Raph Koster’s Stars Reach will offer shorter play sessions specifically to boost stickiness

Playable Worlds’ lengthy blog post on Stars Reach’s middle quad of pillars earlier this week wasn’t long enough, or so Raph Koster suggests, as he says he actually forgot to include a section – and has now done so on his own blog.

“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,” he writes. “MMOs are infamously time consuming. Twenty or so hours a week — who has that kind of time, in today’s interruptible, constantly busy world? Especially if you’re older now, as so many MMO fans are these days? Kids, jobs, other hobbies… Participating in an MMO really ought to be something available to everyone.”

Koster harkens back to Star Wars Galaxies, which somewhat unusually for its day offered content like quick terminal missions, offline crafting/harvesting, and relatively fast leveling, all specifically meant to make the sandbox more accessible – and playable in shorter time spurts by players who didn’t have much to spend. While that naturally drove down peak concurrency, it also saw high stickiness with “the highest total hours played per week” even compared to extremely grindy SOE games like EverQuest. In other words, those players played a lot, just spread out in spurts.

Stars Reach is aiming to replicate that approach. “[O]ne of the implications of these pillars is our attempt to make an MMO that you can play in sessions as short as five minutes,” Koster explains. “One where there are a lot of asynchronous ways to play and feel like you matter to the community, even if you can’t devote the continuous hours to it.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean the game will feel superficial or lack depth – Star Wars Galaxies sure didn’t.

“None of this says that the game can’t be deep at the same time. We’ve tried to build in a lot of things to make it easy to have a fun session in a short amount of time, but they all still tie into the deep systems we want from a game that can hold us for years. Stuff like being able to teleport to your friends for a session, but not being able to transport goods with you (so we don’t break the local economies). The way our combat works, or the way our crafting works, also play into this. And so on.”