Stars Reach begins testing this weekend as Raph Koster talks playstyle and the anti-endgame

Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster is continuing his weekly dev blogs about Stars Reach’s intended audience this week – though he does say this one is probably the last of those “outlining the high-level goals of the game.”

The veteran MMO dev explains that the game is very much a sandbox where you’re there to live and play rather than [chase] XP pellets to complete gear sets” or advance through a content treadmill. That means letting go of the idea of a traditional themepark endgame.

“Today, with themeparks having dominated the landscape, we instead speak of ‘endgame.’ Levelling up – the journey – has come to be thought of as the obstacle in the way to getting to ‘the real game,’ which is increasingly group raid coordination. ‘End’ isn’t really a word you want sitting next to ‘world’ though. Raids are another form of content treadmill, just they call for groups. There are gear sets and color coded items and all the same jazz that there is around the basic levelling game. Very much more about advancement than just play.”

So if you’re not just grinding to endgame so you can raid, what are you doing? Koster lays out some ideas for gameplay styles that will work within his idea of horizontal progression, like adventuring, exploring, farming, healing, sampling critters, piloting, mining out planets, and even puzzle-solving. And each of these basic skill sets will be available to a newbie, but as that newbie grows in play, those skills will sharpen and expand. Again, it really is very Star Wars Galaxies-esque.

But Koster does admit that the team can’t create and satisfy an infinite number of playstyles and skill sets, so the devs dipped into multiple player motivation models (yes, including Quantic Foundry’s) to sort out the feature types it would need to suit the demographic it wants – community, fantasy, completion, discovery, and design, but not necessarily challenge, story, or power. (There are challenges and story, but it’s not the main content.) The overall pitch, he says, has gone over well – and they’re still listening.

“What we got back was a lot of interest. In fact, exploring those living worlds scored through the roof! We also got back worries about griefing, about whether there would be a clear sense of which goals to pursue, and whether the game might be too grindy. Most importantly, we found that there absolutely was a market for the game we are making. In fact, there’s quite a big market.”

Finally, Koster says that that pre-alpha he teased back in June is finally beginning as of this weekend. It’s apparently extremely small, so don’t expect to get in, and it doesn’t sound like it’ll be the most robust experience either (“Oh, those poor first Reachers will barely get to see anything! We expect to just crash the client over and over,” Koster jokes). But do make sure you’re signed up on the official site.