As much as I respect Raph Koster for all of his passion and pioneering of MMORPGs, I’ve rarely crossed paths with his games, notably Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. We’ve kind of traveled down different roads, he of gaming and I of journalism, connected only by our mutual love of tracking MMO history.
Yet I sense that a convergence is coming in the future when I will enter his domain, willingly and gleefully. Ever since its announcement, Stars Reach had my full, undivided interest for its concept, for its looks, and, yes, for its creator. You might even say that I’m becoming low-key obsessed with this project, trying to fend off my own growing hype lest it drive me mad. Because everything I see out of this game makes me want to play it even more.
So let’s take a step back and look over this project as a whole. Stars Reach is a full-fledged sandbox MMORPG being developed by Koster and his crew at Playable Worlds. The project was first announced back in May 2022 and has been going full-throttle since then, with plenty of dev blogs and pre-alpha testing, all ramping up this past summer.
The concept here is of a living galaxy of sorts, where players will populate, settle, and cultivate various planets and planetary bodies while working cooperatively to make this happen. There are spaceships and space stations and destruction and rebirth galore — and housing too. What the players do happens on top of the game running a sort-of simulation of these ecosystems, with planets themselves having health meters that can be drained to zero (and you don’t want to be there when that happens).
Koster and his team want to “break MMOs out of the rut” they’ve been in (referring to DikuMUD design and a combat-centric focus) by proving that sandboxes can be just as engaging — if not more — to players if done right. He’s basically taking decades of experience, theory, and study and channeling it into a grand opus.
It’s kind of breathtaking in scope and also scary to consider. I get the feeling that it’s either going to be an industry-wide game changer… or it’ll fizzle out as a could-have-been, with no in-betweens.
I may be the perfect test subject for Stars Reach — and you too. I don’t dislike sandboxes in concept, but in practice I’ve yet to find one that eases my anxieties and draws me into its world.
Structure, rules, and being able to wrap my head around the gameplay loop is very important to me, so freewheeling chaos and constant change is anathema to me. If other players can radically alter the world so that I have to re-learn what’s what with each play session… I’ll just meander over to more stable settings.
That said, I know that Koster isn’t ignorant of the pitfalls of unmitigated and boundless sandbox freedom, and I’m encouraged by what I’ve been reading in his dev blogs about this very subject. From what I can understand, players in Stars Reach will be able to modify, change, and even destroy, but the negative consequences aren’t going to be permanent, and there will be limitations to keep griefers at bay.
I want to be reassured on those fronts because there’s a lot that appeals to me here. I applaud the use of a more colorful, cartoony aesthetic, which is more WildStar or No Man’s Sky than Star Citizen in my eyes. My favorite sci-fi properties have always usually a lot of style and color, an approach that shouts “adventure” to me. It also communicates that not everything here is super-serious, giving players freedom to be a little more goofy and experiment.
And heck, I absolutely love that Playable Worlds elected for a scifi setting than fantasy. It’s not the typical route these days, but with SWG in Koster’s background, I can see why this would be a familiar approach. I’ve been starving for good MMOs with spaceships, interstellar travel, cool technology, and a call to explore strange, new worlds.
We’re still a long way out from seeing Stars Reach 1.0 hit our computers, of course. Three, four years out, in my estimation, unless Playable Worlds has discovered a wormhole shortcut. Yet I’m encouraged to see this level of communication and even limited public testing at this point. This game really does need to sell itself to the masses and become more well-known, especially considering that it lacks a notable attached IP.
The waiting will be hard, as it always is, and without assurance that what waits at the end will be an actual launch or promises fulfilled. In the meanwhile, I’m eating up all of the details coming out of this studio. I think homesteads sound incredibly cool, the sheer assortment of professions sparks imaginative thinking (can I be a criminal botanist?), and the tools to physically reshape these worlds look slick to use.
In the MMO community, we often lament how same-old, same-old everything is. How nobody’s taking risks, nobody’s swinging for the fences, and nobody’s pushing the genre forward. Well here we have something doing just that. And while it’s up to Playable Worlds to make good on this vision, it’s also up to us to venture out of our comfort zones and engage with this vision. Priming the community to receive a game like this is going to be just as much of a challenge as building it itself, I fear.
But I, for one, am ready to stretch out and grab this shining hope.
Do you love spectating and speculating about upcoming MMOs? We do too! Every week, Justin tackles another upcoming title on the MMO Hype Train with opinions, analysis, and blind fervent hope. Choo choo all aboard!
