“Today I’m going to give you a tour of Stars Reach, the game. Like, the whole thing.” So begins Raph Koster’s latest dev blog for Playable Worlds’ in-development sandbox MMORPG, just ahead of it next week’s Kickstarter launch. And make no mistake: When he calls this an MMORPG, he means it.
“Stars Reach is an MMORPG,” he continues. “It’s not a small scale survival game, it’s a game where thousands of players play together in a shared setting, a giant game with thousands of planets in a single galaxy. It’s a game in which those players explore, settle on, and rule living alien worlds.”
The piece serves as an introduction to the game for people who haven’t been following it in detail (i.e., probably not most of our readers, as we’ve been covering it for years already, even before we knew what it was called). Koster recaps the basics, like the eight (probably) human-ish character types, stats, character customization, and starting scenario, before moving on to describing the “most alive gameworld ever made” that flexes and adapts to the players inhabiting it as they explore, fend off invasions, build up their homesteads, trade across the galaxy, take over planets, tackle player-made quests, and eventually, PvP, all while building up a huge variety of skills from smuggling and cooking to dancing and fighting.
It’s a high-level look, overall, but we want to draw your attention specifically to the map of the “typical session” for a basic player; it flowcharts its way through the options open from login, like maintaining your home base, zipping through missions, interacting with the economy and social systems, and working on your skills. It’s definitely weighting certain gameplay types much more heavily than your standard themepark MMO.
“Ultimately, this is about handing you a galaxy,” Koster concludes. “Putting you, the players, in control. It’s about building that immersive, reactive, dynamic world we have dreamt of since we all read Snow Crash or first saw a Holodeck. Our dreams for MMOs haven’t been big enough for a while. Stars Reach is all about being a game that dreams big.”
Wanna see it with your own eyes? MOP’s Chris streamed the pre-alpha last week.
