‘We are designing it to last for decades’: Stars Reach is hoping for ‘a few hundred thousand players’

Are you feeling the hype yet from the approach of the Stars Reach Kickstarter? Because Playable Worlds is kinda going all out with blogs and videos and now an AMA on the MMORPG Reddit. In fact, Stars Reach boss Raph Koster even posted the AMA as a single doc on Reddit (apparently this is the new thing over there), so you don’t have to wade through every little last comment and piece it together, but also it’s harder to comment on individual answers. Can’t win.

We’re not repasting everything here, as a lot of this has already been said on multiple videos and posts and comments, but we have plucked out a few of the highlights worth special notice:

• Koster has reiterated that the launch schedule is to hit early alpha in early summer, beta “towards the end of the year,” with launch next year, with “some flex” depending on how much money is raised. The team needs “a few million in total” to finish the game. Yes, it is continuing discussions for more investment. The Kickstarter doesn’t have to carry that whole load; it’s more “meant to demonstrate market interest.”
• A lot of the questions were about sandbox and non-combat gameplay, and none of it will shock you if you know anything about Star Wars Galaxies. Did y’all miss that this is basically SWG2? Because it is! Yes, you can play a totally non-combat toon in Stars Reach. You can be an entertainer. You can be a pure crafter, and the crafting system is “almost exactly the same” as SWG’s, though the resources don’t shift (they just deplete).
• There’s no WoW-style hub-centric questing or FFXIV-style MSQ; the questing here is player-driven quests, the mission system, dynamic content, dungeon planets, ruins, and the underlying thematic storyline. “[T]he hope is that when you take on a simple fetch quest, you are doing it for another human, not a robot,” and there will be systems to make that viable, including the “people fast goods slow” rule. (Also sounds as if player-made dungeons are on the table.)
• Likewise, griefing is another hot topic, one Koster has addressed dozens of times since last June. PvP is “completely opt-in.” Koster promises “no direct harm” on other players, people’s property, or anything the team can detect: “We can detect if someone opens a lava pit near you. We cannot detect if someone redirected a river somewhere on the other side of the planet, and through a butterfly cascade of events, that means that your crops on the other side of the planet get less water. Yes, people will use this for griefing, but it’s also just gameplay. You are multiple people participating in a dynamic system, and stuff like this will also happen by accident.”
• Koster has confirmed the SWG-style pack-up feature for housing. Your personal house can’t totally be destroyed, but if your planet falls to ruin, your house/stuff will be saved so you can put it somewhere else.
• “As far as numbers, our models show we can be financially successful with a few hundred thousand players,” he says. “I’d also say we can be profitable with less, but not at our size team.” If the player population is too small, they have the ability to remove planets and reduce the size of the game to suit.
• The devs aren’t worried about the typical MMO sandbox where the rich get richer and no one else can break in: “Everything in our game is designed so that big achievements don’t stay. You overextend, you collapse, etc. It’s not a raw accumulation game. All items break. Planets get consumed.”
• It does sound as if PW is still angling for a sub model; Koster says it will at least “deserve to charge a monthly subscription fee” by the time it launches. “We are designing it to last for decades.”
• Post-launch, the team will fully implement PvP; Koster also suggests functional ship interiors (POB ships), new world types, alien civilizations, and so forth.

Finally:

Same, Koster. Same.