Regular readers of our site and followers of the MMORPG genre know by now that Raph Koster has a lot to say – and he often takes time to say it as he joins multiple panels throughout the years. But now that his studio’s sandbox MMORPG Stars Reach is headed for Kickstarter tomorrow, he now has things to say about the game specifically in the first of a “Q&Raph” video series.
This premiere episode answers a series of questions about the things that gave Stars Reach its start, such as what inspired Koster to begin concepting the MMORPG, the initial prototyping process for the game, the choice to use Unity over Unreal Engine, and the biggest challenges of bringing the game to life.
As one might expect, the question of what makes Stars Reach different from other MMORPGs came up, which got Koster to repeat a frequent mission statement of creating a world and not a game mat.
“I’ve been playing online worlds, MMOs, since 1993, and that means that I’ve seen an awful lot of designs and an awful lot of patterns. […] One of the things that happened over time is the experimenting kind of stopped. It started getting to this point where people say, ‘this is what these games are,’ and people stopped trying really new things. […] With Stars Reach, I wanted to go back to the beginning and say, ‘If we were designing an MMO from scratch, given what we know now, given what technology lets us do, what would we do differently?'”
It’s a pretty open and honest 30 minutes’ worth of video – at one point discussion is interrupted because Koster’s lunch had arrived – so those who are looking to hear more about the game before flinging crowdfunding money at it might want to check it out.
