Today, MMO fans finally have the pleasure of learning about Stars Reach, the next game envisioned by genre guru Raph Koster and his team at Playable Worlds, a studio founded in late 2019. Koster was the Lead Designer on the seminal Ultima Online, the Creative Director on Star Wars Galaxies, and the Chief Creative Officer on EverQuest II.
For Stars Reach, Koster has returned to his sandbox roots with the power of today’s technology. The developers at Playable Worlds have crafted a first-of-its-kind server architecture running partly on the cloud, which allows players to fully modify the universe. In turn, the worlds (yes, plural) will react. Water flows, creating natural currents. Forests can catch fire. Flora changes as heat and humidity change. Creatures migrate as food sources are depleted. This is a single, global, persistent universe that won’t reset during downtime. The actions players take affect the landscape, are visible to all, and are permanent.
The game aims to allow players to build a home on the planet of their choice, an underground lava mining facility, an underwater dome farm, and an orbital starport, and these are just a few examples. You will be able to rule a planet as you see fit, and there will be even areas of space where PvP is enabled. Stars Reach also adopts a fully classless system, eschewing levels in favor of skill-based progression, which means you’ll never be ‘outleveled’ when playing with a friend.
I was able to speak for nearly an hour with Raph Koster about virtually every aspect of Stars Reach that I could think of. The game’s ambition is through the roof, as you’ll see in the full transcript below.
Let’s start with the basics. What engine are you using?
Unity.
Are you aiming to eventually release this game on other platforms?
We’re focusing on the PC, but we have been doing work to prepare for other devices, including controller and touch-screen compatibility.
You’ve said that the player’s actions are permanent, but as I understand it, only as long as players are active on that planet. If they don’t visit that planet anymore for any reason, the buildings will be lost or erased.
We can decide whether or not to have the wormhole to a planet collapse based on not just the activity but whether or not players have stuff there. If there’s a planet that people go to and they go and nobody builds here, let’s just extract all the gold and diamonds, kill all the monsters and leave. That might be a planet that eventually goes away again.
In terms of the setup of the universe, is Stars Reach somewhat realistic in that you have planets that have very different features? Or are they all Goldilocks (habitable) planets?
Right now, we are making them all Goldilocks. However, that is because long ago, an alien civilization terraformed this arm of the galaxy to make it suitable for their genetically engineered pets, which are humans. So they set up this arm of the galaxy for us in order to eventually let us spread across the galaxy. They have disappeared now, but we have been allowed off of our homeworlds by the robot servants that they left behind. That doesn’t mean that all the planets are that similar. They can have different fauna, different flora, different gravity, different day and night, different temperature ranges, different seasons, different seasonal lengths, and different year lengths. Also, there’s actually a lot of variety that can happen between the different planets, but we are not planning on starting out with planets with fully poisonous atmospheres. We can do that; we just aren’t starting Stars Reach that way.
Maybe in the future. In terms of size, are the planets going to be roughly the same size, or will there be any differences in that area?
Right now, we are looking at them all being the same size. Space areas will be bigger. The robot
servitors do not allow you to colonize the entire planet. They basically created a force field dome and are restricting a portion of the planet and that’s the part that the humans are allowed to visit.
That’s because they don’t want us messing up the rest of the garden. They saw what we did
to our home worlds. These areas, we are aiming for them to be village-sized. We are looking at zones about four kilometers on a side for planets. We’ll see how big we get them; we want to push them as large as we can while preserving the idea that this is a game about a guild owning a planet, about a group of friends coming to own a planet, all of them connected in this galaxy. So they share an economy, trade, and all of that. but it isn’t a game about the 10,000-person battle on a planet. It’s a game about smaller groups and that is because we want to bring back that sense of community where people come to know each other, they know who their fellow planetary citizens, they establish those ties and friendships. It’s not about building downtown Manhattan necessarily with millions of people crammed into a tiny space because that doesn’t help build those sorts of friendships, and that is a really big part of what we are trying to do.
Let’s say that a lot of people want to go to a specific planet at the same time. Do you have some sort of instancing mechanism in place to prevent overcrowding on a single planet?
We can do instancing, but we are actually trying to avoid it. We are avoiding phasing and all of
those kinds of things because they are very gamey. What we are interested in is providing the sense of an alternate world, an alternate reality that you go into. What our tech allows us to do is have flash crowd support, so if there is an event or something and a lot of people are going to pile into a planet, we can handle a higher load than normal. That isn’t the issue. But there could be queues within the galaxy. Like, if there are too many people currently orbiting this planet, then maybe the orbital space has gotten crowded.
A space traffic jam.
Yes, exactly.
You’ve claimed that players can reshape the environments in Stars Reach. Let’s talk about that.
Our entire galaxy is running on a simulation. It is not just voxels and it’s not just Minecraft style. Every cubic meter has little AIs in it. When you see water flowing downhill, what you are seeing is little water AIs holding hands and walking down the hill. That is what is going on. We know the temperature and humidity for every cubic meter of the entire galaxy. Things can be in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state. If you take a heat ray and heat up that water, it is going to turn into steam, float away, then eventually condense, and fall back into a puddle someplace.
It is a level of simulation that has never been seen in a game like this before. That allows us to do all kinds of new gameplay. You can shoot and bring down a cliff onto your enemies. You can open up a lava pit and watch things fall in and die. You can grow individual trees they will be healthier or not based on the kind of soil that they are growing in. I’m sure there’s even more that we haven’t even thought of yet, but the stuff pervades the gameplay everywhere, and all of it is a hundred percent persistent. If somebody burns the forest down, it is burned down for everybody.
Does it grow back automatically, or do you have to do it on your own?
There is a way to grow trees and they do grow back. Every tree that you saw in that video grew there. We didn’t place them; they grew there. And if we just let it run, those forests would spread over the map. So we do let players regrow the forests and so on. In fact, every planet has a health bar. The reason why humans have left their home worlds is because we’ve ruined them with nuclear winters, global pandemics, and climate change. So, we are going out into the galaxy, and it is a second chance for us to do better.
One of the things that Stars Reach is about is saying to players that they are now in charge of this planet. Can you keep it alive? Can you do well with it? Can you manage it successfully? Are you going to strip mine it, drive all the creatures extinct, chop down every tree, and build a strip mall here? Or are you going to try to build a pastoral peaceful village? We leave that up to the player.
Of course, if you build it into a shopping mall, now you have a net import economy and will have to import all of the stuff you need from other planets. Every planet has different resources with different qualities on it. They all have different creatures with different AI behaviors, different appearances, different stats, and so on. Every planet is unique.
So, players could potentially ruin the planet and turn it into an arid, lifeless landscape.
Yes.
Speaking of physics examples, something that just popped into my mind is that it would be cool if there was a way to boil water while your enemy is in there. But this leads me to ask whether there is going to be any sort of magic in the game. Or is it strictly science fiction?
Our setting is science fantasy. There isn’t magic, but there is the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, the Old Ones, the ancient civilization that made humans, had that kind of tech. Their artifacts are out there.
You briefly mentioned the economy earlier. How is it going to work? Are there systems to trade all across the galaxy via a unified auction house, or will players have to deal with local economies?
It is a fully player-driven economy. The entire galaxy is in one economy. You absolutely have the means to trade, but we do not show you all of the goods in the galaxy in a single auction house. The game is too big for that. We want there to be price variation across the galaxy so that the gameplay is there of smuggling goods from one sector to another, of arbitrage, finding something selling cheap here and selling it for a higher price someplace else, of finding a region of space particularly rich in particular gases or resources and trying to not let out the secret that that’s the place to go to get this stuff. We have a rule that people can move fairly quickly. We never want to block you from playing with your friends. So we let you teleport to your friends, actually, sort of Altered Carbon style. You download yourself into a clone local to them, and then after you have some fun and chat with them, you rewind back to where you were.
But the other side of the rule is goods move slowly. They can never teleport or be cloned that way. If you want to go out into an asteroid field and start blasting away at the asteroids to harvest the crystals, you are going to end up literally dragging them behind your ship in a bunch of mesh bags, almost like a 3D game of snake and the space spiders are going to be coming and stealing it off of your tail. You will have to smuggle it through the wormhole the slow way and get it to the planet that is its destination. Whereas, if you want to play with your friends, you can just get to them very quickly and easily, but you can only take the gear that you have on your tool belt.
There are a lot of things in the game economy that are meant to drive that kind of interdependent gameplay, from varying statistics on different planets to the ability for players to run shops on their planets. You can have a local auction house per planet and it can advertise to nearby areas.
Could you place an NPC vendor at your own home for people to come and buy your stuff?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, cool. You mentioned space, so let’s discuss that. Let’s say that you have to trade goods… Is there space combat?
Everything that I described for the planets is the same. Space is simulated just like the ground is. If you want to build your home as a space station on an asteroid, you can do that. You can tunnel holes in the asteroid, go inside, and perhaps find alien creatures living there. Yes, there is space combat. We do not yet have spaceships in, but people can fly around in their spacesuits engaging in space combat. All of our combat is actiony, but we do have homing bullets and lock-on for people who want to use a more traditional tab-targeting combat; they can do that also. They both coexist within Stars Reach. Space gameplay is actually really important.
How will spaceships work when they make it into the game?
When you start out, we will be handy everyone a small single-seater spaceship.
You put out some very interesting teases in the last 10 days. Among other things, you said ‘What if monsters didn’t always respawn in the same place’? I always thought that it was very boring for monsters to always be in the same place in games. Is it player-driven, like do you have to hunt them down to make them move, or will they just migrate off their own volition potentially as well?
All of our creatures run AI like The Sims. They have needs, hunger, fears, and all of that. If the environment changes around them, they might migrate because they will move around to satisfy their needs. They do reproduce. We do allow players to drive them extinct. The game does fight against that because the Old Ones and the servitors are trying to maintain the populations of the creatures. That’s part of the servitors’ job. There are ways for players to defeat that, but I’m going to keep it a secret for now as to how exactly those systems work.
You also said that they may invade you in your cities.
That’s right. Let’s say that there is an infestation of ice wolves. They might only come out in the winter when it is cold because they only like the cold. If the population starts to explode because nothing is a predator of theirs and players aren’t killing them, then they will reproduce and their territory will spread. And yeah, then they might invade your town. On the other hand, if you killed too many of them, you could drive them extinct on that planet. One step beyond that, we have xenobiology as a profession track in Stars Reach. If you gather the genetic samples from the ice
wolves, you could bring them back from extinction, too.
In the case of NPC invasion, will they be able to damage player-made buildings?
Right now, we don’t have creatures damaging people’s houses. But they’ll certainly damage you!
Another interesting tease was that you might get snowed in while at a tavern. Was that just a fun tidbit, or would there be a purpose in that sort of situation?
Due to our simulation, if you walk into the lava, it is going to burn you. It might even catch you on fire. If you walk into water waste deep, you will slow down. If you are on the edge of an icy cliff, ice is slippery in our game. If you are walking through really wet dirt, it turns into mud, and you move more slowly. So yeah, if there is snow around you, your traversal will become more difficult. We are planning to have skills that allow players to learn how to do things like navigate snowy conditions, climb super slippery cliffs, and so on. In Stars Reach, players have tools like grav meshes so they can fly and grappling hooks so they can zip around the world. But yeah, getting snowed in can be a thing, and it will affect gameplay pretty dramatically because those ice wolves might not suffer any movement penalty on ice, but you do.
So, the environment also affects combat in a way.
Yes, absolutely. Pretty significantly, in fact!
Something else that you said a few days ago is that you could potentially write quests and create contracts for players. How does this system work? Could you write a full quest text, or is there just a basic framework?
It is a contract system. Let’s say that I am a crafter, and I have made a crate of high-quality rifles for a guild that is buying them. They have sent me the money, and I have now made the rifles, but they are far away. I can create a mission on the contract board, a job for another player to deliver these rifles to this planet’s mailbox by this date. The reward money is held in escrow. You do have a deadline. If you don’t do it in time, there is a penalty. You create these contracts for other people. We can also drop authored quests into that same system, but a huge amount of the point is to allow players to help drive the economy by creating contracts between themselves. These can involve delivering things, killing things, mapping areas, and so forth. There is a pretty wide array of things that you might need a contract for.
Can the contract system be tied to PvP? Could you ask for a player or a player guild to be hunted down?
It could, yes.
We have talked about a lot of the sandbox content, but at some point, you have also mentioned potentially going into an underground alien laboratory. That sounded a lot like a dungeon. Are there traditional MMO-style dungeons in Stars Reach?
Our procedural generation tech for the planets is capable of including handcrafted content into the planets, so we have the ability to insert things like crashed pirate ships, points of interest, alien labs, etc. into the maps when they are generated. All of these maps, by the way, they are not just random soup. They are the output of a toolchain where our designers define the important aspects. We need the canyons to be this wide that combat is fun. We need the mountains to have these kinds of slopes so that traversal is fun. We need this amount of space reserved for player housing and so on. It is a very sophisticated toolchain, and it can then insert that content in and that serves as the starting point. From that point forward, the simulation runs.
Can players expect to be fighting big bosses if they want to?
Absolutely, and I think an important thing for people to know is that we are not a game where you
level up and get more hit points and gain power that way, so a big, tough boss is probably going to one-hit kill you. It is a very different feeling because it’s a horizontal progression system. You advance through a skill tree progression where what you’re doing is acquiring more capabilities.
Even though that boss might just stomp you with one foot, another player can just run up to you and one-touch revive you. The dynamics of combat are actually very different from traditional MMOs. It feels much more fluid and actiony and real-time than what I think people are used to. But yeah, there’s absolutely huge bosses. They have different tactics. On every planet, the creatures come with different AI tactics. A lot of that stuff is generated along with the plane, so there is a lot of variety, and as you visit different worlds, you’re going to have to relearn how to fight individual enemies.
Speaking of combat, a lot of games in the MMO genre fall somewhere on the spectrum of the so-called Trinity (tank, DPS, healer/support). How does Stars Reach work in this regard?
There are absolutely roles within combat, even though we are a profession-based skill tree system. Players can choose to specialize in the different professions. There are tracks for different kinds of combat tactics and so on. There are the usual kinds of things, like, I can learn how to stun enemies or blind them. There are things that come with our simulation. I can freeze them or set them on fire. A key thing here is I mentioned your tool belt earlier. You venture out from camps or cities
with a loadout on your toolbelt and you only have the capabilities you take with you on that tool belt, and it is a fairly limited inventory. Right now, we let you take five different tools with you.
Those might be guns; they might be serving tools, crafting tools, harvesting tools, or whatever. But you have to make choices. Each of those tools has what we call special moves or capabilities that are associated with them. As you skill up, you get to decide what specials you take with you that you have attached to that tool. You end up with a hotbar of five tools and about ten specials, basically. There are some extra wrinkles to that. We have charged-up shots and a variety of other things like that. That is what your hot bar is like, so even if you learn a lot of different things while you are on an adventure, you are building a loadout for a specific role and there is that interdependence with party members. If you build a toolbar meant for a solo player, then you can go out and play solo. If you want to be essentially a DPS-type person, you build a toolbar full of DPS-type tools and moves and you go up that way, but that means you won’t be able to do other things that you know how to do until you come back to camp or town and swap it out.
Loadouts are swappable whenever you’re not on an adventure, then?
Yes, and these tools also have a socketing system. So you can actually custom design the way that your tools work as well.
I’m guessing gear will be very important in Stars Reach. Do you have a rarity system?
Everything in the game is crafted by players. Every piece of gear is customizable and has unique stats. So yes, the gear matters a lot. If you are a combatant, you depend on weaponsmiths for your
weapons. Everything also can take damage and break. It might need repair. You might want to strip it and replace sockets in it. Those crafters, like the weaponsmiths, rely on the miners and the harvesters who bring them the materials. The miners rely on the people who map the planets and explore, and the explorers rely on the combatants. All these different ways to play are
interrelated. We’ve set it all up in a large-scale economy, so yeah, gear matters a lot. If you venture out into different areas of the world, you’re going to want to equip the right kind of gear for what you’re doing.
Let’s say you defeat one of those big bosses we talked about before. Will they drop just crafting materials rather than fully constructed items as in a traditional MMO?
Mostly, we drop resources and materials. That said, the Old Ones and the servitors have left all kinds of technological components all over the place. Our creatures are smart enough to pick up interesting things and take them back to their lairs, so I wouldn’t say that 100% of the loot is resources.
One of the things that you mentioned in the video is that, just like in Star Wars Galaxies, there are many other professions, like Dancer. How do you plan to make them as fun as traditional professions? What kind of mechanics will there be, and do you have to sacrifice some of your combat proficiency to be a top-class performer, for instance?
Stars Reach is, in many ways, the spiritual sequel to Star Wars Galaxies. We do have those kinds
of things on our roadmap. We believe that peaceful play should matter just as much as the combat ways to play. We do not separate life skills into a separate track. If you want to be a player who plays entirely peacefully and never learns how to shoot a gun at all, that’s fine. We think you should
be rewarded by the game for doing that, be able to become wealthy and famous and progress that way.
We are currently looking at around 40 different professions that are spread across combat, social professions, entertainment professions, leadership, xenobiology, mapmaking, scouting and a wide area of crafting things. All of them are designed to provide either goods and services that matter elsewhere in the game, so every single one of them generates something that can result in you making money and getting progression.
You can learn all the skills in the game. You just can’t have them all in practice at the same time. When you hit the cap on how many you can have in practice, you will have to start choosing which ones you keep active. If you want to reactivate something, it doesn’t cost you anything but time. You don’t need to re-level it or anything. You can just turn it back on. It will turn on after a certain amount of time in order to prevent people from cheating by just flipping everything instantly.
You can change your character over the course of a real-time week or something, but we let you basically fully respec your character. So yeah, you can learn everything, but you can’t have all of it going at once. All the peaceful ways to play matter just as much and are on equal footing with the combat ways to play.
It will be like relearning to ride a bike.
That’s exactly right. That’s actually the logic we use.
Okay. Well, I might have a hundred more questions, but in the interest of time, I will narrow it down to a few more. When do you plan to open up Stars Reach for playtesting?
We are starting limited testing with friends, family, and selected community members this Summer. If people are interested, they should wishlist us on Steam, sign up for our mailing list, and join our Discord because we will be starting to grab people out of the community sometime this Summer.
Do you have a roadmap for how long you plan to be in Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Beta, etc.?
It is very dependent on testing, because you have to progress through the stages of testing and get the game right, which also means, of course, it’s always dependent on money. But I would say we’ve got at least a year and a half of work to go.
Do you plan to launch Stars Reach in early access?
It’s too early to talk about that.
What about the business model?
Business model-wise, we’ve currently modeled it out, not really inventing anything, just using standard business models from today. It will be free to play with a VIP subscription, which seems to be the standard. We are definitely avoiding any form of pay-to-win.
Did you ever consider using Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general?
Usually, people ask that more aggressively! We get asked, are you asking us for money? The
answer to that is we are not asking you for money right now. We are announcing the game.
How open are you to tweaking and modifying parts of Stars Reach based on the community’s feedback?
Very. The whole point behind announcing now while we are still in Pre-Alpha is so that players
can collaborate with us on helping us make these systems what they can be, because we are making this game for players, not ourselves.
We have been very quiet until we could show the basics, show the innovation, show the new things we are doing. Now that we have all of that foundation in place, we are moving to an open development mode. Expect us to be blogging, posting videos and screenshots, showing things in development. Raw footage, all of that kind of thing, on a regular basis and involving the community in everything we do from here on out.
Personally, if I may provide a piece of feedback, while I’m very excited about the feature set, I would say the visual style and animations still need a lot of work.
Yes. All of that is still fairly early. In fact, when our website goes live, you’ll even see an FAQ question there: are these visuals what it will be? We have a lot of work to do still on the visuals and we know that. We are very upfront about that. There is lighting work, there’s animation work. There’s a bunch of stuff we still need to do. With the general direction of the art style, we are not aiming for high realism. The instruction to the art department is to do to sci-fi what World of Warcraft did to fantasy, make it welcoming, colorful, and broadly appealing. High realism actually signals to the market that this is a game only for hardcore people, and that isn’t really the game we are making. We want a game that you can jump in five minutes and have fun. Our visual target is in the realm of Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact, and Fortnite. That’s kind of the area that we are aiming for. We are not there yet, but we are not done, and we are continuing to work on that.
We also need to get the frame rate up. There’s plenty of work left to be done. There’s a few reasons why we aim for that kind of that target. There is an audience market reason, as I just said. Also, Because of the architecture, it actually is a lot harder and more expensive to do highly detailed textures and do full realism and also have a dynamic world. We make a trade-off choice between having a slightly more cartoony world and giving you flowing water, for example. We are putting our foot on the gameplay side. That’s what we are doing. But we know that the graphics still need to get better for sure.
I wanted to ask about the character creator and the number of races/species in Stars Reach.
We are going to support a full morphing character creator, state-of-the-art, that lets you choose faces, height, weight, gender, expression, muscularity, all of those things that you expect. It’s just not quite done yet. I’m not going to say how many player species are available because we are saving those back to do gradual reveals over time. There’s several more than you have seen so far. But we are sticking to humanoids because we share all of the clothing and all of the gear works across all of the different choices. It lets us maximize that aspect of the economy.
It was actually a pillar for the game that all the characters should be cosplayable on a budget because we want to give that ability to players. We want to see them dressed up at Comic-Con and those conventions, so we stuck mostly to these fairly humanoid shapes.
You’re using Didimo, right?
Yeah, we’re using them for the character customization. We have partnered with them pretty closely and have helped evolve their technology in order to support doing this at an MMO scale. They have been a wonderful partner.
What do you think about other uses of generative AI, like with NPCs? Is that something you’d be interested in adding to Stars Reach?
As you know, the use of LLM and diffusion-style models is pretty controversial. Our game is built on AI. Obviously, the entire environment is AI, but it isn’t LLM or diffusion-style AI. We currently do not use any of that in the game itself. This is much more a game about players taking most of the roles that NPCs usually do. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any NPCs, but there are far more players in this game than there are NPCs, so that use case is not something that is really at the heart of what our game is.
So there will be other NPCs in Stars Reach beyond the servitors you mentioned.
Yes. There’s a whole bunch of lore around not just the servitors, but also there are other genetic experiments that were created by the Old Ones that are out there. Various sorts of tentacle monster things that call themselves the Cornucopia. Expect to encounter more things.
Raph, thank you a lot for your time.
