Stars Reach News

By Dave Georgeson

We strongly believe there are three core elements at the heart of a great, massively social MMORPG. Fun and compelling moment-to-moment gameplay, a thriving global economy you’re excited to participate in, and satisfying character advancement. These are all married together and intertwined like ivy branches. Each inseparable from the others, and all operating in mutual support. This is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish, and it’s worth every ounce of the herculean effort required to make it happen.

Together, they’re too big of a subject to tackle in one article, so today we’re going to separate out character advancement and talk about how that works in Stars Reach.

[h2]GAIN EXPERIENCE BY BEING USEFUL[/h2]
One of Stars Reach’s core principles is that you learn by doing…but not by just blindly repeating an action over and over again. Instead, you need to do something that’s useful to yourself or others, or incurs risk.

How does that translate into gameplay? Here are a few examples:

• Let’s say you’re learning to be a Ranger, and you learn the skill to set up temporary camps in the wilderness. Do you get XP for setting up a camp that just sits there idle? No, you don’t. But you do earn XP when that camp is used by you or other players to rest or re-equip.
  
• Or maybe you’re becoming a Weaponsmith and you start making weapons. Do you get XP from making weapons? No, but you do get XP when those weapons are actually used by you or other players. The more the weapon is used, the more XP you earn.
  

The same is true for entertainment (you get XP when your dancing benefits others), leadership (you get XP while actively providing benefits to squad members), xenobiology (you get XP when people use the libraries of information you create) and you gain XP with medical skills when you heal or restore other players.

Of course, some trees are more straightforward. When you train with a weapon, you get XP when you cause damage with it (which incurs risk for your character). If you learn Combat Engineering skills, you get XP when your traps or turrets are effective.

You can see the pattern here. This is about your relationship to a universe where danger exists, and how your actions impact others both directly and indirectly, all of which are critical elements in our living, thriving sandbox of a game.

[h2]SKILL TREES AND TOOLS[/h2]
We have a lot of skill trees in Stars Reach and every skill tree has a tool associated with it. To gain XP in a specific skill tree, you need to use the tool associated with it.

Want to be a better miner? Use the extractor. A better leader? Use the rally banner. Get better with the assault rifle? Then use the rifle in combat.

It’s a simple concept. Of course, you can’t equip everything at once, so you’ll have to pick which trees you’re advancing at the moment by choosing the appropriate tools. And various tools have different quality levels which affect their various abilities, which again plays into economy and crafting, but the basic idea of “use tool, get XP with that tool” is an easy one to understand.

Nearly everything you can do in the game is associated with skill trees (you can do fundamental things like run and jump without unlocking skill nodes, of course), so your loadout choices will influence what your character becomes capable of doing as you play.

[h2]CAN I LEARN EVERYTHING?[/h2]
Yes, and no.

Yes, you can learn every skill in the game, but no, they cannot be active all at once. There is a maximum number of skills you can keep “in practice” for your character at one time. If you want to continue to learn more skills thereafter, you’ll need to first let some of your previously-learned skills atrophy and fall “out of practice.”

Atrophying a skill doesn’t mean you lose it. You’re just out of practice and can’t use the capabilities at the moment. You do retain benefits from having worked so hard the first time: If you want to dust the atrophied skills off and relearn them, it’s much easier and is really just a matter of time. You don’t need to learn the skill again from scratch.

WHAT DO I LEARN IN A SKILL TREE?
As you unlock nodes in a skill tree, you’ll gain bonuses to your existing abilities and unlock root nodes to other trees that branch off from the one you’re climbing. And you’ll also unlock Specials.

Specials are new abilities that you use with the tool for that skill tree. Some examples:

• If you’re pursuing the Forestry skill tree, you might learn to force trees to grow so you can replant and replenish more quickly, or automatically de-limb a tree when you cut it, or learn to cure diseases in the trees while they’re growing.
  
• If you’re learning Leadership, you can inspire your team by boosting various character stats, create formations for them to use for bonuses, or activate crowd control abilities against foes.
  
• If you’re learning to use the Laserwhip (a weapon), you might learn to Lasso an opponent, or Laserstrike at range, or lash out and entangle a foe like a Bola.
  

And so on! However, there are two caveats with this:

• You can unlock many Specials on a skill tree, but you can only enable two of them at a time, and;
  
• The Specials you have enabled are crafted into the tool that you’re using. So when you want to use different Specials, you’ll need to buy or craft a different version of your tool and use that one instead.
  

As you can see all of this obviously intertwines with moment-to-moment gameplay as well as the economy. Every item you use in the game was made by a player, so you’ll either need to learn crafting skills of your own, or you’ll need to make friends with someone that has those skills. How that all works together is a much larger discussion for another day.

[h2]SO WHERE ARE WE NOW?[/h2]
As with most (if not all!) fundamental gameplay systems in an MMO, we first have to build the supporting infrastructure, which is part of what we were up to when we were running quietly before announcing the game publicly.

Then we build the systems and interfaces that the gameplay teams will use to fill out the code and data that becomes the trees and abilities. Finally, the player-facing trees and abilities themselves get created and you’re able to see and test them.

We’re on that last step right now, and you’ll be able to see the first couple skill trees very soon. Our next set of external tests will let players explore the first couple of simple skill trees, and then we’ll continuously roll out new ones thereafter until we get all the intended functionality for launch into the game.

We’re still pre-Alpha, so we have a good chunk of development still to do, and we’d love to hear your feedback on these core concepts! Join us in our Discord channel so we can discuss!

If you have a friend or guildmate who would enjoy this testing, please give them this link to sign up: https://signup.starsreach.com/email-cohort.

This past week I was at the annual Unity developers conference called Unite 2024, where we were presenting a couple of times on our game and technology. This year it was held in Barcelona, Spain. I had never been, and it was on my bucket list of places to visit.

We work very closely with Unity. Some of our technology is right at the bleeding edge of what the engine can do, and several aspects of it, such as our simulation, are outside the game engine entirely.

Among other things we make use of their DOTS framework, and we have been able to contribute back by identifying ways in which the physics system and networking system could reach even higher performance – several of these changes are actually in the engine for everyone to use now. It feels good to be able to give back that way.

I filmed a segment for their YouTube channel, which had me in full TV make-up… no photos of that, but you’ll get to see it soon I suppose! I also did a segment for their livestream which you can see right here starting at the 1h 33m mark:

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1N7c0PD5FY&t=5s[/previewyoutube]
There were two main presentations.. One of them was actually a joint talk with Amazon Web Services. They are another key partner of ours. We run our game servers on AWS, and work closely with them as well in order to build our unique backend.

The talk was all about how we use AWS services for our back end. Many of the lessons we wanted to share were about how we try not to reinvent the wheel, but also are very willing to dive in at the deep end of inventing new technology if it serves the game and the vision for what we are making. The talk was filmed, so I am pretty sure it will pop up publicly at some point here.

As part of this talk we showed examples of how our terrain generation system works, and described a bit of how the living world simulation works as well. We shared images like these, which show how we have built custom tools for generating the initial state of our planets before the simulation starts to run. It is all too easy for procedural stuff to generate “endless bowls of oatmeal,” stuff that is technically different but starts feeling very samey.


Our designers use a node graph tool to build algorithms. These algorithms describe landscapes – not just one specific landscape, but rather the rules for building a particular sort of landscape. We can randomize parameters within those rules in order to make endless variations of that landscape type.

This keeps important stuff under designer control: canyons need to be this wide in order to keep combat fun, slopes this steep for navigability, and so on. We can put all those rules into the algorithms, and know that no matter how much we randomize in the procedural process, the rules will still be obeyed so that player fun is preserved.


The tools let us preview the way the world is going to look and tweak the rules in advance. You can see that this isn’t just like regular terrain tools with heightfield generation – we have a full 3d world and simulation, and we need to know that there’s a quartz deposit there under the soil, and so on. So the tools actually annotate the rules so that every cubic meter knows what materials the world is made of at that location.

When we go to generate an actual planet, we grab rulesets out of that designer-created library, and change the seed values so that we ourselves don’t know what the geography we get will be – but we know that it will still fit our design criteria.


And then, there’s all the wizardry to make it actually render in a gamelike way. We talked about that more in the second talk, which was on the main stage. A bit intimidating! Here’s a shot of the room before it had filled up, from the stage.


This talk was meant more as an overview of everything we are doing, a chance to introduce our tech to a crowd of folks who had never heard of us before. Among other things, we shared stats about the way the world is rendered, how the simulation works, and of course, an overview of the gameplay. We talked about how we use a custom scripting solution based on Javascript for our game logic, in order to achieve MMO scalability and high levels of service reliability.

by Raph Koster

When we announced Stars Reach, the art style and visuals were not yet as far along as the gameplay, the cloud technology, and the simulation. Visual improvements were planned for later in the schedule, starting with this month’s pre-alpha testing.

This gave us a challenge: Our development plan calls for early input from player-testers. Waiting for near-final visuals would have meant player input coming too late in the process to help us scale the servers and improve the game. So we cut a trailer with the imagery we had available, giving players a general sense of what the game was. We did receive some criticism on the visuals of the trailer.

Well, we have made great progress and some of that is visible now. We’ve improved the lighting, increased detail levels, added functionality to and enhanced the simulation, and much more. We still have more work to do, especially on characters; in the meantime, we’re sharing some video and screenshots that show how the game looks today. As you can see, we incorporated some of your criticism into the new appearance.

Expect more visual updates before this game reaches beta phase, but even now we can begin to show you a combination of art and technology that approaches our intended finished look.

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/embed/B08Ld2sLa00?si=0f8xs7WWdLyc3Xxv[/previewyoutube]

A lot of work went into adjusting the lighting in the game. In modern videogames, light interacts with the shaders that are on all the objects. Texture detail might be present but basically invisible unless the lighting is set up correctly.

We did a general pass on tons of objects throughout the game to make sure that shaders were set up correctly, and then built a new day/night cycle for it all. Contrast and saturation were adjusted and balanced out to be closer to the look we are aiming for.

We also finished off some capabilities of those shaders that you haven’t seen before. You may already know that our simulated world has temperature and humidity for every cubic meter, and that the grass reacts. Well, now the grass actually stays burned and trees blacken, when set on fire. They also ice over. So do the rocks, the bushes… everything.

Simulation detail also increased, and that brings with it visual detail. In those older videos, we only had about a dozen sorts of materials in the world – one or two sorts of rock, one kind of dirt, and so on. We now have ten times as many as we used to – and they all behave differently! They melt and freeze at different points, they have different densities, and they slump and fall differently because they have different adhesion characteristics.

This turned out to be a huge difference in the look of the world. Minor details like sand always sliding down, or bare dirt being more susceptible to giving way than dirt held together with grass roots, add visual touches that powerfully echo what we see in reality.

[h3]Before...[/h3]
[h3]Along the way...[/h3]
[h3]Where we are now...[/h3]

We also implemented all the chemical reactions between different materials. Suddenly the simulation was doing worldbuilding for us! The bottom of stone riverbeds eroded away into sand and clay. Dirt embankments turned muddy and were swept away. Dirt on slopes too steep to hold it slid off, and the sides of mountains that used to be bare gained pockets of greenery all over anywhere that plants could cling to life.

The best part of all this was how it showed up when players were modifying the world. Dig a tunnel, let water in, and you can just watch as unexpected color and detail shows up – whether it’s algae or moss on a rock face, or soil rounding off the landscape, stuff just looks more like you expect it to, but still in that painterly, welcoming style we were aiming for.

We still have plenty more work to do – character customization is well along but not yet visible, and work continues on that. And of course, upgrading the terrain rendering means that soon we will need to revisit the grasses, and so on. It’s a never ending quest to make it all look better and cohere. We are solving rendering issues that other games simply don’t face, and we will probably be working on the look and the art right up to the very last minute. Thanks for coming along on the ride!

(Oh, who am I kidding? It’s an MMO. We’re definitely going to keep going after the last minute! Haha.)

By Raph Koster

I think this may actually be the last of the posts outlining the high level goals of the game! And just in time too, because the very first Reachers are going to be landing on a planet in Stars Reach this weekend. That’s right, it’s time to start testing! If you’re interested, be sure to go sign up, and join the Discord and wishlist on Steam while you’re at it.

[h2]THIS IS A SANDBOX GAME[/h2]
As you have maybe read from the other articles in the series, SR is very much a sandbox. That means that it is about living in another world, not just chasing XP pellets to complete gear sets. There is no single goal that a player can pursue, except perhaps to work together with other players to try to solve the large scale thematic problem the game presents.

In many ways, then, SR is more about play than it is about advancement. Advancement runs out or becomes an infinite treadmill; whereas if you get bored of playing one way, you can go play in another way and keep having fun.

This means that there isn’t any one journey through Stars Reach. Instead, players choose their journeys. So how do we pick what features we will have?

In themepark games, you build one feature – player-vs-environment combat, usually – to a huge degree of depth, with a ton of progression and advancement in it. You then spare a thought for everything else, because progression is what holds the player.

Back in the day, we used to speak of “elder games,” which meant features and subsystems that were not dependent on content treadmills: stuff like economic play, social play, PvP, and so on, which were much more about interaction with others.

Today, with themeparks having dominated the landscape, we instead speak of “endgame.” Levelling up – the journey – has come to be thought of as the obstacle in the way to getting to “the real game,” which is increasingly group raid coordination.

“End” isn’t really a word you want sitting next to “world” though. Raids are another form of content treadmill, just they call for groups. There are gear sets and color coded items and all the same jazz that there is around the basic levelling game. Very much more about advancement than just play.

[h2]SOME THINGS TO DO[/h2]
So what are some ways we want you to play? Well, here’s a list from our early design documents:

• THE ADVENTURER
  • Run across the geyser fields towards a crashed Old One ship, before the Cornucopia get there.
• THE TRANSLATOR
  • Observe aliens speaking in strange glyphs; match them up, and crack the code of what they are saying.
• THE EXPLORER
  • “Beep! Beep!” Audio signals help you find a soft spot in space to open a new wormhole.
• THE FARMER
  • Plant red wheat under a violet sky; crossbreed strains to get a valuable healing variant.
• THE MEDIC
  • One press of a button conjures a healing bubble around you as you call your party closer.
• THE XENOBIOLOGIST
  • Sneak up on house-sized carnivorous bunnies and draw their blood; gotta sample ‘em all.
• THE PILOT
  • Collect crystals fallen from shattered asteroids and drag them in bags behind your ship.
• THE MINER
  • Tunnel underground – the map is fully destructible. When the gold is gone, it’s GONE.

In a game that is more about play than it is about advancement, we want to embrace the idea of horizontal progression: that you gain more abilities as you skill up, rather than just numbers going up. And these should give you tactical growth and the feeling of finding new ways to play over time.

So we would want a newbie to be able to blast away at space spiders or alien ice worms in an asteroid field. They should be able to explore a lost Old One laboratory hidden within the mountains of a volcanic planet. They should be able to try to tame a feral blunderhog and name it Fred, or take a mission to smuggle radioactive antigravium through a wormhole.

But an advanced player, someone who has been around the block, ought to be able to use their faction powers as a member of the Purity to call in an airstrike on a nest of the Corruption. They should be able to restore a dead world to life by importing creatures and materials from a distant world, or lead their guild to claiming a new planet, and perhaps become that planet’s first governor. Maybe they make it a pirate den, or they build a powerful corporation by supplying the best spaceship engines in the Galaxy.

[h2]GETTING PRACTICAL ABOUT DEVELOPMENT TIME[/h2]
Now, you might be thinking that sounds great, but also like we will ship in 2047. And some of that is because we are all so used to themepark progression. If you are designing a sandbox with many features, none of them have all the content progression treadmill that a themepark game devotes to PvE. Instead each one of those systems is small, in terms of implementation. Instead, we rely on the dynamics of the individual feature, and how it connects to other features, to provide the depth.

An example is that alien languages feature mentioned above. It’s basically a codebreaking minigame. All our creatures “speak” their internal AI state over their heads, a lot like the Sims speak Simlish. But it’s all encrypted, and it’s encrypted differently on different planets.

It ties into the collection minigame (you have to collect the glyphs before you can assemble enough to crack the code). And it ties into the economy – once you crack the code, it generates economic value, because you can sell a translator module to a player who doesn’t want to play this way but does want to know whether a creature is about to attack.

But the feature itself is just picking an encryption method. It’s not that different from using code to generate Sudoku boards. If the core puzzle is solid, like Sudoku is, then there’s going to be demand for lots of boards. If they have to be handcrafted, you’re back on the content treadmill.

We strive for every feature to have these qualities: simple elegant rules, deep dynamics, and interconnection to other systems.

[h2]PICKING WHICH FEATURES TO MAKE[/h2]
Even then, though, we can’t make them all. We have our razors to help us cut our own ideas: what the game is about, what the vision items are. But we also have to think about it in terms of who will be playing.

We did a bunch of research to dig into what the demographics were for MMOs of various sorts – high fantasy ones, sci fi ones, games like Minecraft and Fortnite and many others. We looked at what ages the players tended to be. We needed to prove to ourselves that there was a market for the game we were contemplating. And we needed to understand why people chose to play those games.

We’ve worked with two different systems for that over the years. One of them, which we will be asking all our testers to use, is Solsten’s. But when we started out, we used the Quantic Foundry model to think about what drives players.


When we looked across these motivations and examined which ones were most common across ages and genders, some commonalities and differences popped up pretty quickly:

• “Completion” – meaning, collecting stuff and completing sets and task lists – is pretty much in everyone’s top five.
• “Destruction” skews younger, and also male.
• “Fantasy,” the motivation driven by immersion, is universally popular.
• “Story” doesn’t pop as high as you would expect!

After some debate, we decided that for our game, we would treat these things as the core of our unique appeal:

• Community: The enjoyment of interacting and collaborating with other players.
• Fantasy: The desire to become someone else, somewhere else.
• Completion: The desire to complete every mission, get every collectible, and discover hidden things.
• Discovery: The desire to explore, tinker, and experiment with the game world.
• Design: The appeal of expression and deep customization.

And we decided that these items were not core. That doesn’t mean we ignore them or have no features for these motivations, but it helps us define what we are not:

• Challenge: we are not Dark Souls. We want players to feel challenged, but we don’t want to center the game on being the hardest experience ever.
• Story: we are not Uncharted. We want players to feel immersed, but we aren’t going to have them sit back while we tell them a story.
• Power: we are not a game that someone wins and dominates everyone else, like say League of Legends. In fact, we are going to have a bunch of mechanics that cap people’s power, in the name of serving community.

We then went through every feature we wanted to have in the game, and looked at which motivations they could serve. And we invented features and cut features until we had more things in the columns for the elements that are core, and fewer in the columns for the motivations that are not core.

[h2]TESTING ASSUMPTIONS[/h2]
After all that, we made game for a few years. And relatively recently, we were able to go back and test again, to see if what we’ve made is getting close to that target, which has evolved as the market has. We put together descriptions of what the game has evolved into, and asked possible players to respond to what they heard.

We told them we were making a shared multiplayer world with many planets but a single universe. A world where you can play any role and learn any skills, with no class limitations. Where you can explore new planets, harvest resources, trade, craft, fight aliens, collaborate with others and transform for the worlds themselves.

We told them you could craft thousands of items both useful and decorative, and that someday you might get so good at it that visitors might come from far away to buy items with your brand on them.

That you would trade across the galaxy in a player-driven economy, where goods have varying prices in different locations. Buy low, sell high, smuggle or own a shop.

Sculpt the worlds, terraforming them and replanting, rerouting rivers and shaping them to the needs of you and your friends. Planets where every substance has unique properties, and creatures have needs and desires. A sophisticated ecological simulation where forests can catch fire and lakes can freeze over, and more.

Active combat with dodging and blocking and situational awareness, with an arcade style but also with options for people who have bad aim or no aim at all. And which players of different skill levels can still play together.

A social world where you can earn XP from helping each other or helping players. Where you can become a leader like the mayor of a town or governor of a planet, but can also play solo and only return to town when you need to buy and sell.

And we asked them to imagine exploring these worlds, traveling through wormholes to discover planets with unknown flora and fauna, unknown resources, and unknown mysteries.

What we got back was a lot of interest. In fact, exploring those living worlds scored through the roof! We also got back worries about griefing, about whether there would be a clear sense of which goals to pursue, and whether the game might be too grindy.

Most importantly, we found that there absolutely was a market for the game we are making. In fact, there’s quite a big market.

We make decisions every day on how deep or detailed to make a feature, or whether we can afford to build it at all. There are plenty of cool ideas we have had which are pushed off to post-launch. We have to be realistic about what we can make.

But it feels great to know that you are making something that not just you feel excited about, but that there’s a lot of other people who will be excited once they hear of it.

And that’s why this weekend is so exciting too. Oh, those poor first Reachers will barely get to see anything! We expect to just crash the client over and over.

But with any luck, we will post a group selfie screenshot of the first strangers to join us on the limitless frontier of Stars Reach.

by Raph Koster

No game can be for everyone. And even though we want Stars Reach to have broad appeal and to bring together multiple playstyles into one world, it also can’t try to be all things to all people.

These vision items and pillars and the rest are as much about excluding and ruling out as they are about what is included in the game. Some of you may be reading them and going “this game is not for me,” and that’s fine, that is part of why we are posting them!

[h3]YES’ES AND NO’S[/h3]
One of the tools we use for this is having a list of what we are, and what we aren’t. This serves as a really quick and simple razor for settling design debates. Here’s what our lists look like:

[h3]YES:[/h3]
Inviting and beautiful

Exciting and instantly fun

Accessible and easy to play

Intuitive to control and read

Permits player competition

The player is in control

[h3]NO:[/h3]
Incredibly high client requirements

Tedium and grind

Shallow and simplistic

Complex UIs and symbology

Mandates play with untrusted players

invites griefing

The game is in control

The single biggest topic we have seen people debating about our game online is “won’t all this freedom lead to griefing?” Well, griefing is on our No list. But “the player is in control” is a Yes. How do we reconcile those two?

When online worlds started out – long before MMOs came along — they were all about being shared worlds. There were no instances, and there was no “phasing”. The world was the same for everyone. If people swept through an area and killed all the monsters, you waited until they respawned, and if you didn’t move fast enough, someone else might beat you to the monster and then you had to wait again.

To a modern player, that may sound terrible. But it wasn’t. It was a tradeoff. Because when a player was on the quest to slay Grendel’s mother and needed the Sword of Weland from the fell dragon Fadhmir’s hoard, and took it, well, they angered the dragon, who then came out and terrorized the entire zone. And that was awesome.

Sure, perhaps it was a bit inconvenient that a player had loosed a dragon on everyone else. But at the same time, that was what made the world feel more alive, more interactive.

Back on LegendMUD, when I designed a zone based on Kipling’s Jungle Books, when a player found the way to temporarily restore the lost city of Oodeypore, it transformed each of the apes of the Bandar-Log back into the ghosts of the humans who once inhabited the city. That wasn’t a phased thing – everyone saw the room descriptions change, the inhabitants change, and then watched mournfully as the illusion popped like soap bubbles and returned to its ruined, natural state.

[h3]A LACK OF TRUST[/h3]
Like so many things from the history of online worlds, things have changed. Instancing was invented so that players could avoid the impact of other players, exactly inverting why you have something be an online world in the first place instead of a single-player RPG. When it first came along, it was meant as a tool to allow more controlled experiences for small groups. Something that felt more like running a hack n slash D&D module with your friends, perhaps.

We can frame that up pretty simply: it was invented to give developers more control over the player experience. Specifically, so that another player couldn’t come along and mess up the pacing and progress. And over time, the trendline has been that developers control more and more of the experience in MMOs, with the freedoms gradually disappearing. Because freedoms are also how players impact one another.

A lot of this was because the old way of doing things required players to have a basic degree of trust in other players. And as we learned through quite a lot of pain in early MMO history, it’s pretty dangerous to extend that trust in a setting where players cannot enforce social contracts on one another the way they could in the smaller population sizes of MUDs.

We know a lot more about trust in games now than we used to. Prosocial design has become a very important topic in online game design. Oh, not just because of idealism about people coming to know each other, and the other sorts of lofty ideas that I talked about last time.

There are playability reasons to do it: odds are excellent that a given player’s friends won’t be available online when they want to play, especially the shorter the play sessions get. Scheduling time with friends gets harder and harder as people’s lives get busy, and so on.

There are crass business reasons to do it: community ties are the biggest predictor of whether a player sticks with your game, and in these days of high dev costs, you need that to justify the spend of making the game in the first place.

I could go on.

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/embed/voz6S7ryWC0?si=BJHQuUutFbwepQ3F[/previewyoutube]

All of this adds up to the idea that there was something to the older idea that people should make new friends in the game, not just live lives cocooned away from everyone else.

We are paying very close attention to these principles. Our commitment is that we will not mandate play with untrusted players, and that we will not invite griefing, and that we will reward social play and trust, and give players more control.

[h3]PLAYING ALONE TOGETHER[/h3]
There are some players who just don’t want to be impacted or impinged upon by other players in any way whatsoever. A quote from one comment about Stars Reach on an MMO site recently:

I don’t want to compete with other players, be it for resources, influence, land control, or anything else; I want the game to make it so every single in-game possession could theoretically be had by every single player at the same time, where what others earn or control don’t limit in any shape or way what I can earn and control. It’s, for example, why I consider housing that isn’t fully instanced to be utterly and completely useless, as without fully instancing it I would need to compete with other players for the prime housing plots, and if that is the case I just avoid the whole housing system altogether; any part of the game where I would be competing in any shape or way with other players for limited resources is a part of the game I will simply not play.

Stars Reach is not the right game for this person. “Permits player competition” is right there in the “Yes” column. And no game is for everyone.

Losing the shared aspect of the virtual world has deep impacts that go far beyond whether someone can grief you. In most MMOs, the trendline towards cocooning players away from one another has reduced the ability to be generous to each other (“can’t give you a gift, sorry, everything worth having is soulbound”) – when all the literature on trust building says that generosity is the first step.

It’s encouraged the most pernicious aspects of modern business models – because it’s a lot easier to nickel and dime you if you are each on your own separate progression track in a bubble of single-playerness and can’t engage in trade for mutual benefit.

It’s driven the growth of budgets through the roof, reducing the number of MMOs you get, and worse, also the breadth of the experiences they can offer as developers and publishers avoid risk and innovation.

I recognize that some players have enough distrust of everyone else that even the idea of getting passive buffs from standing near a stranger sounds like too much risk (this is also a real comment, one we got on our Discord). I would go so far as to say that losing the shared aspect of virtual worlds is a big part of why people end up feeling this way.

Too many online games have abdicated the responsibility of solving for prosocial play, and instead settle for just keeping you apart.

Well, that’s not what our game is about. And yeah, that means that we have a lot of work to do on making sure that the game offers freedom and security. It means that our game systems have to offer onramps – the ability to play solo when you don’t trust anyone, the ability to gain benefits from playing near each other with no commitment implied, the ability to give and receive gifts when you’re ready to, and the ability to start to trust one another when you feel able to commit.

[h3]A GUILD CAN OWN A PLANET[/h3]
Our most basic step down that road is to enable something that MMOs haven’t before. The basic model for MMOs is to have a public space controlled by the developer, and maybe little pockets of housing or guild spaces controlled to a greater degree by the owner of that space. But a ton of online games have thrived since the MMO boom first began by creating smaller worlds that are controlled by players more directly. Examples include the entire survival genre, of course, including so many thousands of Minecraft servers.

(If you read some of our older articles, you will discover that under the hood, our technology is actually a lot more like a network of separate Minecraft servers than it is like most MMOs you are used to).

We’re trying out a new model. What if you could have that public space controlled by the developer –andinstead of just your little pockets of housing, you could treat each planet or space zone much like you treat a player-controlled server? What if a guild could own a planet? Now you have public space, private spaces, and group spaces.

These group spaces have both more freedom and more control for the group. You could set the PvP ruleset for your area. You could set the tax rates for shops. You could allow or disallow modifying the terrain. Someday, we could enable modding these worlds, or letting players do level design! It’s a new arena on which to play which is built of group problems, the player cities of Star Wars Galaxies writ large.

And they get more interesting because they exist in this federation of worlds, where different planets have different economic conditions, have been tended well or poorly, have attracted one sort of player or another. They have economic ties, rivalries, and needs. It can give us multiplayer that is actually about massiveness.

Since we first started talking about this idea online, I’ve seen several players concerned about the idea that groups controlling parts of the map means that they are going to be at the mercy of those groups. That it means they will be able to impose their will on you.

But thanks to our cloud native model and world generation systems, you shouldn’t ever need to go to those places. We can make more planets. It should not impinge on your play any more than a player having a house does – unless you want to live there, in which case you are choosing to engage with what the group play implies.

We don’t expect the solo players to want to jump right to participating in something like that. But we do expect that there will be guilds that take pride in running planets that welcome the solo player and don’t ask anything of them, because it will serve that guild’s desire to be rich and powerful. (And yes, we also expect some guilds to build pirate dens to murderhobo on).

I can’t promise that you will never be impinged upon by another player. It’s a massively multiplayer game. It’s in the name. Stars Reach is about finding ways to get along – but we are not so naïve as to think that it will “just happen.” Building trust is hard work, and we have to build in the game systems that help it along.

[h3]IN THE END…[/h3]
We understand how nervous players are about griefing. And we will work hard to prevent that griefing.

But fear is why the world doesn’t change around you in these games anymore. Fear is why you cannot rule a fiefdom in these games. Fear is why you cannot build a home in the world, with the layout you choose. Why you can’t trade an item, or dig a hole.

If we want what MMOs can be instead of what they are – what we have settled for – we have to stop being afraid and instead embrace the potential. There’s a galaxy full of possibility out there.