Stars Reach News

by Raph Koster

It might be hard to believe now, but a couple of decades ago, plenty of designers didn’t think that games could be art. They didn’t think that there was any greater meaning, that it was enough if games were just fun and didn’t have anything more to them.

These days, we have a lot more awareness that games can mean something, carry artistic statements, and can do while still being fun. In fact, one of the standard ways of thinking about game design now is to start with the idea that you want to evoke a particular experience for the player.

That calls for knowing what your game is about. This then cascades into knowing who your game is for, because no one game can be for everyone.

For years now, I have used a little vision exercise in order to help clarify thoughts around this issue. It consists of just four questions that you can ask of the game that help tie together the thematic side of the game with the game rules and mechanics.

Games where these two don’t match often don’t “feel right.” You end up feeling like you are going through the motions in some storyline but really are just popping XP bags for loot.

[h2]WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)[/h2]

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

In our lore, humans of various sorts are all the result of genetic engineering experiments conducted by the Old Ones, a powerful and long-vanished galactic civilization. But we now have done what you’d expect of humans (we’re only human after all): we’ve made a mess. Whether it’s global warming, peak oil, nuclear winter, or global pandemics, we have managed to ruin the planets from which we come.

This game is about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have. Crucially, this is a lesson that the Old Ones themselves, for all their power, don’t seem to have learned themselves.

It’s all fine and dandy to say that this is what we want the game to be about, but that means that what the player can actually do has to line up to these goals. There have to be game systems that offer second chances, game systems that teach us to live in harmony with each other, and game systems that represent the natural world and how we interact with it. So we ask the next question:

[h2]HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)[/h2]

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

More features the game needs start to crystallize now. In order to learn to live in harmony, we need difference. The game has to supply multiple ways to play which sit at comparable levels of importance. It’s not that it needs to appeal to everyone, but that it needs to support a spread of player types that help each other mutually survive.

Similarly, if we want to provide players with a laboratory about stewarding the world, then there need to be game mechanics that relate to that goal. The game itself needs to put the idea of sustainable settlements front and center. If we built a typical MMORPG where stuff repops infinitely, then this question would never even come up!

As you can see, game systems start to take shape from these questions, because the theme demands them. And already, they are forcing us to do things differently than most MMOs do.

So now let’s ask the same questions but in a different way. Until now, we have been framing these within the fictional context, within the fantasy. What do the above answers turn into if we think of them in raw min-maxing numbers?

[h2]WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)[/h2]

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Now we are really into system design! This description is the same as the thematic one, but it’s framed up in terms of goals and currencies and rules. We need a game where players are working through progression systems like usual, but collectively, not just on their own. That suggests some sort of system of collaborative progress, where the diverse types of players all are pushing towards similar meta-game goals.

There’s a classic collaborative game mechanic that is perfectly suited to that, which is often called “barn-raising” in game design circles. Think of it as a collective goal that every player can contribute to individually, even while they pursue their own interests. This idea will serve as the backbone to our player government system: players in Stars Reach will work together to improve and progress their planets from wilderness to settlements and thence to cities and planetary governments.

The second half is far trickier. We want the players to engage in this activity but also have to be good stewards of the resource pools available. By this we mean the ores, the wood, the creatures they fight, and so on. This idea led us to the idea that planets must be capable of being destroyed – but also revived. That they should have health bars, so you can see how you are doing in managing them.

Players have to be able to see, at every moment, that what they do matters to the game environment. And from that powerful idea comes the entirety of the living world simulation that underlies Stars Reach.

So that’s goals… what about the moment to moment? Well, we can once again ask the same question we did previously, but through a game rule lens rather than within the fiction:

[h2]HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)[/h2]

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

We rely on players being self-interested! If we have every player out for themselves, and many ways to play, we can have all the ways to play depend on the resources in the world.

Then we can make the players loosely dependent on one another. Oh, not on specific individuals necessarily – we want to preserve the ability to play the game solo, as part of our pillar on accessibility. But economically, by having one playstyle rely on the existence of another playstyle.

This concept becomes the map of our player-driven economy. Combatants need someone out there who makes blasters. Crafters need someone out there who mines the materials for blasters. Miners need someone out there who maps these alien worlds and finds the deposits of rare minerals. And explorers need those combatants to keep them safely out of the bellies of giant carnivorous mushrooms.

If we instead made looting monsters the supplier of all economic value, then all economic power would flow from combat. Our thematic message would be lost. We want players to be thinking about the fact that it takes all sorts of people to build a society.

We have one special advantage in approaching things this way: The Tragedy of the Commons is a lie. The basic premise of the idea was that given human actors and a common resource, some asshole is always going to hog it all for themselves and ruin it for everyone else. And in fact, we have seen plenty of people who hear about our game and assume that griefers will inevitably win out here too, digging up every scrap of the landscape and ruining the planets for everyone else.

But… in reality, humans have successfully managed commons for millennia. In fact, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her thorough refutation of the concept.



The only time that the Tragedy of the Commons comes true is when you accept the premise in the first place!

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

Well, in a game, negotiation and tough choices are called gameplay. We as designers need to give you the tools to manage the space and prevent the one griefer from using up your commons. But after that, it’s on you, the players, to figure out how to solve the larger problem of allocating the resources, deciding how much to build up your world at the price of losing your wilderness, and so on.

In the end, we hope that we see players land at many solutions for this, not one. We at Playable Worlds are not trying to be prescriptive about it. Instead, we want to see the thousand solutions this vast laboratory creates. And sure, some of those attempts will most assuredly end in strip-mined planets cooked down to the bare bedrock. That’s okay. We have procedural, simulated worlds. If you wreck one, we can just generate another.

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

Games can have greater meaning. And that meaning can matter well outside the game. If any one of those solutions you try out for fun on our infinite planets works out, we hope that maybe you can turn around and apply it to the real world.

Because we only get one of those.

by Raph Koster

Hello everyone, I’m back with the third chapter in our exploration of the pillars for our vision of Stars Reach. Today I’ll be talking about the ones that get much more concrete about how the game works.

It’s been great to see the discussion of these pillars on the official Discord and MMO sites online!

The last big pillar starts out by describing the setting of the game. There’s a lot of stuff piled into a single overstuffed sentence, I admit! But we wanted to capture all the key elements that make the galaxy of Stars Reach what it is.

An Endlessly Explorable Fun Retro Sci-Fantasy Universe
The world is grimdark enough; our game will be visually appealing, brightly colored, and have a tone of optimism and enjoyment. It will accommodate melancholy, mystery, and even fear, but will do so within the overarching atmosphere of limitless possibility and player enjoyment. Around every corner will be new vistas, new things to discover, and new mysteries to unravel. New planets will be found (and lost), old secrets will be uncovered, and new content will be rolling out constantly, allowing players to find their own paths in a galaxy of infinite potential

There are a bunch of adjectives in there!
A lot of settings aren’t worlds. They don’t necessarily lend themselves to MMOs. A setting that is great for an MMO has to have variety, it has to have rich texture to it, and a degree of coherence and realism that a purely character-driven IP doesn’t have. We owe Tolkien a big debt for setting the template for detailed worldbuilding in service of an epic story.

But worldbuilding also has a “flavor” to it. The setting of Mad Max has thematic implications, and it’d be pretty darn weird to set the stories of, say, Studio Ghibli movies in a setting like that. (When they did their own post-apocalyptic thing, in Nausicaä, it was pretty different).

So let’s focus first on the “retro sci-fantasy” bit. Why retro? Why call back to older rocket-and-rayguns stuff?

It isn’t because we want to aim the game towards people old enough to remember that stuff from when they were growing up. And it’s not because we want to aim towards kids (a lot of that iconography has aged downwards as it has been used by toys).
Rather, it’s because we want to capture the spirit of that sort of sci-fi. It came from a period before, during, and post World War II where there was great enthusiasm about the power of science and the potential of humanity. Today, we see that retrofuturistic style used as a way to evoke the lost dreams we once had.

Here are a few images from our “mood board” of artwork that reflect that sense of possibility… but also the danger that can be out there.



After the war ended, print science fiction moved away from the sense of optimism (it took media SF on screen and in comics a while to catch up). The Golden Age gave way to New Wave SF, which was much more pessimistic about humanity and the future. Ever since, science fiction has been much more ambivalent about technology. Even the premier space opera of our time, Star Wars, is gritty and dirty.
Ultimately, that ties back to the core themes of our game and our lore:

Stars Reach is a game about hope and optimism. The real world is grimdark enough. We want to capture that sense of possibility that was present in Golden Age sci-fi, that sensawunda (“sense of wonder”) that it evoked.

That doesn’t mean we have to shy away from serious themes or dark elements in the storylines. We need a world that can encompass many sorts of stories. But it should be presented in an overall spirit of optimism.

Humor is fair game, but we lean towards wit, caricature, and gentle humor, as
opposed to cartoon, slapstick, or “easy” dad jokes. This is not a comedy game.
It’s a game that takes things lightly.

The lore really deserves its own blog post, because a lot of thought went into it. It’s designed to provoke questions, and in keeping with the other pillars, it’s meant to be easy to approach but offer depths that aren’t apparent on first glance.

The game will have deep lore.
As Tyrion put it at the end of Game of Thrones, stories are what hold us together. Tribal identity is driven by culture, and culture is driven by stories. We want to create a new tribe, the players of our game. We can unfold discoveries over time, and drive the sort of tapestry of complexity that long-lasting IPs have, a web of characters and motivations that generate fan fiction and cosplay and the like. These things are what create a long lasting fandom.

The central theme of the game is that our player species have plundered and destroyed their homeworlds as they have clawed their way up to the brink of interstellar civilization. Now, these species have been given a second chance: a galaxy of terraformed worlds on which to build their future.

Will they learn from the lesson of the fate of their various homeworlds? In order to support this theme, responsible shepherding of these inherited planets must be rewarded by the game, and thoughtless plundering of them should be punished.
Among the things that we want to make sure the lore represents are an understanding of the grand sweep of history, themes of cross-cultural communication, how one deals with a Galaxy where a genocidal species basically swept thousands of planets clean, a feeling of uncovering a deep past… one of the central mysteries is, where did the Old Ones go and why did they leave? We don’t know whether they annihilated themselves, decamped to greener pastures, or were exterminated by something even more terrifying.

So all in all, Stars Reach is upbeat, optimistic, and colorful; yet capable of weighty themes and strong characters. It is meant to project hope, and it is also a game that winks and nods at itself and the tropes it uses. If I had to sum it all up, it would be we’re going into space, and it’s going to be awesome.

Now, if you’ve followed the reception to SR online, you probably already know that the graphics are a bit controversial. I’ll restate again that we aren’t at all done with the visual style. But I also won’t lie, nailing an art style for the above is challenging. It ties back to whether the basic presentation is conveying that tone but also stretches to accommodate all the tonal variety we want in the lore and setting – and also reaches the audience we want.

One of the challenges with a hyperrealistic style is telling all the games apart. As rendering capability has increased, realism is starting to get… kind of boring. From a business standpoint, we need to stand out in the market. We also need to keep costs down, and our technology that allows us to stream content down on the fly works more cost-effectively with less load in terms of highly detailed textures. But lastly, high realism tends to tell broader audiences “this game is not for you.” It signals to people that the game is complex, unapproachable, and often specifically chases away women players.

The game will be welcoming and fun and beautiful.

Edgy may drive core audiences, but most mass market things are fairly sunny and brightly colored. If we want to drive retention, we need the experience to not be stressful; an escape more than an ordeal. If we want people to live in the game, we need to make it feel livable.

I vividly remember two great examples of this from long ago – when World of Warcraft came out, and when Dark Age of Camelot came out, they both felt immediately more colorful and welcoming than Everquest was.
This is a hard line to walk. When we were doing early concept art, we actually developed a “realism to cartoon” scale, where we made sketches of a human avatar’s head, in styles ranging from kids’ cartoon through to realistic, and told ourselves, “never fall below a 7 on this scale.” But it’s a long way from sketches to in-game art, and we still have more work to do.

This leads to a set of specific goals for the art style of the game:

• Do to grimdark sci-fi what World of Warcraft did to grimdark fantasy.
• Bright and colorful — a place you want to be.
• High beauty, not high fidelity – by which we mean, it is more important that the environment be attractive than it be super high res textures and realistic rendering.
• It can be fun and even funny, but archetypes, not cartoons.
• Familiar tropes that serve as “anchors” for players’ imagination, because much of the best visual design leans on things that are already familiar, then add a twist – rather than going all out weird with something that people can’t relate to
• Strong silhouettes and iconic forms that can move across art styles.
• Influence from caricature and anime, for a contemporary look.
• Iterative development: we test our stuff and see that players respond.

You can be sure that as we continue to iterate the art style, we’ll be doing a lot of that last one with you all!

Our last pillar is all about gameplay.

The game will constantly generate new content.
It is expensive to make content. We want to enable players to create as much as possible, and we want to enable the game to create as much as it can as well. It has to be constant, because we want players to always want to learn about what’s going on. We want them to feel like it’s something that stays fresh and evolves and makes them want to check in regularly.

Now, this doesn’t exclude content we create. But that’s sort of the default assumption these days in design: that the designers will populate all the content. Designing for the game itself to drive emergence doesn’t mean that we abdicate our responsibility to create engaging content. But it does mean taking a look at every single system to ensure that it isn’t reliant on that.

From this emerged a whole bunch of pretty specific principles which shaped the game design very powerfully.

We decided that Collection, Crafting, Settlement, and Combat were the core activities of our game. This wasn’t arbitrary, either. It was driven by the audience we are after, which is a large one, and a diverse one in the sense that it is made up of players with varied gameplay preferences but who all like existing in a sandbox together where they interact.
This then also implied two big things:

• The entire game economy is player-driven.
• Combat is opt-in, and not at the core of the game loop.

To many players, these two things may feel like a marginalization of combat. The fact is that combat usually marginalizes everything else, so every once in a while turnabout is fair play! I was wondering online a while back on Reddit, “when exactly did we start calling everything else you do in an MMO ‘life skills?’” The default current of MMO design usually puts combat at the center, and relegates other ways to play to “side games.”

Everyone always feels like their preferred way to play should be dominant, and can even get pretty resentful of seeing other ways to play present. But there are good reasons to interweave everyone more.

We want to put Community First because MMOs are about other people. I often describe virtual worlds as “be someone you aren’t, somewhere that you can’t be, with others.” That’s the heart of the unique offering of MMOs. You can get individual bits of that sentence elsewhere, but there’s something magical that happens when you get all three from one experience. And it leads to a few more goals:

• Player-driven economy fostering social ties – because each different play to play the game can be related to the others via the goods and services that playstyle outputs.
• Similarly, having multiple guild types and multiple guild membership also helps foster strong ties. Basically, a common pattern that we see (and a common mistake, we’ve come to realize) is trying to make human relationships one-size-fits-all.
• “Increase communication bandwidth.” Chat, emote animations, etc, should be very important, because the higher the bandwidth for emotion and humanity to pass through the game, the more likely players are to behave, because it’s easier to recognize the people on the other side of the wire as being people like yourself.

Of course, that means you have to recognize that it takes all sorts of people playing in their own ways to build a world. That sort of diverse playerbase is very different from chasing a super narrow audience of specialists in just one way to play. The bet we are making is that the range of playstyles in one game will appeal to people who get tired of one-note play. If you get bored of one way to play, you can go try another.

We think of that range of play in a couple of ways. We have to support diverse sorts of players – different age ranges, genders (a lot of games chase away demographics through their choice of art style, as mentioned above), ethnicities, and so on. We also need to support different playstyles; we have used both Quantic Foundry and Solsten models to think about our players at different stages of the game’s development.

And lastly, we need to level the playing field some between new players and old pros. The power accumulation curve of most MMOs results in friends being unable to play together as soon as one of the members has more or less time to play than the others. MMOs have long recognized this problem and built design hacks into the system that basically “undo” you advancement when playing in mixed-level situations. The first one of these was “sidekicking” in City of Heroes in 2004, but nowadays we have level scaling and other approaches, all of which are fundamentally about ignoring the level system that the game is designed around.

Since we favor horizontal progression, where instead of “numbers go up” we have “number of commands goes up,” we can avoid this issue. In our game, your hit points won’t go up noticeably. And you will do more damage not because you leveled up or your gear got better, but because you compounded tactics together that you unlocked with skills.

So, that (finally) finishes the series on key pillars for the game. I hope you found it an interesting glimpse behind the curtain on how we try to wrangle a huge project like Stars Reach into something that a team can wrap their head around.

That’s it for this week, but I’ll see you around the Discord, or Reddit, or wherever your favorite theory crafting community is, and if you want to talk about these pillars, I’m always up for it!

by Raph Koster

Hello everyone,

I’m back to talk more about our design pillars for Stars Reach. Last time I described an MMO as a virtual place that we put games in, rather than as a game. I also promised that today I would talk about principles that animate the games – the fun! – that we are hoping to provide.

Just like the last set, these are organized into a big statement, with three consequences of the statement. What I didn’t talk about last time was that even the three consequences break apart into a bunch of even smaller ones, which become more like design rules that we try to follow as we do our work.

This big one this week deserves a little bit of a preface.

Look, we all know that the audience feels like MMOs haven’t really progressed much. A lot of the action in online games has shifted over to looter-shooters, survival crafting, and the like. These genres are children of MMOs, streamlined down to make them more accessible in a bunch of ways.

MMOs were always big unwieldy beasts. Lots of game loops, lots of content, in a big sprawling world that could feel very unfriendly and hard to wrap your head around. This is why when World of Warcraft came along and held your hand every step of the way through the leveling process, it was such a revelation. It ended the days of total confusion, at the cost of total freedom.

That path continued to get refined, but its end destination isn’t a traditional world anymore. It’s more like a looter-shooter. Destiny 2, after all, is a lot like an MMO with the world part taken out.

Ironically, feeling more like a world has been flourishing in single-player games. Whether it’s Elden Ring or the recent Zelda titles, there is this trend towards open worlds that feel more alive. And Breath of the Wild, in particular, showed us all that you can have a very accessible sandbox world experience if you design the interface and the gameplay correctly.

This matters because I’ve always felt that sandbox play is more popular than orc-slaying, despite the conventional wisdom that sandbox games are more niche. Oh, it’s not to say that orc-slaying isn’t awesome and fun. Of course it is. But I think we all know that decorating a house, or running a business, or engaging in carpentry or cooking or other crafting, is just a more widespread human activity. Sandboxy gameplay by nature offers more than kill, kill, kill, and should broaden the audience. If only it weren’t so intimidating and confusing.

Which brings us to the core pillar:

The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO

The game will offer deep simulation and freedom for players to make their own choices about how to play. But the game will limit its interface complexity to what can be achieved with a game controller or a touchscreen. It will choose elegance over visual cruft and complexity, and it will utilize layered UIs so that players are never presented with too many choices at once. Given the desire for ease and accessibility, we will eventually strive to have clients on many devices.

A lot of gamers probably worry that having things be easy on the surface means that the depth won’t be there. But these ideas aren’t mutually incompatible. One of the oldest statements about games is that they should be “easy to learn, hard to master,” after all. Among some gamers, there’s even a point of pride in dealing with frankly overcomplex and intimidating controls, a sort of sunk cost fallacy of “well, I learned it so it must be good.”

But if we want to break MMOs out of the rut they have been in, we cannot look backwards to the interface conventions of the past, to the complexity that results in screens with more buttons on them than other people. We have to make MMOs be something that non-MMO players are willing to give a shot. All the goodness that veteran MMO players expect can still be there.

So if we think about this big core statement, we land at three bits it implies. Now, remember that we have to think of this in terms of not just what offers fun to the player, but also what makes for a sustainable business. Luckily, sustained fun equals a sustainable business!

“The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe.”

The core premise is that we can marry ease of use to depth. Why? Because ease of use maximizes audience, and depth maximizes retention. We will make our money by holding people over the long run. We don’t need to be the most popular game in the world, we need to “maximize the area under the curve,” which means that retention wins over the long haul. If we can become a hobby for people, we can continue to drive revenue over years (and not just from the game, but from ancillary extensions of the IP as well).

So much of what has gone wrong with game services has been the trend towards trying to maximize revenue. We aren’t after that goal; we want to maximize how much players love the game instead. A great game can turn into a hobby that lasts many years! This is why Ultima Online is coming up on its 27th anniversary and has multiple generations of people playing it.

And if we can keep driving revenue, we can keep updating the game, keeping it current, and giving people joy. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

So what we do we mean by proven mechanics? Well, I mentioned that design rules emerge from these bullet points. Some of them that we have based on this pillar include

• Simple systems can support deep gameplay; think of Go or Chess.
  
• MMOs require depth, varied gameplay, a universe to explore and master.
  
• Our dev team “plays jazz”: We experiment, iterate, and find the fun.
  
• If something doesn’t sing, if a system isn’t fun — fix or or kill it.
  

We look back at other games, particularly MMOs, constantly, looking for the best version of a given system. We aren’t reinventing every wheel here; we picked our big battles like our living world simulation, and made those our core innovations. But there are so many great games out there that you can’t experience with others in an MMO. If we can bring those experiences into a shared setting, that changes how they feel pretty dramatically.

In other words, why not have the best building from games like The Sims and also more current things like Enshrouded? Why not look back at the most successful combat games and steal ideas? Game design is built on other games, after all.

The toughest part of this design is keeping it tight. Plenty of folks have commented that our vision seems super bold and ambitious in scope. The only way to build it is for the component parts to be small and elegant. They have to be rulesets more like Go. I often tell folks on the design team that they are going to have to talk me into any game system that uses more than three or four rules and three or four variables. You can have a lot of data in a system like that, without making the coding and balance a nightmare. (A deck of cards only has three variables: 13 numbers, 4 suits, and 2 colors. That’s it, and yet look at the depth of all the card games made with that small set!)

Probably the best example of that in what you have seen so far is the living world simulation itself, which is built out of surprisingly few rules (that’s a big part of how we can scale it to this size!). Stuff in the world knows how to flow and fall, stick, change state, and react to other stuff. That’s pretty much it. But from that we get a very large number of interactions and a ton of depth.

Controls and interfaces will be intuitive and simple and familiar.

Familiar is important because it means that users don’t have a huge barrier to entry when they first show up. Intuitive and simple is important because it means both users who are coming to us for the first time, and users who are returning after an absence, don’t have a huge learning curve and barrier to entry. It maximizes the possible audience. It also lets us go to multiple clients more easily.

I often try to make the distinction between complexity and complication. There is a lot of complexity available in that deck of cards mentioned above. But the basic shape of a deck of cards is not complicated. Chess has only six kinds of pieces. Go has one!

I worry, sometimes, that audiences won’t understand that something that looks simple might be deep. I’ve seen comments from folks in our (wonderful!) Discord community that “hey, I don’t see hotbars with a ton of buttons on the screen, so it doesn’t signal MMO to me.” But what makes an MMO is not the size of the hotbar. What makes an MMO is the activities you can do in a virtual place.

Now, you still want familiarity, of course. That’s what eases the player in. Some of the bullet points we have as design rules here include:

• Minimize the learning curve; make it easy for players to jump in and play.
  
• You have two hands, so you have a few tools at a time. That’s your current “class.”
  
• Less bars: use techniques like BOTW’s fatigue meter.
  
• Do as much as possible in-world; dialogs only when necessary.
  
• UI must be butter-smooth.
  

You might notice that the second one there speaks a little bit to how we handle player progression and skills… we let you learn all sorts of things in the game. But we have you use those skills through tools, and you can only have so many of them with you at a time. So you effectively build a hotbar out of the way you want to play in a given session. If you want to change that out, you basically just have to go home and change what tools you take in your loadout.

The last one is more of a long term goal, and something else that I worry a bit that core gamers will look down their noses at, honestly!

We will support varied clients so that players can play on whatever device they choose.

…and that matters because we see particularly younger folks moving readily across computing devices. Mobile devices dominate gaming time, and are the gateway computing device. We want to be there where users reach for us, and the thing most users most often reach for is their phone. This lets us have more frequent touch points, which keeps users in the orbit of the game. Regular engagement is the biggest predictor of both retention and revenue.

I know a lot of gamers look down on anything related to mobile, thinking that it must mean simplistic or designed to extract maximum dollars. But we think about this differently: if something is a beloved hobby, we want it to be within easy reach at any moment. And a phone is something you probably always have with you.

I think of devices as just windows to the world we are building up in the cloud for you all. They’re just windows of varying sizes and control schemes. And someday, I want you to be able to use whatever window you have handy. Oh, you may not be able to do everything that way. Some sorts of gameplay will always work better with one control scheme versus another, with a larger screen than a small one.

So we’re starting PC first, for sure. But already a pretty substantial chunk of PC gaming is happening on Steam Decks and similar devices, and the use of controllers for controlling PC games has gotten to be almost mandatory. So designing for a world like that makes sense if you want to be more futureproof.

All of these pillars end up being about the same things, really. Make it easy for players to participate, but have real depth and complexity inside what seems like a simpler wrapper. All too often surface complication tricks us into thinking there’s real depth in there, when really there’s a lot of stats that boil down to mostly the same thing. We want to build a game that has the true depth and complexity that comes from simple things combining in unexpected ways.

As to how we get that complexity, well… that will have to be next week’s post. In the meantime, I’d definitely enjoy it if you stopped by the Discord, where we have discussions with the SR community around these topics!

by Raph Koster

Hi everyone,

I’m kicking off a little series of posts here on what our core game pillars are. These are the defining philosophies that animate everything in the game design. They tell us what the game is, and what the game is not.

When we do design work, we constantly look back at these core principles, and we check our work against them. We want to make sure that we are staying true to the ideas that sit at the center of the game, because all the game systems flow from these.

We didn’t just come up with these out of the blue. These were based on doing market research, looking at what things players have been asking for, what things have been missing from MMOs for a long time, and so on.

It was also based on dreams about what is possible now, with current technology. MMOs have been kind of stagnant, we feel. Back when I was working on Ultima Online we were dreaming of fully simulated worlds, worlds that could react to player actions. Instead, we have kind of settled into a mode where we as developers tend to make theme park rides for players, little canned experiences they run through, rather than alternate worlds.

So our first pillar to talk about is therefore this one. Before you read it I should say, it’s obviously aspirational, all these pillars are!

The Most Alive Online World Ever Created

The way we described this pillar to ourselves was this, which is actually cut and pasted directly from the internal development wiki. In fact, this is one of the oldest pieces of design documentation in the entire project, and predates any code being written at all!

Economic and environmental simulation will be the underlying substrate of the game, and players will be able to select from a wide array of ways to interact with the systems. Players will find themselves able to do things in the game that they have always expected: drop items, set fire to trees, and dig holes in the ground. They will find that the world does things they expect: wind might actually blow you around, you might slip off a steep slope, and snow will in fact pile up and bury things. Lastly and most importantly, player characters will be interconnected into a living society, with the intent of forming strong communities.

As you can see, we intentionally defined “alive” as including what players do, not just what the world does. If what players do affects the world, and what they do matters to each other, then the sense of it being an alternate place strengthens.

In fact, you’ve heard us talk about our living world simulation tech a lot, but the fact is that the economic simulation that players are participants in is just as important, even though it’s not nearly as visually cool.

From this high level pillar, we got three specific targets to aim at.

“The game will run off simulation.”

All the best toys are driven by simulation. Lego. Hot Wheels. Minecraft. The Sims. Having building blocks that interact with each other in magical ways is what encourages a playful attitude to the game, which then leads to players surprising us with emergence. (But we won’t be too surprised, because we are going to design for that emergence from the beginning). This then results in new ways to play, new ways for the game world to grow and flourish, and so on.

The tension between simulation and what I call “stagecraft” has a very long history in online game design in particular. If you use stagecraft, you are basically “faking” reality, in ways that help guide players. This is often really necessary – it’s very easy for players to feel like they are confused or lack guidance.

On the other hand, simulation, and consistent underlying rules, is where you get emergent gameplay from. This is both a blessing and a curse – it’s hard to predict the outcomes, and they could be good or bad for fun! So when you design in a simulationist way, you have to always temper your approach and think of how to end up with fun outcomes, as opposed to realistic ones. Realism is often not very fun.

Our core simulation is, of course, the environment. One of the questions that always comes up when we talk about our game with other developers is “what gameplay impact does that feature have?” And it’s the right question.

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We don’t want to just have different types of dirt for no reason. They have to matter to a game system – such as farming. If we have different sorts of rock, the differences should matter – to crafting, say. If you can melt that rock, that can’t just be a cool gimmick with no purpose. It has to matter in terms of giving players fun things to do. Maybe you can melt stuff to the point where its transmogrifies into something else! Maybe you can melt holes in front of creatures so they fall in and die during combat!

The point being, having a simulation that exists but doesn’t provide gameplay is kind of pointless. We’re not building a science experiment, we are building a game.

“The game will be a true persistent state world.”

You can’t have real history without persistence. You can’t have pride of place. You can’t tie players into the world unless there is a world to tie them into. This is what allows the crazy experiment players made to stick around and be experienced by others. This is what drives returns out of nostalgia. This is what leaves traces of lore to be found.

By itself, this is a technical requirement. Not a small one, either! But it’s really about human behavior.

Worlds that are more theme parks don’t have history within the game. Oh, sometimes developers have done things like destroy a zone as part of an event, or have expansions alter the map that already exists. But small things don’t change day to day, and it means that players kind of just move through the environment.

When we explore the real world, a huge amount of what we enjoy finding is actually the traces of those who came before us. When we talk in the real world about our legacies, we are talking about the things that we leave behind for others to experience someday after we are gone. These are profoundly human feelings that games aren’t tapping into.

And yes, they create fun as well.

The history of online worlds is partly the story of slowly adding more and more persistence to the experience. In the earliest text based worlds, you only saved the state of your character. The world fully reset around you every once in a while. Eventually, this evolved into resetting each zone independently. I remember when the innovation of having repops per mob came along and it felt like the world had taken a big step forward is realism! (“Mob” is the term of art for “mobile object,” so think “monster or NPC”).

Similarly, we went from saving just what you carried (and often not all of it) to saving your corpse if you died, and then the contents of bank accounts, and so on. The definition of “your character state” got bigger over time.

These days, the largest way in which players tend to be able to modify the world is using a player housing system. But so many games tuck that away into an alternate dimension, basically, so that players don’t leave a trace. It’s really just a big inventory bag that looks like a house.

That’s really not all that human structures are, despite our habit of hoarding stuff. The monuments we leave behind are often public works, plazas and pyramids, theaters and halls of government.

And yeah, it’s okay if the works of players past, like those of Ozymandias, turn to ruins someday.

But it’s really the last one of these three where it all comes together.

As an MMO, we are a live service game, and that means that we live and die based on people coming back, making the game their hobby for extended periods of time. That’s just a survival thing, for any MMO. We have to design within business realities, not just for fun factor.

Luckily, the two can often coincide. But it means a big ol’ block of text! Remember, what you are about to read may sound like it’s cynical business talk, but it’s not.

“The game will be driven by player community and interdependence.”

Retention is driven by community above all. Social ties in the game are the biggest predictor of retention. Particularly now that streamers and the like are the biggest social hubs, replacing guild leaders, it’s incredibly important that we tie users to us, not to the streamer or celebrity.

When World of Warcraft launched, they made a point of stealing away all the high-end guild leaders from EverQuest. Similarly, we don’t want someone to be able to steal our audience by persuading streamers away from our game. We have designed this game so that people don’t identify with only one social hub. That’s why we have systems such as multiple guild membership that drive loyalty to multiple hubs.

People can be very important to your life even if they aren’t close friends. Think of that plumber or electrician you rely on, even though you don’t really know them. Those relationships are called “weak tie” connections, and despite the name, they actually make the social network stronger, reducing the dependency on central hub people. When people depend on you, you are less likely to leave.

Lastly, we are investing deeply into player cities, planetary governments, housing, and other permanence. It is all stuff you cannot take with you should you leave – and that makes you less likely to want to leave. By giving limited space per planet, we are preventing any given social hub from growing too large, and therefore too powerful.

These ties matter because they are actual human connections. It’s that healer you really trust in a fight to have your back. It’s that crafter who makes the best armor, the one you trust the most. It’s the person who shares similar play hours to you, and you come to know each other as friends. These are real ties, not fake ones. Real relationships.

It takes work for people to build up to these sorts of friendships, and in the real world, it happens gradually as people come to trust one another. How does trust building work? Well, it usually starts with forms of exchange – a service performed, a payment made. But from there it grows to include favors done and gifts given, and eventually confidences exchanged and feelings shared.

This is why the player economy, and people needing each other for varying goods and services, is so important. It’s an on-ramp to friendship.

So even though our need to have players commit to the game for a long while is a business necessity, it also serves a very real need for players: human connection. And really, that has been at the heart of the MMO genre all along. It is what distinguishes MMOs from other game types. MMOs are about the other people in the world, in the end. They are virtual places in which we happen to stick games.

But this is plenty long, so I’ll talk more about those games next time!