Stars Reach News

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.

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!