Got the heads up from Wilhelm, but apparently Raph Koster is making a new MMO called Stars Reach. It’s in a pre-alpha state, but apparently there will be a playtest for select testers this summer.

They also posted this YouTube trailer:

A lot of the YouTube comments were shitting on the art direction and general Fortnite vibes. Which… I guess? It doesn’t look awful to me, notwithstanding the pre-alpha animation and textures. I’m pretty used to Early Access survival games anyway, so graphics are not necessarily required beyond a certain minimum. Looks more like Wildstar to me and I liked that game.

Wilhelm already dissected a lot of the official promotional material, so I wanted to focus on the Reddit AMA Raph did a few days ago instead.

That said, it still has to look good, of course. We are aiming for graphics akin to Genshin Impact, Breath of the Wild, etc. It’s a broadly appealing style that maximizes audience (frankly, a large chunk of the audience is turned off by hyperrealistic graphics. It “codes” as being for hardcore players only, typically male players).

As far as the sci fi angle… the mandate was “do to sci fi what WoW did to fantasy.” A huge huge part of WoW’s success was its stylization, and people also complained that it was cartoony and kiddy at the time.

This was Raph’s response to someone concerned about the visuals. Again, I have zero issues with Genshin Impact-style visuals, and frankly, this is really the first time I had an inclination that someone else did. Perhaps I have been unplugged from the MMO population for too long.

Right now, planets are aimed at being a few kilometers on a side. The Servitors have placed a force field bubble around the area they are letting humans settle, in order to preserve the planetary ecologies. […]

We are intentionally not a seamless world. Having partitioned zones lets us do:

• an ever changing map where planets can be discovered and can go away, wormholes can collapse, etc
• worlds that are actually consumable — mine out all the gold, it’s GONE. Pave the planet over and turn it into a shopping mall.
• segmenting player control of areas on really bright lines for things like PvP rulesets
• cheaper operating costs since we can bubble zones up and down really easily in the cloud

Err… uh, whoa?

In case you click on no other links today, let me summarize some things. Each planet basically has one 4km zone where players can go wild. Planets (or rather these 4km cubes) are completely procedurally-generated to start, within certain parameters. There are actually a lot of physics in the game, including gravity, fluid dynamics (i.e. water flowing to new spaces), and temperature. Also, seasons. However, players are also free to essentially strip-mine the planet to bedrock and then it’s just… gone forever. Which may or may not be a big deal because these planets can just be blipped out of existence by the devs depending on whatever criteria they please. Or maybe they will just refresh the 4km cube and leave the planet as-is. But it doesn’t appear to allow more than one 4km cube per planet.

Now, the obvious question is “how do you prevent other players from deleting the ground beneath your house?” Or, frankly, griefing in almost innumerable other ways under this system. The answer appears to be: government. The details are sparse at this point, but players can be elected to be a governor of a given planet, and they can set the rules for what other people can do. Presumably some of these rules include being able to destroy any blocks, build things, and so on.

The obvious follow-up to that should be: can I solo govern my own planet? Right now, I don’t see a clear answer. Maybe one doesn’t exist because they haven’t implemented it yet. But I suspect the answer is No. Otherwise it would be easy for an industrious player to beam down, lock the planet, strip-mine all the resources, and cart it away. Or, you know, basically everyone trying to get their own personal planet. However, without that ability as a solo player, that opens up a nightmare scenario of landing on a unpopulated planet, building your dream house, and then a guild popping down, instantly electing one of their own dudes as governor, and Eminently Domaining your ass off-planet.

The strip-mine scenario can be resolved via game mechanics – “all that ore is too heavy and requires multiple trips to move it anywhere” – but social griefing is a particularly pernicious design weed. We’ll have to see how they address it. I’d be surprised if it was an EVE-esque “that’s content!” approach.

[Fake Edit] Just found Raph’s response in another thread:

So how it works is that until a planet is claimed (via barn raising, a group action) it belongs to no one.

Once it is claimed, the government of the planet actually has the power to set permissions on all the things you are worried about. Including banning people, build permissions, planet modification permissions, etc.

So, yeah, that’s a nightmare for solo people. Best you can hope for is joining a governed planet with friendly policies, and just hope nothing changes (e.g. you get kicked off planet, your base destroyed, etc). Yikes. What’s worse is that Raph seems to think the government thing itself is a good enough guardrail to prevent griefing. As if we don’t see IRL government griefing all the goddamn time.

It’s action combat inspired by a variety of things:

• we take a bit of twin stick shooter DNA. You can run in one direction while firing in another. You have dodge rolls, etc.
• We also draw inspiration from more arcadey feel. We want it to be super accessible, not a giant confusing hotbar. So we reference stuff like Smash TV a lot.
• We also want it to be deep. So we look at MOBAs a lot for weapon variety and tradeoffs and the like. Avi, gameplay engineer on combat, has said that he wants the system flexible enough to make every attack in LoL possible for designers.
• But we know that a lot of MMO players are fans of tactical thinking and tab targeting and the like too! Weapons can be customized to have varying degrees of lock-on. There are tradeoffs there — if you have tab lock on, then maybe in exchange for aim not being required, you have a tradeoff on firing pace, damage done, etc. You can actually see homing shots already in the videos we released.

I like how they mention Smash TV as if that is something anyone under the age of 40 would understand. Like, I played the 1992 SNES port back in the day, but what an otherwise ancient reference.

It’s amusing how many times Raph has mentioned about wanting the game to be accessible, focusing on horizontal progression, no chasing “numbers go up” and such… and then introducing what sounds a lot like a twitch-based bullet-hell combat system. Does the tab-targeting versus free-aim even matter if you are expecting your players to be shooting a different direction than they are running all while dodge-rolling? Unless the difficulty is dialed way, way down to where it doesn’t matter at all, horizontal progression is actually more difficult than vertical. At least in the latter case, you can theoretically out-level/out-gear the encounter; in the former, you have to “Git Gud” or group with people who have.

Anyway, that’s Stars Reach for now.

…a game where you can explore, strange new 4km worlds, start building your dream house, and watch it all be taken away by foreign bureaucracies who drink your milkshake in the name of capitalism. Or sadism. Or both! Unless you start your own nation-building company to sell your votes to desperate solo players who just want to build a planetside home. Although perhaps the devs will anticipate such chicanery and dissolve governorships when the population falls below X level or requires Y amount of upkeep costs that is unreasonable for solo players. I can’t wait to find out!