MMORPGs have, in many ways, been foundational to video games as a whole, not only one of the most enduring genres out there but crucial for developing the ideas of player sandboxes, open worlds, crafting, and much more. Equally, Raph Koster, the creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, is a key pioneer of MMORPGs.
But interestingly, Koster feels like somewhere along the way, MMOs have sort of lost the plot on what they’re truly capable of, sandbox experiences about player freedom and collaboration. Koster and his studio, Playable Worlds, hope to tap into that potential again with their new MMO, Stars Reach, an ambitious, player-driven universe.
At Summer Game Fest, we had the chance to preview Stars Reach and talk with Koster about the game, the state of the MMORPG genre, the enduring legacy of Star Wars Galaxies, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What do you think the future of the MMORPG genre looks like? How does it adapt to where the industry at large is at right now?
Koster: It’s interesting because it’s hard to disentangle that from industry things. Factors that I think a lot of gamers don’t necessarily pay attention to, and why? There’s no reason for them to. Let me pull together a few strands.
The first is the game of forming a party of separate classes, levelling by killing 10 rats over and over again; the rats get bigger, but you’re still killing 10 rats to get gear, level up, and end up in a raid — that was invented in 1991, right? It predates MMOS. It was text games, MUDS (multi-user dimensions), EverQuest was explicitly, “let’s put graphics on that,” and World of Warcraft was explicitly, “let’s make EverQuest accessible,” and that’s a great game. But that’s where strand two comes into the mix, which is that it depends on building loads of static content that players eat up, right, they consume it. So you end up in newbie zones that are deserted, that you still pay server costs for, that players went through and never go back. So you end up with what we call Hollow World Syndrome in the biz, which still costs you money.
I threw out some numbers in an earlier interview; I’ll repeat them. Ultima Online, 1997, $2 million. Star Wars Galaxies, 2003, $10 million. World of Warcraft, 2004, $63 million. More money than all the previous MMOs combined. A couple of years later, Star Wars: The Old Republic grossed over $250 million. That’s not sustainable right now. They just start doing this, and that goes to bad places. Actually, it went to bad places. That’s why the industry is in a slump right now. And not just MMOs, all games have that problem. You want to hear a horrifying statistic? Facebook’s Farmville – an early Facebook game, under a million dollars. Farmville 2 costs as much as Star Wars Galaxies. And it was only three years later, and it cost more than $10 million.
So it isn’t just a big game problem; all games do this, even the casual brands these days. $10 million is like a mid-level mobile game, which you know, gamers don’t go, but wait a minute, can’t you just shovel those out? No, everything is costing a fortune. So, from a business perspective, why keep doing it?
Strand three is the business model. If you control the experience, handcraft everything, lead the player by the nose. Well, that makes it really easy to sell them things, and that’s what’s happened. So today, MMO players are underserved and over-monetized. And they’re not happy about it. The genre has painted itself into a corner: it has to produce ever-increasing amounts of static content it can no longer afford to make, because that’s the only way it knows how to make money, and at this point, it’s been doing it for so long. And it’s impossible to keep up. We’ve known since the early days that players eat the content faster than you can make it. So the irony is that sandbox MMOs were invented in the 90s as a solution to this. We’ve had the answers since then, but WoW came along and kind of put a stop to it all. And they did a great job; that’s not a knock on WoW, they made something fantastic. But it ended up setting the template in a particular direction.
But in the meantime, what happened? Crafting everywhere, house decorating, The Sims comes out a bit later, fashion gameplay, running shops, and raising a pet. Suddenly, these are all the casual genres on the planet. There’s a good argument to make that sandbox MMO gameplay is dramatically more popular than killing 10 rats. If you look at games as a whole, it didn’t just happen in MMOs; it spread everywhere else – it became Minecraft, RuneScape, and Animal Crossing. So we have a generation of younger folks who grew up with Minecraft and RuneScape, and they go, ” What’s my next game? Where is it? I think the pathway towards this greater potential is there and has been there, and we know people want more out of an alternate world than just killing ten rats.
That’s why we’ve said the tech makes this possible. Now we know more about design. This is my fifth MMO engine from scratch, and there are some things you can only do when you’ve done it a bunch. So we said it’s time to be ambitious and unlock the potential in everything the digital world can offer.
I’ve talked to other MMO developers about this recently, but with the rise of the live-service multiplayer model, is there any kind of symbiotic relationship between it and MMOs? Do you think live service has changed how players view MMOs? You often hear the idea that “MMO players” are all older, and young people don’t play MMOs.
Koster: Two things. The entire live service model is just all of those other games trying to be MMOs – MMOs invented the live service model. MMOs invented game time codes. MMOs brought subscriptions and invented microtransactions – to many people’s regret. All of the things that they’re doing, a season pass is just pre-buying a three-month subscription block. That’s what it is. So what’s actually happened is that, in order to be market-viable, all the live-service games are trying to borrow MMO business practices. It’s not symbiotic, it’s outright.
As for the other side of the question, I think it’s important to realize that anyone who grew up playing Habbo Hotel, Runescape, Puzzle Pirates, or Club Penguin knows MMOs. To say kids don’t know MMOs is bananas. Like the kids, the MMO market was about 10 times larger than WoW. And people just kind of ignored it.
You still see that now with something like Wizard 101, a game that’s tremendously popular and no one ever talks about.
Koster: No one ever talks about it. But is that an MMO? Yes, in every way. And in fact, it’s a pretty innovative MMO. There’s a lot more innovation happening in the kids’ MMO market than in “grown-up” MMOs. So that’s kind of the irony. We say, ” Oh, it’s all converged down to this, and is there really a market for different and sandbox-y gameplay?” Meanwhile, millions of kids grow up and hit MMOs and go “Where’s the cool stuff? Where’s my freedom? Where’s my building? Where’s my emergence?”
What do they do? They go and do it themselves in GTA Online, because AAA companies aren’t putting it on offer. There’s a massive hole in the market from a business point of view. I’ve been candid, will a high-end guild raid person like Stars Reach? I don’t know, honestly. That’s like asking some fighting game person from the FGC to play FIFA. Like, they might not.
I think this points the way forward to gameplay that’s much broader than that, to the possibility of having way more kinds of experiences. To get back to worlds that surprise you, not baked down into a strategy guide on a website. And to have the dream back of alternate realities that you fall into. That’s what got me into MMOs in the first place: the moment of immersion when I fell in and was like, oh my god, the possibilities are amazing. To see that boiled down to collect five purples is just, like, sigh. So that’s what we’re about, that’s it. Literally, it’s in our company name. That’s why we’re called Playable Worlds.
With Stars Reach, what you’re doing is obviously incredibly ambitious. And you often see people talk about ideas like scope creep and keeping the project realistic. How do you approach that with a game like this? How do you keep a realistic mindset?
Koster: One of the big things is, by planning out things like the simulation, you’re building a solid baseline machine underneath everything. It is entirely possible to build theme park content on top of a sandbox. It’s completely impossible to build sandbox content on top of a theme park, right? Like, Blizzard is adding housing now, and they’re having to stuff it into instances, because where do you put it? If you’ve gone and handcrafted everything, there’s n o room for players to build a village.
So, setting those things up as initial constraints makes it much easier to do the rest. One of the things that often catches people by surprise when they join the team is that you can pull up the original vision document from 2018, and it’s recognizably this game. Most of the systems are what they say, the variations tend to be in the details, not in the macro. And that’s actually kind of unusual in a project of this scale. We defined our core pillars, like we will embrace emergence, we will foster community, we will be casual, accessible casual. We will be accessible and deep, is actually what the pillar says. We set all of those up and use them as filters for every design decision. Even now, when we talk about game design, we go back and reread the pillars and ask, “Are we being true to our soul?”
It has taken longer. We had five big technical things to pull off. And we were like, “Well, if two of them blow up, we’ll be okay. If three blow up, we’re in trouble.” The simulation we did, the first draft in 2019, was functional. But it was literally 1 million times slower than what we have today. It has been through four separate programming languages and has been rewritten five times, but it’s been working for a couple of years now, and players have been playing this a year and a half already in closed testing. It turned out that two of the technical things blew up, but we front-loaded the risk as much as possible. Games need to be ambitious. Because otherwise, players master them, get bored, and then walk away. Ambition is what opens new gameplay.
I’ve heard many MMO developers talk about Star Wars Galaxies, even Naoki Yoshida at the recent FFXIV Fan Fest. I’m curious, in retrospect, after all these years, what do you think the impact of Galaxies really was? How has it influenced both MMOs and games at large?
Koster: That’s a really good question. Because it’s super easy to trace the influence of Ultima Online, I mean, Time Magazine picked it as one of the 100 most important games of all time. You can clearly trace it out. Galaxies is so much more complicated.
Its biggest legacy, ironically, is a massive screw-up: the new game experience (NGE). How often does a video game patch get covered by The Village Voice and The New York Times? It made international news. I honestly think it was the worst patch in video game history, so it has ended up being kind of the legacy – don’t treat your customers this way. It’s a really important lesson for the industry to have learned. And just for the record, I opposed it every step of the way and lost.
But anyway, I think a lot of the features in Galaxies, I think a lot of the features in Galaxies, because people don’t have the experience or skills to do things like, let’s design the economy from the ground up. You see it happen, Eve did it, but it’s not that common. When EVE started, it took a long time to build this ramp; now it’s enormous and quite popular. But I think even they would say it’s a bit impenetrable. It’s hard to get into.
I think it’s hard to apply some of the lessons from Galaxies because they have those assumptions. I used to regularly get asked, “Everyone says the best crafting system in games is Galaxies. We want it in our game. Can you help us put it in?” But they’d ask me when they were a year from done, and I’m like it’s too late. You can’t shove it in at the end. You have to plan your whole game around it from the beginning. We do see it pop up. Actually, the Guild Wars 2 guys, when they finished that, ArenaNet sent me a collector’s edition with a lovely note saying thank you, we were really inspired by Galaxies. So you do see some of those ideas spreading out in various places.
I wish people had picked up on the town building and all that more, but we’re running with it [in Stars Reach]. We see that, but doing it as the private server thing is a really interesting path forward. But we didn’t see much of that; instead, people just started creating instances. But to me, the interesting legacy is that players just would not let the game go. The emulation scene for Galaxies, a couple of years ago, we did a classic game post-mortem for GDC on Galaxies, and as part of that, we looked at the live concurrent population on all the Galaxies emulators – and it would be charting on Steam [if it was on there].
One of my favorite legacies is really far afield. MMOs touch people; they get married because of them, or three or four generations played the game, the parents and their kids, and then those kids had kids. That kind of thing is what the real legacy of MMOs ends up being, not so much the design influence. One of the wildest stories is that of musician Porter Robinson – he’s a Grammy-nominated guy who steered EDM toward a more ambient sound with his classic album Worlds. You know what made him make Worlds? The shutdown of Star Wars Galaxies. The last song, the last track, is called Goodbye to a World, and if you listen to the lyrics, it’s along the lines of, it’s not your fault, it’s okay, this is a world we made together. I have a signed copy of the vinyl hanging on my wall. I didn’t find out for years, then one day on social media, he mentioned it in an interview, I did a TIL post, he DM’d me, and we became friends. Ultimately, that’s what you hope for from any kind of creative work. It isn’t necessarily the way you influence the next designer to do some of what you did; it’s how you influence the people who got to play. It’s totally cool with me if they play in the world, and then he decides to play an instrument instead, and takes some of Galaxies with him into that. That’s a legacy too.
