MMORPGs are among the most enduring genres in video games — massive experiences that continue to run for years, or even decades, with tremendously dedicated fanbases. But like most of the industry, it’s fair to say that even MMOs are stuck in a bit of a rut, struggling to find ways to innovate meaningfully and bring on new players. And it’s equally hard for new MMOs to break onto the scene when so much is dominated by the big players like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV.
And that’s before you even talk about balancing the time sink of an MMO with real life. I’ve been an MMO player my entire life, but I only stick to a single one right now because of both a lack of time and the feeling that so much of the genre has become homogenized. And that’s exactly the biggest point that sticks out to me about Stars Reach — how intrinsically and fundamentally different it feels from what we expect out of modern MMOs.
Stars Reach is the first game from Playable Worlds, a studio founded in 2018 by Raph Koster, best known as the creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. It’s extremely difficult to demo an MMO in a 30-40 minute segment, and even though I did get to play Stars Reach, it goes without saying that it’s impossible for me to get a true understanding of the game’s scope in that small segment, and most of what I’m talking about is the systems and structure of the game.
That being said, after playing a snippet of the game and talking to Koster for quite a while, I’m genuinely excited for what the studio hopes to do with Stars Reach. Perhaps most important is the idea of a “sandbox MMO,” a game where you truly have the freedom to build and do what you want. While it’s a lot more complicated than I can explain, the gist of Stars Reach is a single, living universe that players inhabit, run by a complex simulation that reacts to nearly everything you do, sequentially building the universe in the process. And crucially, you won’t be playing instanced areas, but an entire seamless world (think something similar to No Man’s Sky).
While there will be missions and a “story,” Stars Reach is largely about exploration and player cooperation. And it seems like the simulation at the core of Stars Reach is really the game’s heart, and that players can use it to collaborate with the game and with each other. Across my 40 minutes, I got to see a bit of how this works.
My demo started with floating around space a bit, harvesting materials from asteroids, which would then reshape the rocks as they continued to float through space. But after teleporting to the planet below, I got a much better idea of the game’s systems.
On a planet’s surface, you can use that same collector tool to reshape the environment how you see fit, creating rifts, canyons, waterways, and more. In my demo, we dug out a lake to create a waterfall over a nearby cliff, and create a flowing river right past our base. Another tool you have is used to affect the age and quality of different materials. For example, I de-aged solid rock into mud, fundamentally changing how everyone interacts with that part of the environment. Another tool lets you alternate between ice and fire, freezing water or other liquids or setting things on fire to burn them into something new. But because of that simulation, you need to be careful — set a tree on fire and you may inadvertently burn the forest, or even the world, if you aren’t paying attention.
There is combat and weapons in Stars Reach, much along the lines of what you’d see in other shooter-based MMOs, but the really fascinating part of that comes with the game’s skill system. In my demo, I got to see the game’s vast skill tree, which works similarly to The Elder Scrolls, where you level up by actually using the skill. But these can run the gamut in Stars Reach. One skill might boost your leadership and politics, giving you an advantage when working with other players. Maybe you want to work on crafting and become a weaponsmith or a piemaker.
In Stars Reach, you won’t get experience by crafting items, but rather whenever one of the items you make is used by another player. So if someone eats a pie you’ve made, you get a boost. This idea similarly works for something like being a Ranger, granting you experience when someone uses a camp you’ve established. There are dozens upon dozens of skills in the game for different combat options, crafting, lifestyle ideas (like music), and more.
Koster stresses that the skill system is meant to reinforce some of the core ideas of the game at large, rewarding players for how they want to play — not forcing them into something they don’t want to do. Because of that open-ended structure, the team at Playable Worlds is hopeful that mini-societies or organizations can pop up within the game’s universe. Groups of players focused on trading, establishing bases, and more.
To end my demo, Koster transported me over to a massive settlement that players already testing the game had built. A glitzy town filled with shops, neon signs, housing, and a giant pixelated picture of an otter in a spacesuit, which has a bit of a funny story to it. It turns out that Otter is a good example of how Playable Worlds is trying to collaborate with its player base.
“That giant cartoon otter in the player city is Charlie the Space Otter. ” He’s in our lore as a mysterious kind of alien thing found in space that the Transplanetary League uses as a mascot for the program welcoming new immigrants into The Garden,” Koster says. “Why is Charlie the Space Otter there?” Because a player was talking about the game and said, “I’m lost in otter space,” by accident on our Discord. They ran with it and started making memes, and we made the cartoon one.”
Koster takes me a little into the city to show me another example, a functional subway system built by players. As it turns out, some inventive players figured out that if you placed objects just right and used the in-game command “unstuck” (essentially unsticking your avatar from geometry), you could transport yourself across distances. After that, groups of players started implementing these jerry-rigged “subway systems,” and the development team was delighted.
“It’s give and take. It’s recognizing something cool is happening and embracing it, instead of squashing it,” continues Koster, “Like, we talk about playing games, we talk about creating content or whatever. But sometimes we forget what the world play means.”
As I stressed earlier, it’s exceedingly hard to show off an MMO in such a small snippet. It’s then equally hard for me to impress upon you, the reader, the real depth of what I saw in that small snippet. But what I can say is that Stars Reach is fascinating, and many of the game’s ideas deliberately address many of the criticisms I myself have had of modern MMOs.
I love my time with Final Fantasy XIV, Lord of the Rings Online, and many others, but so many of those experiences do start to feel checklist-y after a while. The idea of an MMO that can provide that kind of hand-crafted experiences on the developer side, as well as a vibrant community that can create in its own right, is tantalizing. I also relish the idea of an MMO that gives me true freedom to pursue what I want, and rewards me for playing even small amounts, not having to log in every day or week to get my tasks done.
Star Wars Galaxies is one of the only MMOs that’s ever really scratched that itch of “living” in a digital world. And while I’m obviously not ready to make a complete judgment call on Stars Reach, we’ve seen no shortage of games with boundless ambition that come up short — coming from the creator of Galaxies, and what I’ve seen of the game, I’m more than invested in seeing if these grand ambitions pay off.
