History of the Stars Reach fan community

Humble Beginnings

Playable Worlds annnounced their existence on October 3, 2019. A press release about a 2.7 million dollar seed investment to a company founded by Raph Koster and Eric Goldberg was picked up and reported on by a few news sites. A few short interviews followed - but were mostly focussed on the business side of things. It became known that the company was working on a new MMO - but other than that, there was absolutely no information that any more gamer-oriented website could report upon.

A diligent redditor by the name of Nick fired up both a sub-reddit as well as a Discord server. He seemingly never had big intentions of growing and administering the space - but he didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands either, that’s why he reserved the “playable worlds” name on those platforms, and a few months later handed it off to more involved fans and members of the community.

The fact that one of the lead investors was an eSports company that also held some investments in the crypto-space, lead to some people mistakenly believing that the game was going to have an eSports or Crypto component. A fringe rumor that weirdly persisted even after getting officially debunked.

At first, things were pretty slow going. For the entirety of 2020, we didn’t really learn much about the game at all. Raph held a few talks and interviews, appeared on some pod-casts - and even showed up on the Discord server (invited there by the new admin Alle) - where he answered a few questions, as he did on the subreddit. Active Members on the Discord were low in number, but we had some interesting discussions on MMO game design in general, and also on the differences between themeparks and sandboxes - to which Raph would occasionally chime in as well. Everyone expected the new game to be similar to Raphs previous ones (UO, SWG, Metaplace) - and he kinda confirmed that - but we knew no details at all.

Sudden Burst of Activity

In April 2021 things suddenly heated up. We got the first wave of “Riffs by Raph” articles, describing some of the ideas and philosophies behind the new game - indicating that it would indeed be a social sandbox with similar ambitions to UO and SWG - but cranked to 11 through the use of modern web technology. Four of those RIFFs appeard in short succession within that single month - more followed on a more irregular schedule. An official PW community manager named violetLight appeared on the Discord - and also doing some posts on the PW website. Something was brewing - and most assumed the sudden activity might be a sign of preparations for the announcement - which Raph had estimated for “sometime next year” in 2020.

During that short burst of activity, we learned a few first things about the game:

• it was going to have a fully player-driven economy, that encompassed and supported all sorts of different playstyles
• we got to see a blurry “map of the economy”: https://www.playableworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/macroeconomy-diagram.png
• it was going to be a social game, carefully tweaked empower small player groups, and asynchronous player-to-player interactions
• it was going to be single-shard, not split apart across multiple “severs”
• players were supposed to be able to join up and play together quickly - but transporting goods was supposed to be slow, to allow for regional prices and arbitrage
• that the game was being designed for long term player retention - to be something people could play for decades (without requiring a constant stream of new static content to be added)
• that the technology underlying the game was built to be “cloud-native” and “metaverse-ready” - but the game itself was not going to be a metaverse

the first ever released image - with intentionally unredable text

Slim Pickings

And then… crickets. Despite some small hints that something exciting was just around the corner - nothing happened. At least until September/October, when another, even larger wave of Riffs by Raph articles landed and activity took up again. People asked and got confirmation that the “2021 announcement” was still on the table… but then it didn’t happen after all.

We were pretty disappointed then - not just because of the delay, but also because nobody ever said anything about the announcement being delayed - we simly got ghosted, waiting for the supposedly impending event until the year went by. Raph later apologized that they keep changing their plans, and that the announcement wasn’t gonna happen after all. violetLight later left the company and took up a community manager role elsewhere.

For most of 2022 and the first half of 2023 nothing much happened at all. There was one Riff by Raph. The Discord community was still pretty small. There were quite a few people lurking - but not many active members who’d actually want to participate in discussions and speculations. But there wasn’t really all that much to discuss or speculate on either, as we still were pretty thin on details. We still knew barely anything. What little we did know, were those high level concepts from the Riffs by Raph - some of which had already been through community discussion multiple times. I don’t seem to have any noteable memories from this phase either.

The Emergence of Fireside Chats

But then, mid-2023 the fireside chats started. First of those happened in late June, and it was just Carneros, talking a bit about the game. How they can already connect, logon and run around, internally in the company. He also answered questions - although most questions regarding any game details still had to be answered with “can’t talk about that yet”. Three weeks later, mid-July, another fireside chat happened. And another one, 14 days after that. And another 14days later, again. And it would continue to be every other week (except for holiday-break I think?), until last week - which was the final fireside chat before the game announcement.

During those fireside chats we slowly, bit by bit, got an impression of what the game might be. Based up the rough outlines given in the Riffs by Raph articles, and the questions asked and answered in firesides, and the few small leaks about (often minor) game features we got from Carneros - a plausible image of the game emerged:

• the game is going to be a continuation of many of the ideas and ambitions found in UO and SWG and Raph’s blog posts and books

• there’ll be a decent number of procedurally generated planets - enough in number to accommodate all the players of this single-shard game and allow housing space for everyone

• all of those worlds are going to be simulated and “alive” to a large degree - and can be changed over time by player actions. player-made changes are permanent-ish, there’s no reset of state or spawning back in - but the simulation will still affect them. a dug hole might fill with water, a cut-down tree might make space for some other plant to grow in it’s place, etc.

• these worlds will come with an initial abundance of both renewable and non-renewable resources, but with enough time and effort, players can theoretically cause the former to go extinct, and completely exhaust the latter.

• each planet will come with it’s own set of raw materials with randomly generated stats (similar SWG) - but the raw materials will never respawn. once a planet is mined dry, those specific materials are gone forever - but the same type of materials might appear with different stats on a different planet

• there will be a deeply interconnected economy, with supply chains, trade routes and regional pricing and everything - part of which will depend on those materials, which have to be player-transported from one place to the other, and cannot fast travel (only player can, goods cannot)

• every item in the game will be player-made (and degrade over time, needing repairs), and players will not only be able to sell material products, but also non-material services. players will also be able to create “contracts” for other players to fulfill as a service. this possibly might even include out-of-game services.

• there’ll be many different skill-trees, most if not all of which play into that economy in some way or form. players will be able to dabble in as many of those trees as they like - there’ll be no limitations, and players will always be able to train a new skill or start a new skill-tree - but they can only have a limited amount of skills “active” at any given time

• combat, non-combat, pvp, pve etc. will all exist - and all of it will be optional, and there will be perfectly valid and useful playstyles (all equally important) for all those things - all depending on each other

• players will be able to build things (including houses, cities, etc.), dig holes and tunnels, breed and introduce non-native species, generally change those worlds in various ways - both directly and through influencing the simulation. building and construction is inspired by, and will be as flexible and powerful as in EQ Next/Landmark

• player clans/guilds will get to somehow govern entire planets and “build societies” there.

Public Announcement

And then, finally, after a little ARG puzzle we totally failed to solve, the game actually got announced - and we got to see a trailer! Our first visual glimpse of the game proper!

Stars Reach Announcement Trailer (Youtube)