Stars Reach Explainer
While this explainer is carefully made to fit in with everything we’ve learned about the game so far - there is no guarantee it will match the final game. It’s a best effort educated guesstimate - but plans could change, and mistakes/misunderstandings can’t be ruled out either.
Sandbox
Stars Reach is an MMORPG - but in some ways it is quite different to what most people would consider a typical MMORPG these days. It’s a sandbox, but not quite your typical sandbox either. It’s from the same game designer who also was lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, so there are some similarities to those games, especially when it comes to the social aspects. But there’s also significant innovation and new ideas. Overall, it might just end up being it’s own unique thing.
The New Player Experience
You will start by creating a character. You’ll be able to choose from a number of different humanoid species, only a few of which are known so far: regular humans, ape-people, cat-people, and demon-people. There’ll be more options than that in the final game - but they will all be humanoid. You can expect a wide variety of visual options for you character - but we don’t know any details about that yet. What you will NOT select though, is a class, or profession or anything that would lock your character into a specific progression path, or limit future options and choices. The game will never lock you in like that - you’ll always have the freedom to change and adapt your character.
You’ll then go through a short tutorial, teaching you the basics of different elements of the game. This tutorial is going to be the only instanced section of the entire game. Everything else will be shared open world. And you will NOT have to pick a server or shard. There might be separate regions - like US, EU, Asia - but within each of those, all players will be within the same shared game universe, fully able to meet up with each other, and part of the same shared economy. This is a single-shard game, like for example EvE Online is.
At the end of the tutorial you will be given a little spaceship - and set off to explore the universe. It’s likely the tutorial will guide you towards a beginner-friendly planet, but you don’t have to go there. In fact, you don’t have to go to a planet at all - you reportedly will be able to spend your entire game life in space. On space ships, asteroids and space stations. But let’s assume you do go down to that planet. As the planet fills up with players and matures - later players will be sent to a different beginner-friendly planet. The game can generate new such planets, as needed, to make sure new players always can start on a suitable planet that has other new players as well.
Once on that planet you then have to choose what you want to do. You will have access to various skill trees, which will cover all sorts of playstyles, including non-combat options, PvE and PvP. You’ll never be forced into combat, you’ll never be forced into PvP - it’s your free choice. You can play a peaceful character that never fires a weapon at all, and still play an important role in the game and the economy. You can also try out anything you want, without any danger of messing up your character, or locking you in. While there is a limit to how many skills you can have in practice simultaneously - there is no limit on how many skills you can train. If you hit the limit and want to train another skill - just take one of your existing skills out of practice, to free up a slot for training a new skill. You don’t even loose any training when you put a skill out of practice - but putting it back into practice will come with a significant time delay, so people can’t just switch around willy-nilly. Let’s assume you want to try some mining first, since that seems like a good way to earn some early money. You equip an extractor, using up one of your five tool slots. You decide to also bring an omniblaster, just in case you run into aggressive wildlife. Then you set out in search of valuable ores. Mining works very much like it does in No Mans Sky, Astroneer and similar games. Your extractor shoots a beam at the ground, which actually digs a hole into it. Ore veins can be found scattered about randomly underground (and some might even peak out above-ground). As you use the extractor to dig and mine, materials will get sucked into your inventory automatically. When your inventory starts to fill up, you decide to visit the nearest town to sell some of the stuff.
The town is small. It’s entirely player made, and being on a new starter planet, it hasn’t progressed that much yet. But there is some sort of material exchange, where you can sell the ores you found for some credits. But you are clever and also check with the player-owned vendor NPCs that have been setup on the town’s market place. And there you find a vendor that actually offers a better price on some of the ores you’ve collected. You sell as much of it as that vendor will take (the player owning that vendor has set purchase limits, but the vendor is also limited by how much currency it has, which had to be provided by the owner as well). So you are actually trading with another real player - but through an vendor NPC, so that the other player doesn’t even have to be online at the same time. The NPC also offers a contract - where it offers you guarantueed pay for delivering a certain amount of a certain ore, but you decline that for now.
Originally, this place had only one single player claim a piece of land, and start build their own house there. But as more and more players claimed and built next to each other, they eventually became able to turn their settlement into a player city, vote for a mayor, setup taxes and build some infrastructure like the material exchange you had visited earlier. They also built a bar, and as you walk into that, the buffs of nearby dancing entertainers start affecting you, and slowly building up stacks. Another player tells you, that the town is still accepting new citizens, and with the coin you just earned you would even be able to get your own land claim, and start building a home for yourself. Or maybe buy a nice blueprint designed by another player, and build that for your house. Their goal is, to eventually govern the entire planet. Joining their clan would come with other benefits as well - but you don’t feel like settling down yet - you want to see more the galaxy first.
So you spend your money on replacing your little shuttle with a small freighter instead. You’d like to also fill up it’s cargo hold with some cheap exports you might be able to sell for profit elsewhere - but you don’t quite have the means for that. Yet. So you just jump into your empty ship and blast off into space - in search of new adventure and untold riches. As you leave the planet, you get a little loading-sequence as the planet is unloaded from memory, and the space region above it is loaded in. There’s no space station here, as nobody has built one yet - but there are few asteroids. You’d like to mine them, but there’s some sort of space spiders near them, and your ship is unarmed. Since there are no other planets in this system, your only option is to fly through the wormhole into another system in space. The jump through the wormhole is another loading sequence.
And that’s how your adventure begins. You have sheer unlimited options ahead of you. You can become an architect, a healer, a crafter, a creature tamer, an entertainer, a politician, a scout, a trader, a miner, a mercenary, an explorer, a cartographer, an archeologist, an ecologist, a farmer, a geneticist, and much more - maybe even a pirate or a bounty hunter. Or a mix of any of these.
The Possibilities
What makes Stars Reach special, is how everything is dynamic, and simulated. (Well, except for the tutorial, I guess.) There is no quest-giver NPC who might task you to go and kill 10 space rats. But a planet might actually run into a space rat infestation problem - because the ecology got skewed in some way. And then the player clan who governs that planet, might actually put out contracts for hunters, to come and help kill rats. This is not a scripted event either. Nobody planned for this to happen, nobody wrote the story for it. It dynamically emerged from the interaction between what the players were doing, and the simulation.
You are not going to do some fetch-quest for some NPC - the same as everyone else gets to do. Where you bring your 100 pieces of iron ore and they just disappear. And even if thousands of players bring 100 iron ore each… the NPC will still desperately need exactly 100 pieces of iron ore. But instead you might be a trader, and see that a planet want’s to build a big spaceport. And you know, they are going to need a ton of iron ore to build that. And the only iron ore to be found on that planet, is way to good and high quality, to use it for buildings. So, you fly to some distant planet, where you know their iron ore is crap and only good enough for buildings but nothing else - and therefore plenty cheap - and you just stuff your cargo ship with as much of it, as you can squeeze in. And then you return and sell that for a lot cheaper than the local ore - but still at a tidy profit.
You are not going to read to through read a pre-written story, chopped into a series of quest-texts, delivered to you by various NPCs you don’t really care about. A story you can’t even talk about, because that would be spoilers to all the other players reading through exactly the same story. Instead you might just be able to be the first to discover a new planet that just got generated - before anyone else finds out. You get to explore it, create various maps for it, that will help miners find good minerals, and tamers to find nice creatures, and things like that. And then you suddenly stumble across some mysterious alien ruins - which by random chance got generated for exactly that planet. The ruins might contain alien Artefacts to be found, Alien writings to be deciphered, mysteries to be solved. And while those alien writings might still be pre-written lore - the story of how you discovered that planet, and those ruins, will forever be yours to tell.
These are just a few examples of the sorts of situations that can emerge from an underlying, dynamic simulation. And in Stars Reach, all planets and systems are driven by a type of simulation called cellular automata. And while that simulation is based on very simple rules - the way those rules interact can lead to really complex behavior. A good example for this, is Conways Game of Life - which is a super simple cellular automata simulation, where the cells can only have one of two possible states: black, or white. And the next state of each cell, is defined by it’s current state, plus the states of surrounding cells.
And we’ve seen some of what is possible with that, during the tests and in videos already. Water flows, fire spreads, plants with access to water become greener. Soil can erode, plants can wither and die. A water pool behind a dam will spill out and drown until empty, if there’s a whole in the wall. The water can turn earth into mud, loam into clay and similar reactions. Animals will multiply when they are thriving, and can even die out, when conditions become unsuited for their survival. Plants might only grow well on soils with the right attributes for them. Animals have their favorite foods (important for tamers to figure out those!) and much more. There’ll be weather, there’ll be seasons - and all of that will affect plant growth, which in turn will affect animals - all of which run their own little AI, with needs and desires.
Player-driven Economy
And on top of all of that, you get a truly player-driven economy. Basically another layer of simulation, one that connects everything, and makes it so that all those different playstyles depend on each other, and indirectly support each other. It doesn’t matter whether you play solo, in small or in large groups. Anything you do can and will affect others. The fighters curb dangerous monsters, helping the miners get their hands on good ores, which the crafters turn into good weapons for the fighters to fight monsters with. All of the players in that loop benefit from the buffs from entertainers, and the food made by chefs, using veggies grown by farmers, using hybrid plants bred and perfected by geneticists. Everyone is part of somebody else’s supply chain. Everyone provides something valuable that others need. Everything you sell is bought by other players, everything you buy has been made by another players.
To keep the wheels of the economy turning, nothing lasts forever. Items slowly loose durability, cannot be infinitely repaired, and will eventually break and need replacement. Instead of each server having it’s completely independent own economy - there’s just one big shared economy - as there are no separate servers. Instead of being split into servers, the economy has regional pricing - meaning that prices can vary from ingame system to system, depending on varying demand and supply. The size helps stabilize the economy, and make it more resistant to manipulation attempts - the distributed-ness helps smaller sellers find their niche, and stops larger sellers from dominating larger portions of the market. And those ingame star systems and planets are procedurally generated and can grow and shrink in number to fit the player populace and keep the player density balanced.
New planets will not only be generated when the player population grows - they will also occasionally get generated to replace older ones. Planets that have been mined bare, or lie unused by players, can disappear. The lore explanation for that is a collapse of a wormhole, cutting off travel to that system. Planets with player cities or player governments on them will be protected from this - but the exact mechanics are not known yet. New planets will come with a fresh batch of non-renewable resources, as well as renewables, and with some random attributes to both - similar to how ores in SWG could have varying stats. Ores will not respawn though - new planets are the only way to get new materials. But there might be ways to recycle old items, regaining some of the materials used in their original production.