What Is Stars Reach?

Stars Reach is a modern attempt to realise a very old dream: the creation of a living, breathing, online virtual world. It’s an MMORPG set in a vast science-fantasy world - a brand-new IP they developed in-house. The developers just recently announced, that it will enter Early Access this summer.

Before Everquest and World of Warcraft cemented the MMORPG formula as this reward-driven quest-based treadmill that the genre is known for today - MMO’s did chase greater ambitions. They wanted to be highly dynamic simulations, reacting to and shaped by collective player action, and driven by emergent behavior rather than scripted quest-chains and pre-written storylines.

The probably most famous examples of this old school of design thought are Ultima Online (UO) and Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Both games were flawed in their own ways, and definitely held back by the technical limitations of their time. But they also had at least some of that indescribable sandbox magic that only happens when the emergent gameplay that exists between players makes the game as a whole far greater than the sum of it’s parts.

And now the very same lead game designer behind both UO and SWG in their initial forms (pre-CU, etc.) - Raph Koster - has returned to finally make the game he’s been dreaming of, for more than 30 years now. Technology has finally caught up with what he wants to do, he says, and the game - he calls it Stars Reach.

The Galaxy

All the players will share the same galaxy, instead of being split up into different servers. Everyone can meet up, everyone will be part of the same global game economy - similar to how EvE online does it.

Planets will be procedurally generated, with new planets becoming discoverable and old planets getting phased out on a regular basis. And total number of available planets growing and shrinking with the amount of active players. But players will also be able to claim planets and thus protect them from getting phased out again - keeping them around for settling and governing them.

Every planet has a fully simulated ecology. The ground is deformable, you can dig into soil and rock, have to create actual mining tunnels to access ore veins, and can also terraform and modify the landscape - similar to Minecraft but way more dynamic. Water actually flows, rock can erode, plants and animals are affected by each other as well as the seasons and of course the players. Even things like soil pH, humidity and fertility are simulated - which will all be important to farming. Each planet’s resources, plant and animal loot will have it’s own, individual crafting stats. And players will be able to complete collections of scanning all the minerals/plants/animals and their stats for each single planet.

The developers say there will be thousands of such planets - and while they will not be arranged in a realistic fashion, they will have some sort of geographic distribution, which allows for regional markets to form, for price differences to form - allowing space truckers to make a profit from shipping large volumes of materials and goods around. And players will not be split up into separate servers - you can travel from any planet to any other planet in the galaxy, and meet up with anyone you want. Everyone is part of the same shared galaxy and the same shared game economy.

Players will be able to build farms, houses, cities and public infrastrcuture on planets. And all player housing will be out in the open world - not instanced. The game does not make use of instancing in general. When a planet is completely overfilled with players, you’ll actually end up in a waiting queue when trying to land there. But generally the plan is to avoid too much centralization, and have things spread out rather. Read this devblog for more information on that.

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In a typical themepark treadmill, you pick a class that defines your combat-role and then maybe one or two optional crafting side-jobs on top of that. Then you just follow your onscreen quest compass while you level up and grow stronger vertically, until you hit max-level were it becomes a different game entirely. See my blog post “Endgame” for more on that topic.

Stars Reach does not have classes. It does not have levels either. Instead you can pick from a huge variety of professions, which do include but are absolutely not limited to combat roles. Crafting professions, social professions, farming, entertaining, trading, … - all of those are first class citizens, treated equal to combat ones. Not as side-activities to act mostly as timesinks. And you will probably be able to max out at least two of those, and still have some skill points left - but you can also mix and match as you see fit. And you never get locked in, as you will be able to kinda respec, probably as often as once a week.

We do not know the full list of professions yet, but here’s a collection of what has been either added to the game or teased and leaked elsewhere (with no claims of completeness):

• actor
• animal trainer (tame and train pets, including combat pets)
• architect (build houses and sell blueprints, craft and sell building pieces/components)
• armorer (craft and sell protective combat armor)
• assassin (stealth based combat role)
• berserker (combat role - probably damage dealer)
• botanist (probably similar to geneticist - but for plants)
• cartographer (survey planets and sell maps and detected locations of ore veins etc.)
• chef (cook meals, sell consumable, longer-lasting buffs)
• civil engineer (terraform planets, build roads and public infrastructure)
• combat engineer (turrets, drones, robots, etc.)
• criminal (smuggling, etc.)
• dancer
• defender (combat tank)
• engineer
• farmer (grow and harvest plants, might include animal husbandry as well)
• geneticist (probably collect creature DNA and bioengineer new variants of combat and non-combat pets)
• herbalist (gather wild plants, craft and sell healing/buffing consumables)
• journalist
• logisitics (might be space trucker stuff - fly between planets, buy low, sell high)
• machinist
• medic (provide combat healing and probably some short-term buffs)
• merchant (might be vendor- and advertising related benefits)
• miner (dig ore and minerals out of the ground, and probably refine them)
• mineralogist (prospector, scan for minerals, detect their stats, etc.)
• musician
• pilot (steer all kinds of vehicles - both on ground and in space)
• politician (form and manage cities, planetary governments and guilds)
• pharmacologist
• ranger (improved terrain navigation, forward camps for healing and buffing, etc.)
• skirmisher (combat role - might be damage dealer and/or melee oriented)
• survivalist (resist environmental effects, reduce fall damage, resist heat + cold + poison)
• tactician (support combat role, probably group and crowd control oriented)
• tailor (craft and sell stylish clothing, create fashion)
• toolmaker (craft tools and workbenches)
• weaponsmith (craft and sell ranged and melee weapons)
• writer
• xenobiologist (decipher alien languages, hunting, fishing, husbandry)

Now, many of these are still work in progress, and might still undergo changes - but we can already see that the professions are going to cover a wide breadth of many different, and quite diverse options. Much more so, than you’d ever find in your typical themepark, where you get to choose between what basically are just different flavors of tank, damage dealer and healer - and nothing else.

All of these professions will play a role in the economy, and will be able to offer something (be it goods or services), that other players will pay for. In a game where everything is playermade, and you can get barely any items from NPC vendors (and those you can aren’t good) - every player becomes a part of large web of deeply interconnected supply lines. Even when playing completely solo - the things you sell to the vendor shop are still gonna be used by other players - and the things you buy from the vendor shop have been provided by other players. And it’s all been balanced to avoid large guilds growing dominant in any space. To prevent monopolies.

Development And Funding Status

Founded in 2019, the developer studio - Playable Worlds - had no intention of ever doing a Kickstarter or entering Early Access. They did several investment rounds (as is usual for a start-up) and maybe were hoping to later be able to accrue even more investment money, or secure a publishing contract - in order to scale up and increase the headcount of the studio.

It worked well at first - and their initial funding allowed them to build their technology stack, and prototype a proof of concept to show that their ambitious innnovations were indeed feasible and that they were able to pull it off. This is a hugely ambitious project after all. Going the single-server route is not something many games do, and the planet simulation they are running is like nothing I have ever seen before. But developing something as innnovative and ambitious as this, takes some time.

And you know what happened then: studio closures everywhere, project cancellations left and right, lay-offs by the thousands. The gaming industry is going through a phase of contraction right now, and as a result investment money has dried up and publishing deals are impossible to come by. The route this project wanted to take, has been closed off.

That’s why they had to do a Kickstarter. To proof to their investors that there was a market, that there was a paying audience, that this project was worth continued funding. And it worked and bought them more time - but it definitely wasn’t that huge windfall that would allow them to scale up and increase the headcount. This still is a roughly 20 person development studio. That’s tiny, for the scope of the project they are taking on here. For comparison: the development team behind SWTOR was over 600 people strong, during the same phase of development. Twenty people is nothing for an MMO-sized project. And this is a true, full-scale MMO project - not one of those MMOlites that seem more common these days.

This developer is so much more like a scrappy, lean indie studio, than you would ever think, if you look at how they present themselves. Anyway - that additional time that the Kickstarter bought them, seems to now be running out as well. And that’s why they have to enter Early Access now, whether they want to or not. I’m convinced that if they had the option, if they could afford it, they’d prefer to skip EA. It is a risky thing to do after all.

Because, we all know from SteamSpy back when it still worked - that the spike of attention and interest you get from launching into Early Access, does replace, or is split off from your main launch. You don’t get a full second spike - you only can shift that one spike around, or split it up into two smaller ones. And that means, that some people will try the Early Access, not like it because the game’s too incomplete - and then never return to give it a second chance when it finally is complete. Especially since the game is going to have another complete wipe for final release.

That early money you get during EA to help fund the remainder of development is like a loan you take out of your launch. You’ll be paying that back with heavy dividends. This is expensive money. It is a gamble that could potentially break the project.

Is The Game Ready For Early Access?

According to the developers it is absolutely NOT ready yet in it’s current form. And that is an assessment that everyone I know seems to fully agree with. But the developers are confident that they can get it ready, by the end of summer.

Early Access is Steam’s answer to crowdfunding - and it is meant to be a tool that allows developers to get pre-sales on a still unfinished game (still in alpha), to help them fund the remainder of development. But while this well accepted for indie games - big, publisher funded AAA projects use EA as a paid beta instead. And to a siginificant part of the mainstream audience - that’s the only acceptable way to do EA.

Stars Reach is not doing a paid beta. This game is going to enter Early Access in an alpha-state, and is going to need the EA income to fund the rest of development. And that means, for those people who only accept beta-state games in EA, it will simply not be ready enough, no matter what.

But even for people who understand that this is an alpha-state game, and who know how much of a scrappy indie-like studio the developers are - the timeline of going into Early Access this summer, does still seem ambitious. Because, this is a type of game, for which you cannot simply do a vertical slice. A social sandbox MMORPG like this, only comes together, when the economy starts working. And that requires all the different parts of the economy, to connect to each other seamlessly. Without that connective tissue - it might end up feeling more like a collection of disparate survival/crafting minigames, none of which seem particularly worthwhile doing. That’s because how it integrates with everything else and the wider economy is the main reason that makes something worthwhile doing. There are no skinner-box reward schemes here.

There are already plenty of game systems to be found in the current testing version. But none of these are yet anywhere near their planned final form - and there aren’t much ongoing loops yet. There’s still a lot of stuff that’s missing as well. And even if the developers can pull off adding a first draft of all of that - none of that will yet be anywhere near it’s final form either. It feels like getting all of that to a state where it’s fun to play and starts adding together, by the end of summer - will require a significantly faster pace of development than what we’ve seen so far.

By no means impossible - by my personal worry is, that there’s then not enough time left, not enough buffer, to also get all that new stuff to run smoothly, work well, and most crucially - be fun. A joy to play. Because that always might take another iteration or two. These developers are achieving incredible things with a very low headcount and a very low budget - but even they cannot cheat time itself.

In Conclusion

Stars Reach is a very ambitious game, that might be able to pull something off, that most others wouldn’t even dare to try. There is no telling yet if it will be able to actually pull it off - but this is not only the kind of ambition, but also the direction that the MMORPG genre needs to take, if we are to ever see a rennaisance. There are already signs that it might be able to recapture that elusive sandbox magic. And if there is any designer that feels qualified to tackle something like that - it’s Raph Koster, who previously designed Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

But it’s not smooth sailing. The current state of the industry makes external funding almost impossible to come by. Against the developers original plans, they had to go to Kickstarter - and now they have to go to Early Access. And their plans of scaling up haven’t realised either - they are still just 20 people strong. In a different timeline, they might have been able to get a publishing contract and secure all the funding they need. In our timeline though, they seem to be faced with unexpected additional challenges.

They are trying to bring some much needed innovation to the sandbox MMORPG genre, and I would really love to see them being given a fair shot. And I don’t feel it would be a fair shot, if they don’t get the chance to actually complete their vision for the game. Even if this is not exactly the style of game you prefer - it’s success could still open up opportunities for other games to be made, on of which might be more your jam. No matter what specific type of MMO you personally like - it would be great to see the genre gain more traction again, as a whole. Don’t you agree?

Stars Reach needs your support. The MMO genre needs your support.

I’ve already seen so much negativity, doom-saying and ill-informed and uncalled-for, completely non-constructive criticism, against not just Stars Reach but many other MMO projects as well - that we can speak of a clear signal being sent to market analysts, publishers and investors, that audiences simply do not want these games to be made at all. Is that really the message we want to be heard and acted on? Scepticism is perfectly fine - you’ll find plenty of that even from me, on this very blog - but keep it civil, keep it constructive. Thanks.

See you next time.