Something that I meant to dig into in that article, but totally forgot to, is that all this talk of forms of accessibility really needs to include a factor that has hugely affected the development of MMOs over the years: the time commitment.
We have three big pillars, each of which decomposes down into a series of goals — three each — and then those provide a host of more specific design rules or guidelines that the game has to follow. It’s core to how we manage a large complex project like this, trying to keep everyone aligned towards the same goals.
It still isn’t always successful. It’s super easy to forget to refer back to them. For a while, we even had the requirement that if you were working on a design document, you had to look up the various design vision statements and paste them in at the top of the doc, in order to force you to have them top of mind.
Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.
The Living World of Stars Reach
As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.
In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.
It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.
Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.
It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach.
This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back, to reinvent what an online world can be. I believe it does things that other games just can’t do.
The most alive game world ever made
Stars Reach uses simulation to a degree never seen in an MMO before. We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.
The whole game environment is modelled this way. It gives us not just those examples of gameplay, but many more. And it makes the whole experience that much more immersive, because everything acts like you expect. Melt the sand on the beach, and it becomes glass.
A video on the vision for the game
Humanity’s second chance
Long ago, an incredibly powerful alien civilization we know only as The Old Ones terraformed arms of our galaxy to make their Garden, a place where they could play with their superscience powers and their genetically engineered creations — such as us humans. They’re long gone now — and we should probably be pretty terrified of whatever chased ’em off.
But they left behind robot Servitors who roam the spaceways tending the planets and their various lifeforms. The Servitors fight off the tentacled spores of the hivemind Cornucopia that infects worlds. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds, each with their own unique gravity, minerals, creatures, landscapes, seasons, and even lengths of day.
Unfortunately, we humans have ruined our homeworlds. Nuclear winter. Peak oil. Climate change. Even global pandemics, if you can believe that one. And so it is that the Servitors have felt obliged to let us out of our cozy planets and into the wider Garden.
It’s our chance to do better this time.
STARS REACH announcement trailer
A classic sandbox world
This is a sandbox online world featuring all the things that players of those games love.
A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat
An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune
An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting
In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house
A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want
The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all
But we’re also doing a lot of new stuff. Like, we are aiming for sessions as short as five minutes. A fresh take on horizontal progression. Making an MMO with hardly any HUD!
We’re not done yet
We’re announcing today, but that’s because we are finally ready to decloak. It’s time to move from stealth to bringing the community along on the journey. We have a lot left to build, but we want to do it in public, with the help of the players that this game is for.
The graphics need a lot of work. Combat isn’t balanced. We haven’t fleshed out all the skill trees. But we’re going to start testing with players this summer. Because this game is for you, and you should be involved in the choices we make.
The stars are yours
You’re being given a galaxy. The question is, what will you make of it?
