Stars Reach (coop sandbox MMO video game)

The Game Room
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I’ve been following the development by Raph Koster of a sandbox style MMO for several years now. He was most famously lead designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies. His games are open world, focusing on character development through player interaction, rather than through grinding content for loot drops.

His new game is “Stars Reach”, being produced through his own company with venture-capital funding. It’s been in pre-alpha testing for the past half year. They’re now fundraising through Kickstarter, which I won’t directly link to as an advertisement. Lots of information there, but I’ll give mine own summary and review here.

Gameplay takes place on instances, each is a planet or asteroid belt. The environment is modifiable, similar to Minecraft, except with high-tech mining lasers. There are creatures that can be hunted or herded, and plants that can be harvested and sown. The basic gameplay loop is exploring and collecting.

The entire economy is player-driven. There’s a huge web of interlocking skills, with xp accumulated in each skill area independently. A single character can learn all the skills, but only a subset can be used at any particular time, with time-based restrictions on swapping skills. The second-order gameplay loop is refining and producing goods from gathered materials that will used to supply other characters with equipment.

The internal story of the game is that the galaxy was seeded with life by godlike aliens, who’ve since disappeared. But they’ve also left behind police robots that try to maintain nature. If a planet gets too environmentally degraded, it can be razed. The gameplay effect is that old planets are taken out of play, which permits the opening up of new fresh planets from time to time.

The actual gameplay is fun. Very natural movement, including running and climbing. There is flight, but that requires equipment I haven’t built yet. In Minecraft, I love just digging through the ground to find valuables, and mining in Stars Reach is just as satisfying. Combat is arcadey and fun. Some of the weapons have homing capability, usually at the cost of rate of fire. Crafting starts easy with snacks and med packs, but quickly has specialized ingredients that make it impossible to be self sufficient. Currently travel to space and others planets is done by teleporters, but there’ll be starships soonish.

I’ve had a lot of fun in the pre-alpha testing. I highly recommend anyone interested in sandbox games without pvp to take a look. Anyone else trying it out?

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I’m interested, but also a bit skeptical that they can pull this off… so many MMOs have come and gone, and this seems like a small enough, high-risk niche that I’d be worried about its survivability. The “property pass” model also makes it seem like either you pay every month or your structures disappear. Combined with the cosmetic MTX, I fear that this will lead to a small core group of dedicated whale players & guilds that end up controlling most of the economy and land, with casuals not having much to do. Combine that with randomly generated planets (like No Man’s Sky?), it sounds like the actual PvE gameplay would be rather shallow aside from the emergent social aspects, which depend on having a large and vibrant player base.

The game sounds enough like EverQuest Next/Landmark (dead), Life is Feudal (dead), Ashes of Creation, Once Human, Dune Awakening, and Second Life that I’d be worried about its ability to attract and retain a sustainable # of players to really populate a living, interactive world. Most of the successful theme-park style MMOs get around that by providing plenty of soloable content, which it doesn’t seem like there’ll be much of here.

Still, it looks interesting. The single-shard model might help. But SWG wasn’t exactly a success story — before the new combat system, it had a small dedicated core group of players, but not enough to sustain the game. It seems like the designer really wants to re-make that early SWG experience again. Maybe there are enough people out there who still want that and don’t care about the Star Wars IP. Let’s hope. I’d love to check it out a few months after release!

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Thanks for the reply (pun intended).

For me, it feels like Minecraft with social systems added on top and the ability to quickly travel between different worlds. Their business model is free to play, which means they pretty much have to monetize cosmetics. The pay to have your own plot of land is also necessary with free to play, otherwise you’ll have free accounts filling up the planets.

Whether exploring and exploiting the world is compelling gameplay is certainly subjective. I go back to play Minecraft regularly, but it’s not for everyone. They’ve hinted at some “external” threats that players need to organize against to keep their planets safe. I do like the idea that planets can be destroyed and that new planets will become available.