Stars Reach is the upcoming sci-fi sandbox MMO from former Ultima design lead Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds. It’s a hugely ambitious project, integrating all sorts of simulatory tech to give players a ridiculous level of control over their environments. Complex terraforming of entire planets is possible here, and you never know what sorts of creatures you’ll have to fend off, or what material you’ll be able to farm to help make your millions. The sheer scale of proceduralism at play is impressive, and as Koster explains to Tom at Summer Game Fest, makes it almost impossible to accurately map through wikis.
“Simulation is one of the things computers are best at,” Koster notes. “This game is built on the premise that if we simulate more, it creates fresh, novel gameplay and allows player creativity, [and] emergent behavior. […] It’s way less wikiable; you can’t just look everything up on a strategy guide, because it’s procedural, it’s dynamic. We generate new statistics; even the creatures generate attack patterns on different planets. So, by building the entire game on that premise, we make a world that captures the feeling you had from the first time you played one of these, which is the sense of possibility, that sense of ‘I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.'”
Stars Reach utilizes a tech called cellular automata simulation to generate its environs, which Koster explains is essentially “a ton of really, really simple little AIs” working in tandem. In the segment Tom got to play, Koster says over 217 million of these ‘lil critters were running beneath the hood – wild.
Ultimately, Stars Reach wants to let player imagination run wild, and facilitate this as best as possible. Similarly to how other MMO economies, such as Old School Runescape’s, are run, Playable Worlds doesn’t want to get involved, letting supply and demand do its thing when it comes to evolving metas. Generally, this organic element is crucial to what makes the game tick, which explains why Koster and his team are doing their best to keep you out of the strategy guides and in the game itself.
“My experience in the past is that what happens is that fads sweep the game,” Koster says. “People start going, ‘oh, this is the new meta,’ and sometimes the meta has changed, even though nothing changed in the game. But I think that keeps the game fresh; having the meta evolve over time is healthy. What’s bad is when the game is mapped. When everything is mapped out on a wiki, that saps the life out. One of the things about this game is that all of these things are designed to make it strategy guide resistant.”
Koster offers a quick apology to Tom (our Guides Editor extraordinaire) for this, and the pair share a chuckle. His ethos is solid, though I think I’d feel hopelessly lost if I gave up using Old School’s wiki at this point. Then again, knowing nothing and relying on your fellow player for advice is considerably more immersive than opening up Opera, especially when they inevitably send you on a wild goose chase that turns out to be false info.
Maddening. Funny. Emergent. It’s in those moments where an MMO really reels you in. I still haven’t gotten over the time I got scammed by an ‘armor trimmer’ in OSRS, and that was 20 years ago. Yet, it’s one of my favorite anecdotes. Stars Reach enters early access this summer, and I’m eager to see what sorts of schemes players will fall foul of without a wiki to guide them, or if folks will genuinely be good to one-another.
Additional reporting from Summer Game Fest by Tom Hopkins.
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