AMA is over! We thank Raph Koster for his time and responses! ​ Message from Raph: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/comment/lapuah9/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/comment/lapuah9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

In one of the interviews you had this to say about what size communities you are scoping the play areas for: "These areas, we are aiming for them to be village-sized. We are looking at zones about four kilometers on a side for planets. We'll see how big we get them; we want to push them as large as we can while preserving the idea that this is a game about a guild owning a planet, about a group of friends coming to own a planet, all of them connected in this galaxy. So they share an economy, trade, and all of that. but it isn't a game about the 10,000-person battle on a planet. It's a game about smaller groups and that is because we want to bring back that sense of community where people come to know each other, they know who their fellow planetary citizens, they establish those ties and friendships. It's not about building downtown Manhattan necessarily with millions of people crammed into a tiny space because that doesn't help build those sorts of friendships, and that is a really big part of what we are trying to do." Can you speak more about player cities? If I already can build a village in a survival game with my friends, why would we want to do the same thing in this game? What will be unique about building settlements? Can we build a city anywhere? Do we need to own the planet? Can other people move in near us? How big can they be?

Your village in your survival game isn't tied into a large scale economy with all the other villages. It doesn't have unique goods and resources that other villages can't provide. Your village probably has substantially the same environment, too. We aren't trying to reinvent everything. In fact, we make a point of not doing so. A LOT of this game is pulling in "greatest hits" from lots of games and putting them in this MMO context. Yes, you can build anywhere. That includes out in space. We'll talk more about how the rules around governing planets will work eventually, but not yet. Right now, planets are aimed at being a few kilometers on a side. The Servitors have placed a force field bubble around the area they are letting humans settle, in order to preserve the planetary ecologies. From a gameplay point of view, we feel that more but smaller areas let us do things like: \* more variation \* clustering players more \* clean dividing lines between rulesets from player governments (taxes, pvp systems, etc)

Does this mean you won't be able to circumnavigate a planet by traveling in one direction (on foot or in flight/vehicle) for a while? If not, is that something the team wants in the future?

I read it more like old school SWG: you can place your house anywhere in a zoned area, but there are areas that you can explore that are off-limits.

> Your village in your survival game isn't tied into a large scale economy with all the other villages. It doesn't have unique goods and resources that other villages can't provide. Your village probably has substantially the same environment, too. So basically, if the game isn't popular, it's DOA? Sounds like so much hinges on the community aspect that if your playerbase isn't large enough to sustain a large scale economy, with many unique and intersting cities/governments/planets/whatever, then you're severely limited to what you can do, which is going to cause people to bounce. What if I *can't* get unique resources from other "villages" because the playerbase isn't big enough? Is it fun or even possible to gather them myself?

>> Your village in your survival game isn't tied into a large scale economy with all the other villages. It doesn't have unique goods and resources that other villages can't provide. Your village probably has substantially the same environment, too. > >So basically, if the game isn't popular, it's DOA? Multiple small villages connected together and you drew that conclusion? This description sounds *highly* scalable, from just a small few 'villages', up to a massive community of thousands. >What if I *can't* get unique resources from other "villages" because the playerbase isn't big enough? You could just.. not have access to that type of resource. It'll be okay

Hey Raph, big fan of your past work. UO was a transformative experience in my childhood and I loved SWG. I'm excited by a lot of the ideas you have for this game, but I'm having a hard time with the visual tone, for lack of a better phrase? It strikes me as overly positive and like the target audience is children, not adults? This is especially weird for a sci-fi setting, as in my personal opinion harder sci-fi is more interesting than, say, galaxy quest. Was this intentional, or are you still figuring this out?

It was intentional, but we're not done yet, either. Long way to go on visuals still. For better or worse, MMOs cost a lot to make. Graphics, specifically realistic graphics, are the most expensive part of it. The cost of games has been going up 10x every decade, and it's not sustainable. It is also a higher PC requirement, and limits your audience. So the first thing is, we choose gameplay over graphics, any day of the week. That said, it still has to look good, of course. We are aiming for graphics akin to Genshin Impact, Breath of the Wild, etc. It's a broadly appealing style that maximizes audience (frankly, a large chunk of the audience is turned off by hyperrealistic graphics. It "codes" as being for hardcore players only, typically male players). As far as the sci fi angle... the mandate was "do to sci fi what WoW did to fantasy." A huge huge part of WoW's success was its stylization, and people also complained that it was cartoony and kiddy at the time. So... I hear you, but there are tradeoffs there. Every day I come to Reddit, or other game forums, and I see posts about how AAA sucks, and we need to reward indies with more gameplay and less emphasis on realistic high end graphics. :) You probably see them too. So... we DO have a lot of work to do on it yet. And we will be doing that work openly, sharing with the community.

For what it's worth your visuals look attractive to me and for someone who's into fashion they look designed in a way that should make churning out cosmetics easier. I like it. >(frankly, a large chunk of the audience is turned off by hyperrealistic graphics. It "codes" as being for hardcore players only, typically male players). As a woman I wanted to like New World and it wasn't the graphics that turned me off but the complete and total lack of feminine content within it. There were like 2 whole dresses in the entire game at launch and the rest was edgyboi shadow the hedgehog and hyper masc stuff. It wasn't so much the realistic looks that turned me off but a feeling that the the entire devteam were probably men making things they visually liked. There is space for [feminine content in high fantasy](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/636/614/dc8.jpg).

I often tell people "you cannot launch an MMO without a wedding dress."

I totally get all of that, makes a lot of sense. Maybe a better way to frame it would be looking at a game like Valheim. It’s certainly got some of those BOTW vibes you mentioned, but it also feels a bit more adult at the same time? I don’t think you necessarily need hyper realism to convey that something is aimed at adults. Honestly, it may have just been the mob that appeared a few times in the trailer that threw me off. It felt a bit silly, not dangerous or interesting. It sounds like visuals are still something you’re working out and completely agree that gameplay matters more. Thanks for the explanation!

The visuals could be fine but the characters look like fortnite/starlight valley. At least SWTOR managed to pull off the cartoon look with some decent Star Wars looks. This just looks like it’s made for pre teens

I agree here. I know visuals aren't everything - gameplay, system mechanics, interactivity, etc. should all have precedence over the looks of the game. That said, I'm pretty put off by the "Fortnite-esque" graphics of what they've shown so far. I'm hoping it's all just placeholder until they flesh out the visual identity of the game, but as is, it looks to cater more to a younger audience than what they've claimed to be shooting for (old-school MMO for more seasoned players).

I used to not be a big fan of it, but palworld has really turned me around on it. I genuinely enjoy palworlds graphics now, especially the visually impressive attacks.

What are the best ideas you think Star Wars Galaxies had that you really want to iterate on and what are the ideas you think didn't work so well? Bonus question, are there are ideas you think didn't work well in SWG but could work today with tighter design and modern tech?

For me, the signature elements of SWG that I most cherish were the economy, the player towns, the pretty free progression, the social professions, and the faction system. Combat in SWG was a total mess, imho.

I started my MMO journey with EQ, EQOA, and SWG. Those games were all time sinks, and the genre has shifted away from that in the decades since, respecting player time more with “solo friendly features” but at the expense of community. How are you designing Stars Reach to reintroduce the community to MMORPG while still respecting the shift in player sentiment?

One of our pillars is "have fun in a five minute session." So for example -- you can download your mind into a remote clone to join your friends on a quick arcadey combat session, then rewind to where you were and carry on or log out. You can't transport goods that way, but we don't want to ever get in the way of you playing with your friends. Similarly, we avoid power creep on characters -- it's horizontal progression not vertical -- so that you and your friends don't "outlevel" each other, and we also don't need to put in "design hacks" like sidekicking/mentoring/level scaling/etc etc etc. We use soft grouping, to get rid of needing the step of doing handshakes and key exchanges to get benefits from playing with other players. Just playing near each other helps each other out. There are still a LOT of benefits to playing in groups, building parties with coordinated loadouts of skills, and so on. And of course, there's a big emphasis on asynchronous interdependence. It's a player-driven economy. Services and goods are just about all provided by other players. So the many ways to play are tied together by the economy, and that's a very MMO feeling, but it doesn't get in the way of a quick play session.

Your design ideals of horizontal progression and asynchronous interdependence are the elements of modern MMOs that keep me coming back. Glad to hear these are principles you are exploring. Wishing you and the team well as you continue this endeavor!

Howdy Ralph, my question is about the claim - "*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." This sound a lot like the NMS pre-launch hype of "We redid the periodic table so that light refracts through atmospheres depending on the air quality and elements present" Can you explain at all how your materials tech works? Water evaporating, irrigating deserts etc?

Sure. It isn't actually pure cellular automata anymore, in the actual implementation, but that's a good analogy. This each cell holding quantities of specific materials (not "one block one unit"), with each of those going to lookup tables for their melt point, boil point, adhesion values, flow rates foe each of the states, etc. Then add in the ability for them to have chemical reactions with one another. We track temperature diffusion through the world. We track humidity by aggregating smaller cells to determine larger area humidities. Then we make all the rendering be dynamic based on what the sim is telling us. The plants turn brown, the dirt gets cracks, etc.

From a fan/player perspective what is next? Slow trickle of info? Player testing? Beta?

We plan to start limited testing this summer. We want to move to open development now. So we will be posting regular updates, discussing features with players and updating designs based on feedback, and so on.

Hi Raph, congrats on the announce and thanks for the AMA. 1. Are there going to be creatures made with procedural generation? 2. Is it going to be one character slot per account? 3. Are the spaceships going to be airplanes in space or something more realistic? 4. I understand the vision of a single shardless server, but is there a possibility of having one server per major geographical region? Like how Albion Online started with NA only but later expanded to Asia and EU. Playing on high ping sucks. :(

1. won't say yet 2. probably not feasible in these days of f2p etc. 3. Spaceflight is already more realistic than that. We debated it a lot though! 4. It's quite possible that we may have to do territory based things. But that's a problem for later. :)

Raph, As someone who is a fan of your previous work but burned out/disillusioned with MMOs that have been in development for ages and end up not delivering on their promises, I'm curious to know how much of what you've expressed as the vision for the game you realistically see being able to deliver on. Time and time again we see games stuck in development hell due to feature creep and when reality hits they have to scale back to something not reflective of the initial mission statement at all. Do you feel confident that you and your team will be able to be the exception to the rule?

We waited to announce until we could show the less plausible promises working. You can see the living world right now, and if you had access, you could play it right now. (Plenty more to do on it, but we can "see the end from here" if you know what I mean). I can't promise the moon and then deliver it, for sure. That's why you see me in these responses saying "not talking about that more yet."

Understood. Hoping for the best, just wish more studios were willing to UNDERpromise and OVERdeliver rather than the other way around. Or even just be realistic about what the product will be. You can always build on a good foundation that is relatively toned-down in scope (from a programming perspective that's not entirely accurate but you get the point), but it seems like what we see more often is a lack of focus and as a result, a poorly executed final product. Best of luck sir! I've signed up for testing and will be keeping an eye out.

Hey Raph! We've seen a lot of "if you build it they will come" type games, like Crayta, Core, and more recently Everywhere. How does Stars Reach differ in it's approach, and how will you attract an initial audience before there's a critical mass of player content?

Oh, these are not empty worlds. We have the ability to spawn handcrafted content in them, and we will. There is a big ol' progression system. There are sets to collect -- collecting is a huge feature set in the game. It's not just empty worlds with modifiable terrain.

Through everything you and your team has been working on, what would you say is your single favorite feature you want implemented in Stars Reach?

Well, the immersiveness of the living world is kind of the core feature that unlocks everything else. But my favorite feature, one we haven't really talked about, is deciphering alien languages. :)

Is the deciphering going to be similar to NMS, where you’re learning single words at a time or will it be more dynamic than that?

Well, we haven't talked about it because we want to save it back for later. :D It doesn't exist yet! We are trying to talk mostly about things that already exist in the game builds today, and less about future promises. We know that the mmorpg audience has been burned over and over so we we held off on revealing until we could show the wilder ideas actually working.

I’m a huge Ultima Online fan - thank you so much for the time and energy you put into it to give us a world that became an almost tangibly real, inspiring place for many of us. What would you say are the main traits that make Stars Reach a spiritual sequel to UO?

The original conception of UO was as an alternate living world. We have that same philosophy. You might remember the "infamous dragon example" where creatures hunted each other, and we hoped that would generate quests, etc. Well, it didn't work, and a big part of why is the CPU power we had available back then. We have a lot more CPU today. So we can actually run SIms-style AI for every creature. In fact, even the real world science behind modeling this stuff is much better understood. But we are also pragmatic about it. Accurate simulation isn't the point. Fun gameplay is. So we have a lot of backstops and unrealistic things that are less lofty but more directly fun. A key thing that carries through from UO is that everything knows what it is made of, and that provides that substrate of consistency to the game.

Hi Ralph, big fan of your blog. Excited to see where you go with this. Can you share who your target audience is for this game? Also, are you working with any publishers or other studios in the industry?

We are aiming for adult gamers, with a reasonable gender split (we want to be broadly appealing). Our market research is telling us that there's a sizable audience of MMORPG and sandbox players who are interested in a game like this. We are partners with several folks on the technology side: AWS, Didimo for avatars, Okteto for backend stuff, etc. No publishers yet.

Hi Raph! I have two questions: 1. You mentioned a free-to-play model with an optional subscription and a cosmetics shop. How will the cosmetics shop work in a sandbox game? It seems like there are two options: account-bound items, which I’m not a fan of in a sandbox game, or a kind of pay-to-win model where you can sell cosmetics bought with real money for in-game currency. Can you elaborate on this? 2. What benefits would the optional subscription offer?

We aren't talking too much about this stuff yet, because we fully expect it to change based on player response. I'll just say that there can be things we provide on the cosmetics shop, like ingredients for colorways, that don't necessarily compete directly with the in game economy.

Hey Raph, thank you for taking the time to do this AMA 🤘. Player housing in MMOs has always been a difficult feature to implement well. I'm super excited to hear about it being in Stars Reach. Can you elaborate on how things like "zoning" will work on the planets? Will it be a free for all system anyone can build anywhere? Will Guilds be able to reserve or restrict areas so that non-members can't build within the guilds zone? Will planets be large enough to house multiple groups of player cities?

I will save some of this for later reveals, if you don't mind. I will say, the planets are large enough for multiple areas to have cities.

Games made by the 'founding fathers' of the industry have a fraught history. Brad McQuaid's Pantheon comes to mind. Are you confident that you have the funding to bring your vision to market within a reasonable amount of time?

This is one of those awkward questions. The obvious answer is "I am not them, and Brad (RIP) is not Richard, and Richard is not Mark, and Mark is not..." You get the idea. Sure, all people with a "founding father" history. But they're all very different people, and they all make very different games, they all did very different things over time, and they all have very different financing, and so on. So I wince every time someone tries to lump us all together. Am I confident I have the funding to bring the entire vision to market? Game dev is full of unpredictabilities. We will need more money to get everything we want. We will do the best we can with the cash we have. It is a very very tough time in the industry right now. Much tougher than the audience realizes, i think. But we are also not asking you for any money right now.

Marketing and profitability are necessary evils for game development; How do you plan to keep those folks and their goals of spreadsheet management in check so they do not ruin the fun of the game?

I run the company. :) We are a design-led company. The REAL question you should be asking is "who stops you the crazy designer from blowing all the cash on impossible dreams?" :D

Love it. Thank you.

Best question yet! The key here is to understand the equal realities of what it costs to both build and maintain experiences with this scope. Sounds like Koster and team have all been there at least a few times already! 💖

One of the things I think is unique about MMOs (and what I love about them) is the concept of prestige. in SWG, you could simply look at other players and know that they've put in some work on their character, being in awe at the sight of a jedi for example.. Same thing for early WoW (not so much the case anymore). I read that you will have a cosmetic cash shop. I understand y'all need to make money, of course. But my fear is that cosmetic shops cheapen the prestige that players accrue through their efforts. Can you address that?

I am personally a big fan of WYSIWYG on avatars, and not a big fan of transmog. But I recognize that tastes have changed in the market on this, and it is something I expect us to discuss with the community.

You can't please everyone, so I'm curious how grounded the vision is for the game. If you pick action combat or tab targeting for example, somebody is going to be upset. Same with PvP vs PvE focus. Which is why I want to ask: Who would you say the game is NOT for?

We actually have lists of these things on our internal wiki! It's not for people who want tons of storyline. It's not for people who want super realistic graphics. It's not for people who want to grief. It's not for people who just seek out increased power-numbers-go-up. We focus much more on collecting as a core advancement mechanic.

If the world is fully deformable, how do you prevent griefing?

[удалено]

Have you been outside lately? 💖 Just saying! But yes, seems pretty certain that will be measured in milliseconds!

I've always known Ultima Online and SWG as the gold standard for innovative MMOs and player interaction. All the crazy mechanics in UO like pickpocketing and the impossible to obtain Jedi status in SWG I've heard so much about. What would you say is a specific feature you have planned for Stars Reach that is similar to the above as something other MMOs are too afraid to try that encourages unique player interactions?

Probably the living world, maybe player governance? I mean, just look at the number of people in r/MMORPG who are already saying "it'll never work" -- plenty of folks are ready to say no to the innovation because of every failure state they predict. And that's fine, but I think we get past failure states by TRYING.

Hiya Raph! Will some kind of creature taming or handling be a possibility. I know the Creature Handler was one of your works in SWG. Pets are always popular of course, but being able to interact with them and have them work alongside you adds a whole new dimension to them. Really amped about this though. Thanks, Lantyssa.

It is definitely on the roadmap. We have a super crude version of it running already, but it doesn't do much yet. :)

SWGs entire pet system (before NGE) was absolutely incredible and my top 1 favorite pet system in any mmo of all time. I dearly miss my brackaset. Was super upset when nge forced me to choose whether I want it to be solely a mount or solely a combat pet. I really enjoyed how he felt like part of the world. I could have him set outside the cantina and wait for me to get my buffs, and then walk out and hop on. And do sweet tricks to make others jealous of my giant armored camel. Patrol paths were awesome too.

Just knowing you're thinking about it makes me happy, and the systems have to start somewhere!

How the combat will work? Action combat? Tab target? A hybrid model, or some other option?

It's action combat inspired by a variety of things: \* we take a bit of twin stick shooter DNA. You can run in one direction while firing in another. You have dodge rolls, etc. \* We also draw inspiration from more arcadey feel. We want it to be super accessible, not a giant confusing hotbar. So we reference stuff like Smash TV a lot. \* We also want it to be deep. So we look at MOBAs a lot for weapon variety and tradeoffs and the like. Avi, gameplay engineer on combat, has said that he wants the system flexible enough to make every attack in LoL possible for designers. \* But we know that a lot of MMO players are fans of tactical thinking and tab targeting and the like too! Weapons can be customized to have varying degrees of lock-on. There are tradeoffs there -- if you have tab lock on, then maybe in exchange for aim not being required, you have a tradeoff on firing pace, damage done, etc. You can actually see homing shots already in the videos we released.

Hey Raph, big fan of your work! From my experience with single-shard online worlds, it seems the core thing that delivers the most immersion is the ability to build player narratives that have real impact. This is the reason that nobody can really get very famous for being the first to complete, for example, a WoW raid on some shard (with few exceptions), but being the guy that started a giant space battle in Eve online can get you mentioned in a Kotaku article. The fact Stars Reach is single-shard is already a huge factor in its favor to acheiving this effect of the ability to build player-based narrative/lore, but a lot of the features that have been talked about so far focus a lot on more kinda physical simulation of the world (which definitely adds very strong factors for narrative flexibility and widens the class of "interesting things that can happen" by orders of magnitude over other MMOs!) **My question is, how important do you weigh this factor of the ability for player narratives to form in your design of the game thus far, and at what level do you currently see these stories playing out in the game in it's current trajectory?** (like, for example, in Eve, while some singular people get famous as heads of large groups or story lynchpins, I'd say the grand majority of the player-lore is focused at the corporation/empire level in these large scale wars, or heists of old. In contrast, a game like Rust, while obviously a weaker persistent world game in that it has many shards and they are only partially persistent on the order of weeks, the stories are almost always around individuals who gain notoriety)

There are a lot of angles here. For example, the fact that we can add and remove planets and space zones from the map on the fly means that there are a LOT of chances for "server firsts" and the like. We have even talked about letting explorers name the landmarks, for example (if we can moderate it, heh). If we get all the way to extensive PvP systems like that, then I think we have the chance for some of the same sorts of stories that you get from Eve. But I am not going to promise that right now, because we are focusing on PvE first.

How far do the building and terrain modification systems go? Are skyscrapers and a player-made Coruscant city possible? How about a player-made Mines of Moria?

You can literally flatten a planet to the bedrock, and drive all the plants and creatures extinct. Yes, you can build pretty tall buildings too. i think there are a few in some of the screenshots...

What systems are in place to prevent players from destroying every planet they come across?

Can you explain a little bit about the tools in-game that allows players to build? Is it prop based, or something else? In the videos, it looks like you're using voxels.

We use something a bit fancier than voxels. Each cubic meter knows how to flow, separate, fall, have quantity, react to heat, cold, change state of matter, etc. We do use a voxel renderer to then display all that. We ALSO have prop-based building.

From the videos, we get to see some blasters and ranged combat but no melee. Will there be melee combat like swords etc in the game?

Only if we can balance it well enough. The whole "bringing a knife to a gunfight" trope is a trope for a reason...

How can you even solve the issue on MMOs on hardcore players vs casual players in a hardcore pvp game? I feel like the fear of "losing" discourages many people to even try and compete such MMOs. And I'm not saying people who "no life" and play 24/7 shouldn't be on a whole other level, but the older I get and trying to design games, the more I think about some sort of AFK progression so you at least have some sense of progress. Of course there are many examples on how one would try solving this issue, but what is your opinion on it?

Some of this depends on how you measure "hardcore." If it's about time invested, one of our answers is to have a bunch of ways to progress while offline. For example, you earn offline progression in crafting when people use the stuff you crafted, not from just making widgets over and over. We also do a lot to reduce that sense of "losing." You can't get outleveled by friends, that's not how the progression system works. You can't gather all the recipes on the path to building a spaceship -- your recipe book has limited space. And so on.

Where does the RPG aspect of your MMORPG come into play? What roles can I choose between? Seems like just another multiplayer crafting game with no RPG aspect to it. Seems like everyone would basically be the same with no roles

We haven't released a comprehensive list yet, and won't for a bit, but we are looking at combat professions, scouting, crafting, merchanting, xenobiology, harvesting, social profesisons, and so on. The list in Galaxies is a pretty good indicator. Tons of roles.

The game's industry is moving towards a Games as Platforms approach. Fortnite and Roblox are leading the way in this regard, but many other platforms are trying to pull off something similar. A centralized place/ platform, where I have an avatar and I can access different games/ experiences using this one avatar. In essence, all of these otherwise non-related experiences are now "worlds" in a centralized "universe". When I hear the idea of Playable Worlds (in the plural) and all of the What Ifs you guys shared the past few days, it looks like to aim in a similar direction. Ghost's new MMORPG which Fantastic Pixel Castle is developing also seems to aim in a similar place. Now goes the question: this movement of the industry doesn't seem to align with what MMORPGs strived for: a Fantastic world that is CRAFTED for players to have a SHARED experience. The experiences on those platforms are not cohesive in the way MMORPGs are. Given all these considerations, WHAT ARE your Playable Worlds?

They are a classic sandbox MMO, with all the gameplay that implies, built on top of cool cloud-based simulation to make really dynamic worlds. We've posted lots of stuff on the underlying tech on the company blog; you're not at all wrong that underneath, this tech looks more like a platform. But we have always said the game comes first, and it's got to be a real game.

From what I'm hearing, it sounds like a procedurally generated sandbox metaverse that players can customize their planets like individual Minecraft servers. This seems like it can allow for player-created content in a theme of exploring the universe, rather than a curated world and story. Maybe there are crafted planets and stories, but sounds like less focus NPC-driven and developer-driven experiences like theme parks (which increasingly seem on rails these days). I could be totally wrong though. I hope Raph clarifies this!

> Given all these considerations, WHAT ARE your Playable Worlds? Sounds like platforms isn't what this is doing. These are sandbox planets with the absolute anarchy that is going to bring. For a games-as-platform approach you'd need to be able to lockdown the planet and prevent others from doing stuff with it so you can create a controlled environment for your minigame zone.

What do you think are the most notable difference in today's MMO's compared to early 2000 MMO's. What do you find are the biggest "lessons learned"?

The history of MMOs since the 2000s has been about layering on more and more developer control to maximize revenue. This has also made it much more expensive to compete. To my mind, the most interesting things in "MMOs" since then have been One Hour One Life, Minecraft, Rust/DayZ, Realm of the Mad God... I am personally very tired of class-and-level systems.

Is each planet actually unique and not a starfield mislead. And sounds like you are sort of going for something similar to Albion online just way more interactive, thought?

They are each actually unique. We have a really cool proc gen system. Basically, level designers can create templates for data like the preferred slope of mountains, width of canyons, etc. We call these topographies. Think of it like authoring the "rules" to generate areas like Bolivian salt flats, or the Grand Canyon, or those cool mountains in China, or whatever. Then for a given world, we grab some of these, not all, and blend them. And in the process, we place mineral veins underground, carve caves, drop points of interest in, etc. And we select the gravity, the leangth of the year and impact of the seasons, etc. We had a cool desert topography with awesome caves. I wanted to go take more video exploring there... but we had pressed the button again, and now it was a completely different desert world. Its caves were not as cool :( And that is fine -- it may well have been much more valuable to mine even though it was less interesting to map.

Thank you for the response have a great day

Eve sees giant guilds able to swing a lot of power, both economic and political. SWG saw Crafting guilds corner the market on the best resources and therefore combat gear. This always left the average player in the dust. Unable to meaningfully connect with your world, and better off in a single player game than partaking in the mmo experience. Or scrambling and spending a LOT Of time in the world in unhealthy ways to generate resources or ability to partake. So Raph - How are you planning to prevent the Guilds-dominate-the-Economy and "One Mega Guild" rules it all THIS time?

A huge part of our economic design is about turnover. I did a blog post about this long ago you might find interesting: [https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/22/31098/](https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/22/31098/)

A lot of games with player made structures struggle with textures. I've seen giant castles built in voxel games, but on the flat surfaces the textures stretch and repeat, really standing out from the rest of the game world. What causes this kind of thing? Do you anticipate it being an issue in Star's Reach?

As a dev, I can tell you it is hard to avoid this sort of thing the larger the surface gets. We will do what we can. :)

Given the cloud based, server side control of this single shard world, how will having a stronger or weaker CPU and GPU play into the performance of this game? With other voxel based games like Minecraft having such a heavy burden on hardware, I'd love to hear how this experience may differ.

We still render the game on your local client. We are not pixel streaming like GeForce Now or Stadia. So client perf will still have dependencies on your local hardware. But we do the heavy lifting for a lot of the game using cloud-based hardware. Running the full scale world sim locally would be a big ask for many computers.

Can you seamlessly go from planet to space? And what sort of size will the planets be if so?

We are intentionally not a seamless world. Having partitioned zones lets us do: \* an ever changing map where planets can be discovered and can go away, wormholes can collapse, etc \* worlds that are actually consumable -- mine out all the gold, it's GONE. Pave the planet over and turn it into a shopping mall. \* segmenting player control of areas on really bright lines for things like PvP rulesets \* cheaper operating costs since we can bubble zones up and down really easily in the cloud

I saw people flying, not in space ships but the actual person. Is this a skill, a flight suit, something else? Would it be something you can just "do" or something that needs to be learned and mastered?

Right now, it's gear-dependent on the ground, and automatic in space. That could change.

Raph I’m so excited to see the game announced. I’ve been craving a new simulations virtual world. I’m a huge fan of your blog. It seems like your game is going to be set for a niche audience, and it seems like the scope and technology behind the game is… expensive? Am I wrong? Can you say anything about your plans for monetization or continued funding of development in the meantime?

Our market research shows the audience for this is the opposite of niche. :D

I couldn’t be more happy to be wrong. Good luck with the project! I’m really looking forward to Stars Reach!

I have heard a couple comments that imply or state this will be niche. While few, i too feel there are important unknowns that very much need to be considered. On the other hand, many of these features feel like they vastly broaden the potential audience? Very curious to watch how this develops!

Will this be on a Mac & Xbox or just windows? I’m a Mac & Xbox mmo user and I was just wondering about the future for that

Right now, it's Windows PC. But we have been approaching it from the get go assuming controllers and even touchscreen controls someday.

How do you plan to deal with trolls/griefers and players who just wanna ruin the game experience? Sandbox is nice, but some people just enjoy ruining other people joy. I'm not taking about stealing, killing and such, which is kinda expected in a normal PvP gameplay, I'm talking about creating a huge create/hole so others players can pass, block houses with terraformation, and so on.

This is where players governing planets really matters. The government of a planet can set what sorts of abilities people who live there, and people who visit, have on a given world.

On that topic, you've mentioned that solo players aren't going to be able to govern a planet, which seems fair. What happens though when a player settles somewhere that another group later becomes the government of? If the government changes the rules of what's allowed to something that first player doesn't want, are they just SOL and need to move to a new planet? Will it be easy for them to bring all their buildings and stuff along?

What would stop a few powerful guilds from dividing the galaxy among themselves and effectively excluding non-aligned players from doing anything there?

this gives me new world PTSD

Yeah, I think any game with territory control aspects will eventually devolve into that. Especially if there are no formal factions, which means that top guilds can create an informal alliance, where they agree to not actively shake the status quo and will join forces to destroy any serious new challenger. I have a feeling that for this kind of system to work, you need a powerful NPC faction that can effectively break stalemates and challenge even the most powerful player alliance.

Its happened in literally every game ive ever played that has mechanics like this. Hell, it happened in Ark before they even had mechanics like this.. the megaclans just banded together and started griefwiping everyone who didn’t obey their bullshit off the servers.

Are those governments going to be democratic, like the players living on the planet voting for them, or will the guild that wins in pvp be the absolute monarchs of them?

Don't you think there will be dead planets right from the start if that's the case? Not saying that's not intended

Hey again, Raph! =\] Regarding the creation of a voxel-based MMO, how does the team plan to tackle the technical challenges/limitations faced by not-that-old, comparable games like Dual Universe, or the "fun factor" apparently missing from EQNext? The design choice to allow a completely manipulatable voxel-based world comes with challenges that other titles have failed to meet, eclipsing the otherwise good aspects of those games. Can you speak to your team's approach to overcoming these challenges? Thank you!

I don't know enough about what got EQN in trouble on that front, nor about how Dual Universe works. But we are intentionally being less ambitious in key ways. We are not doing giant worlds. We are not doing a seamless galaxy. We are not doing \*everything\* made of voxels (in fact, technically, we don't use voxels at all).

Hi Raph! I'm super excited for Stars Reach, and can't wait to get that test invite! 😉 Can you please give an overview of the data and networking architecture and technology so that we can understand what's possible from a practical perspective of scale, community, and "discovery" gameplay experience. You've mentioned that things will be discovered- and I wonder how this may get around our inhibit data mining meta. Additionally, I'm curious about the metaversal infrastructure, and how it relates to different players. Thank you

We have posted some of this in blogs on the Playable Worlds website. Think of it this way, which is \*inaccurate\* but a good mental model: \* a single server process handles a zone (not really, but go with me here) \* you can bubble it up or shut it down based on traffic \* you hyperlink between them to build a galaxy \* each manages its own persistence \* central DB manages global state for things that travel between them \* assets stream down to clients like they do on the web, and go into cache like on the web, and we can clear the cache or cap it, like the web, and don't need to patch to deliver them \* most all gameplay is in softcode on the server, so we can update it on the fly

Where do I sign up?! I loved UO, and anything which can scratch that itch is fine with me :)

Right here! [https://linktr.ee/starsreach](https://linktr.ee/starsreach)

Starsreach.com has a pink button you can register.

There have been thousands of MMOs made over the past three decades. Most of these have **a percentage** of the amount of design specificity that you claim to want in your new title (knowing the humidity of every unit of air, having every creature have a personality, etc.). Do you think adding all of this is really going to appeal to the core MMO gamer; the casual, the one who keeps the game feeling alive? If not, how are you ever going to make the world feel populated (i.e. "massively multiplayer") when you're already splitting the playerbase up among such a massive variety of planets? Do you think people have been asking for most of these features, or are you simply designing around what *you* want, without admitting you may be a bit out-of-touch? How are you possibly going to handle the graphics/art perspective (hell, and the QA) for the amount of custom animations that would be necessary for a game of this scale, considering 5(?) years into development the game, visually, looks awful?

I do think it will appeal, yeah! Most of it just "feels like the world is consistent." So it actually feels pretty accessible when you're playing it. But it adds a lot of gameplay. As far as splitting up the playerbase -- remember, it's a single connected galaxy. So that's sort of like asking if the playerbase is split up across different zones. Every planet has different environment, resources, and so on, so players will need to trade, explore, and so on between worlds. I do think that players have been dreaming about this for years. It's not just me. At this point, there hasn't been a sandboxy MMO for older players for many years. But hundreds of millions of people have grown up with Runescape and Minecraft. There's not a lot for them on the market right now. And I don't think that the idea of "have an alternate world to go visit" gets old. The game looks pre-alpha, for sure. But honestly, getting the visuals up to par is not even in the top five risks that the game has had. We will keep working on it. We know they are still quite janky. :D Solving rendering for some of the things the living world does has actually been very challenging. Videogame water is usually either a prop waterfall, a flat lake, or ocean waves. Having to actually represent what water does has taken us a lot of iteration, and we are pretty sure it will still take more!

> So that's sort of like asking if the playerbase is split up across different zones. But that's still a problem overall, because it basically creates a game that feels dead. World of Warcraft splits players between zones, and outside the major cities or where players need to congregate(for events or whatever else) the game is empty and feels lifeless. It's been a major complaint from the WoW playerbase for many, many years. >And I don't think that the idea of "have an alternate world to go visit" gets old. This is instantly refuted by games like Starfield. That game came with many of the same promises, and it made almost zero impact and came and went in a flash. I DO think the idea of having alternate worlds to visit gets old when they don't have anything interesting or exciting to actually visit FOR. Resources, landscapes, etc. have a very finite amount of "Wow this is cool" factor, once the novelty wears off, I personally find it difficult to want to take the time to explore mostly empty areas without something to make me go "oh damn, this is a new thing I can use" or something to that effect. As much as people hate the "play the game, get power, numbers get bigger" gameplay, it DOES drive engagement and gives people goals to work towards. > Every planet has different environment, resources, and so on, so players will need to trade, explore, and so on between worlds. This is a concern to me. The game hinges on it being popular enough that people engage with the high level gameplay of planets(it seems). If you don't have the population, then how will players trade? Something you said they will NEED to do? If the game isn't super populated and trading isn't easy, is it legitimately fun(or even possible) to do all of this solo, longterm? > At this point, there hasn't been a sandboxy MMO for older players for many years. I do feel like there is a reason for this. If this was super viable and achingly missed by a bunch of players, I think it would have been filled. There's a number of solo/multiplayer games that more or less do the same thing you are trying to do to some degree, but they aren't MMOs and don't have the costs associated with them, and they still struggle. This is wildly idealistic, but I do hope it works out. The MMO space needs some solid new, fun games.

> World of Warcraft splits players between zones, and outside the major cities or where players need to congregate(for events or whatever else) the game is empty and feels lifeless. It's been a major complaint from the WoW playerbase for many, many years. Part of why is that WoW uses a linear vertical progression system, so entire zones become obsolete. > I DO think the idea of having alternate worlds to visit gets old when they don't have anything interesting or exciting to actually visit FOR. Agreed, very strongly. :) > The game hinges on it being popular enough that people engage with the high level gameplay of planets(it seems). If you don't have the population, then how will players trade? Something you said they will NEED to do? If the game isn't super populated and trading isn't easy, is it legitimately fun to do all of this solo, longterm? All MMOs need a minimal population to function. One nice thing about our system is that \*the map doesn't stay put\*. We can add planets. Wormholes to space zones can collapse. Worlds get used up and abandoned. We can grow and shrink the map based on the playerbase size. > I do feel like there is a reason for this. If this was super viable and achingly missed by a bunch of players, I think it would have been filled. It was! Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Breath of the Wild... heck, even GTA Online. COD has crafting now, doesn't it? Sandboxes took over the world when people weren't looking. It's only in MMOs where people think that they have limited appeal. The features of sandboxes drive half the mobile game market too. People made fun of me for including dancing in SWG, back in the day. Today it's a key driver for Fortnite. Fashion gameplay -- having dynamic outfits in games in something that we pioneered specifically in SWG and UO before it. I've always said sandboxes are MORE broad audience than levelling-hack-n-slash games are.

When you said you wanted the experience to be something to make you smile does it mean that there won't be anything dark and/or gritty in the game or will there be some of that as well? I know a lot of players of these kinds of games particularly sci-fi tend to have a good amount of appreciation for horror. Will there being anything horror focused for those that like that sort of experience?

This is a post-colonial galaxy in which the Old Ones committed galactic-scale genocide, and now humans have managed to destroy their own homeworlds. It's one where sentient artificial life (the Servitors) are essentially still enslaved by masters who aren't even here anymore. There is a LOT of room for hefty, provocative, deep storytelling in the lore. But we do want this to be a game that is HOPEFUL. That sees ways past these disasters. The real world is grimdark enough. In my loftiest moments, I want this to be a lab for players to explore how we do better.

Hey Raph! Very excited for this. Will play tests be long running leading up to launch, or will they be limited short bursts?

You start with short bursts, then they gradually get longer until it's open all the time.

I really enjoyed playing a thief in Ultima online. Do you see this in your new game? Given the differences in context and player expectations - do you think any modifications would be needed for such a system in modern games?

This is the kind of thing that we could let a player government decide to allow. No promises though.

Will PVP be in-game and if so will it be full loot?

We have a lot of design work to do on PvP yet, and it's one of the things that we want to discuss carefully with the community. We are starting out by trying to get the PvE aspect right. Bear in mind that the living world means there are a lot of ways to grief others with world sim features -- like, what if you collapse a cliff on their house? Etc. So we want to make sure we solve all those edge cases before we add yet more ways for players to do harm to one another. :) But broadly speaking, the plan is that PvP is zone based. If you want your planet to be PvP, the planetary government players set up can vote for it to be that way.

What made you choose this specific childish art direction? I feel like on paper, your MMORPG ideas would attract the old school MMORPG audience, so a more mature art design would have made more sense. The current design looks like it's aimed at a much younger audience, especially the monsters.

1. It maximizes audience. Huge hits like Breath of the Wild, Genshin, Fortnite, etc, use a style like this. We hope to match their visual quality. We know we are not there. 2. Realistic graphics are a huge cost driver, and a huge reason why you haven't gotten more innovative games over the years. 3. Stylized is a LOT easier to make work with the dynamic environments we are doing. So we chose gameplay over graphics.

What would be the incentive to setting your own planet up as a PvP zone? Wouldn't everyone just make their home a safe zone when given the option?

Take a look at the rest of the thread, tons of people asking for the other. :D

Raph! I sadly did not play SWG in its prime. But i have played the Emulators and I gotta say.. BRAVO! You have no clue how much i appriciate you! Please do not give up on this project! We need something like SWG BACK! Thank you for creating such a Masterpiece. Looking forward to STARS REACH!!!!!

Awww, thanks. :)

For the building aspect of the game. Will there be blueprints or will everything be free build.

It's free build right now. We do have the ability to do blueprints as a skill, in our roadmap, but that's subject to change.

Is there a target date when we will get to test / play the game?

Limited testing this summer! And then, how fast we move through that depends on how the tests go, of course.

Hello Raph - thanks for doing this AMA. From what you've told us about the game so far, it's clear that the project is ambitious and a passion project for you and your team, and I do honestly wish it success. Unfortunately, we have seen similar ambitions stated before by big-name players in the industry - games such as Star Citizen and Camelot Unchained are the elephants in the room. Those projects, and others, have languished in a state of seemingly perpetual development for years. I'm sure you appreciate how many MMO fans have become extremely wary of flowery language. Even in your opening post, wording such as *"to a degree never seen in an MMO before"* and *"to reinvent what an online world can be"* are more like warning bells than they are things that would get us excited. How confident are you that Star's Reach will actually see a real, polished, full release? Is there anything you are doing as part of the development process to specifically avoid a situation similar to the games I mentioned?

I think I basically answered this over here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/comment/lappl8f/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/comment/lappl8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

Loved the unlockable hidden progression paths like jedi in SWG. What kind of class or classless system are you looking to make?

Much like SWG, with many of the same professions, but not with rigid "onion" trees.

How do you intend to simulate all of that physics? Will you use FEM/FVM methods? Will you have flexible bodies also simulated? Will you simulate material plasticity and/or failure? Are you using AI which was trained on FEM models (Physics Informed Neural Networks, PINN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed\_neural\_networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networks) ? That would greatly decrease compute time, so I could totally see that being in a video game. I honestly thought it was only a matter of time...

No, no, sort of, no. I described how it works elsewhere, but think of it more like a giant CA system run in a compute shader sort of way.

Can you talk more about the whole cloud infrastructure for this game? Anything special going on there since I saw it mentioned a lot in hiring tweets? Also the AI proc gen system

Given you've been on the Discord, you already know more than most. :D Really, other than answers I gave here today, the blog posts on the PW site are the best I can offer right now. :)

Hi Raph I have one simple question: How wars and player conflicts will happen and work in Stars Reach? How many players can join a war and will there be alliances between guilds? will there be territory warfare or planet invasions by players as attackers and defenders?

We will hold off on talking too much about PvP for now.

How would I get access to the beta?

There is a signup link on the website. [www.starsreach.com](http://www.starsreach.com)

hi raph! i am very curious about the model of professions you are planning and the kind of ecology of interconnected relationships you are envisioning (obviously familiar with your previous work) — especially what all you might have in mind that will new, and add new dimensions of novelty we didn't see in games like, say, swg :]

We are doing a very similar model to SWG for professions, but the ways in which you use them moment to moment is very different. You have a loadout of tools, and every profession is used via a tool. So you can only "be" five things at a time on a given adventure. You have to return to a camp or to town to change loadouts.

Have you played No Man's Sky?

Sure.

Hey everyone, thanks so much for all the questions. I am at the 90 minute mark, so I need to stop. But I do hang out and reply on r/MMORPG fairly regularly, so you will see me around for sure! Looking forward to sharing more about Stars Reach as time goes on.

Hey Raph! First off I'm really excited about this, especially after reading in another answer here that you're going to be adding xeno-/paleolinguistics. I love the fantasy and puzzle of games like Heaven's Vault and Chants of Sennaar, and hope this will be able to scratch the same itch! Two other things I love doing in space games: exploration and large-scale cargo hauling. And I also love spaceships. So here are my questions! 1. How minigame- or puzzle-like do you think linguistics will be? 2. Y'all already mentioned in the Q&A video that exploration will be a skill tree, but can you share a little about your current ideas for how exploration might look? 3. Fairly simple: will I be able to move huge quantities of material using large ships or otherwise? Will doing so be dangerous? 4. How does acquiring ships work? Do you buy pre-made ones from foundries, craft/trade specific ship models, build them freely from basic blocks, or maybe something else or several of the above? Looking forward to following the development!

Hi Ralph, I'm a big fan of Sandbox MMO's and believe they are the future of the MMORPG market. I really like a lot of the concepts that you trying to implement into this game. My only real question at this point is the art direction. Your previous games UO/Star Wars, both had rough around the edges, gritty design that brought a certain charm to the world. With what we have seen, it's certainly not bad, it's just not my style and quite off-putting for a lot of gamers like myself (That sort of Disney feeling if you understand me). I'm certainly not the type of person obsessed with graphics, but this feels like it leans towards young children. Is that style set in stone or is there a possibility of adjusting it as things progress? Many thanks. Edit: Looks like this question was already answered here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/im_raph_koster_creator_of_ultima_online_and_star/lapk43b/

Hi Raph \\o/ My questions are: Can we code with an ingame Language? Can we write Books and draw Comics? Can we create our own NPC's for the Space Flight School we want to build for our Clan, that Members can get a course in good movement? Can we create things and sell it? Like Space Ships? i have read we get a prop based building system, is it possible to create own props with a wide range of detailing a prop e.g. a Wall which have no window, and light lines can freely deform to get light lines and Windows? Can we freely change e.g. a simple steel pole into more mechanical with working parts like a extruder that grap something on the ground or put something on another machine. Working like a CAD-Software to give static props functions without limitation in physics?

Given the fact that there will be so many distant worlds, how do you envision some sort of fast travel system working? I would assume certain worlds will become more popular than others and become hubs, so to speak, how will players be able to find those, if they aren't already aware of them?

Hi Raph, thanks for the games! I think this looks great so far. If there's enough demand in the future are there any plans to allow for something like small scale player hosted worlds? Say someone wants to copy their character and a planet from Stars Reach and turn it into a small private server they can play and mod like a survival game... is that sort of thing even possible with the tech you've built? Thanks again, radical stuff, looking forward to more.

Raph! Love all your work in this industry, can’t wait to live in Stars Reach. With that said, do you guys have any plans to bring this to MacOS for those of us in the Apple walled garden?

Do you expect players to sit at the bottom of the economic pyramid and do all the tedium of labor? Or will players have the opportunity to transition into management? How large of a role will NPCs play in the game? How do you plan to manage engagement for your game when it is unrealistic to expect players to only have time for your game and ignore everything else competing for their interests? Are you realistically expecting players to log in daily or weekly for three months or more? How will you bring them back when they move on? Is an MMO the best fit for this game? Do you see your game innovating in the MMO genre to make the game world feel shared, believable, persistent, and populated without bringing all the limitations of ancient single-server MUD architecture? (sync issues, how mechanics have to be programmed and structured around server ticks, reliance on hotbar actions rather than the modern approach of natural context sensitive actions and player skill). If so, how do you plan to address cheating if more of the game is handled client-side? Have you ever played Oubliette/Moria/Avatar on PLATO? Mordor? Demise? What was your favorite part of that/those games?

Is it viable to create a single-player game with a complex virtual ecology in hope that the player will play with artificial inhabitants? Or would this be isomorphic to an average combat game because players only \*play\* with other humans? And an artificial agent is just a sum of game-related affordances.

Context for my question first: 1. I read that you are considering a Free 2 Play model. 2. I read that there is going to be some character specific limitation on the number of skills (Professions) that can be done at once. 3. I read that due to market considerations it will not be possible to limit accounts to one single character. 4. Given all of this, I think I could see myself just creating mule accounts, becoming self-sufficient, and only interacting with other players to show off my accomplishments. Basically the way the majority of MMORPGs are now. My question: What is the design strategy to encourage player interdependence (Prevent self-sufficiency) if there are no limitations to what an individual can do besides the minor inconvenience of registering another account?

Will you be able to crossdress, use makeup on male characters, have trans and non-binary characters, etc? Happy Pride month!

SWG remains one of my favorite games of all time. No question, just wanted to say I really enjoy your ideas, writing, and implementation and look forward to whatever you have coming next without reservation. Good luck, man. ends in question mark?

Is this the art style you are wanting?

Will there be thievery and lockpicking or door hacking abilities as well as ways to counter these like protection for doors and some sort of protection available for items.

How will you prevent the game from feeling desolate in areas with a low population of human players? Super cool concept and appreciate the community engagement!

How Starts Reach would handle creatures life cycle in the context of "living galaxy"? Would it be possible to tame and herd alien fauna instead of fighting it?

Is this gonna be pve oriented or pvp ? Both ? Is this a sandbox like ultima then ? What are the main features you plan to have on release ? Thanks!

There's been a lot of discussion here in the past few days about how mmos don't do much anymore to encourage social interaction. Things like downtime between pulls to recover hp/mp by sitting were the kinds of things discussed that folks enjoyed in the past causing spontaneous social interactions. What are you doing to encourage social interaction?

Good luck with the game, but not gonna lie looks too cartonish for my style, so I will be passing.

With such sandboxy games making up your project's DNA, is pvp a planned feature and how much of an impact would it have on gameplay? Also can I have a code when you hit the closed and/or public testing phases? I'll be your friend.

If things go well with this project, is there a vision to use your tech/business/game systems for other projects or is STARS REACH essentially THE PLATFORM for future projects?

I loved SWG for having a dancer and music classes that actually had gameplay effects. Will you be creating skills like that again in this one?

Hi Raph! Are you aware that Tibia, the MMORPG that came out in 1997 and is still alive today, started as a copy of Ultima VI?

Hey Raph, are there any plans to bring Stars Reach to apple silicon? I think the Mac OS world is in desperate need of some good MMOs. With the game being developed on Unity, I don’t think it would be too difficult to achieve. I am primarily a PC guy, but when I’m traveling I’d like to ability to continue progressing from my MacBook Pro, like I do currently with WoW.

does it make you feel like batman?

After skimming through a few questions and answers in this thread, this reminded me a bit of "Star Settlers" (mentioned in your book *Postmortems,* which I had to pull from the shelf to refresh my memory for a moment here*).* I am quite interested in seeing how this will go decades later with the freedom of seemingly self-publishing & today's technology. I don't think there was a question in here so... When's *the beta invites coming? :D*

No worries, we always blamed Smedley for the NGE.... now i loved SWG, and i feel like we have never seen a game with such a wide and deep crafting system. I loved the combination of harvesting, crafting and base building. And community building. And flying starships, it was such a great thing to be able to take a break and go flying. What are your favourite parts from SWG, that you would love to see again in an mmo?

Yeah I'm gonna wait and see for this one.

Do you ever revisit the world of MUDs and/or is there a piece of multiplayer game design that has stood the test of time from MUDs until now?

UO and SWG (before NGE) are my favorite MMOs of all time. I truly don't think there's been an mmo since these 2 that have had as much depth in their gameplay. One feature of both games I loved was being able to build your character with a skill system. In UO, I play a "disco-mage." I use discordance to debuff monsters so that they're less likely to successfully dispel my summons. In SWG, I played a droid engineer/master carbineer. So I could spend my days crafting droids but still be able to hit up PvE content with the boys. Will Stars Reach have this sort of freedom to build your character how you want, without shoehorning you into a specific role? Also, will there be droids/robots!?

I know you're emphasizing more horizontal progression than vertical, but there will be at least SOME vertical progression when it comes to weapons and armor, yes? I'm super not a fan of guild wars 2 gear system for example, where it feels like there is no "strong weapon" to make you feel a sense of power progression, like that feeling of being the biggest baddest krayt hunter in the galaxy.

I love what I am hearing. Like my parts are getting all tinglely. No question, just a plea. Please restore our collective faith in MMO's. No pressure :)

Played both UO and SWG as a teenager into my early 20s and just want to thank you and everyone responsible for the best gaming of my life!

These words mean so much to me 70% of my comments in this sub are complaining about how I can't play swg

What's your go to snack during a work day?