Raph Koster, a pivotal figure in MMO development with credits on titles like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, is leading the creation of Stars Reach, a new science-fiction MMO from developer Playable Worlds. The game promises a procedurally generated universe where every world operates as a sandbox with materials behaving according to real-world physics.
Koster explained that the depth of the simulation is central to the game's design. "All of the game gets richer, the more the simulation underneath is present," he stated. The team's primary goal is to establish a consistent physics simulation across all of Stars Reach's planets, ensuring that environmental interactions are predictable and intuitive for players. This approach aims to create a coherent world where the environment feels genuinely real, rather than a series of staged events.
Environmental Interaction and Player Agency
The physics simulation extends to a wide array of player interactions. For instance, players can manipulate water to alter climates, rerouting rivers into deserts to foster plant growth and transform arid land into fertile soil. During a demonstration, a player drilling into a mountaintop lake caused a release of water that rapidly turned the ground below into mud. Koster recounted an anecdote where a player-created pond inadvertently flooded a nascent city by overwhelming its unreinforced earth foundations, requiring significant effort from both players and developers to rectify.
He contrasted this with games where physics are applied inconsistently, noting that realizing such limitations breaks immersion. "That moment takes you out of the world because you clock that the first experience 'wasn't simulated, it was a stagecraft moment. It was a set piece.'"
Beyond basic environmental manipulation, Stars Reach will feature tools like heat rays, mining lasers, and cannons. A particularly unique tool is a "time gun" that can rapidly age objects. This allows for transformations such as turning marble into limestone, limestone into chalk, and chalk into sand. Players reportedly use this tool to lithify soft rock walls in tunnels, preventing collapses under geological pressure.
Underlying Technology and Inspirations
While the game's surface-level visuals might evoke an earlier era of MMOs, Koster highlighted that the underlying simulation is complex. He addressed comparisons to other games, like Helldivers 2, where destruction might appear dramatic but is often a pre-scripted animation. In Stars Reach, the impact of an event, such as a meteorite storm, can have cascading environmental consequences, like causing a reservoir to breach and flood a nearby town.
The simulation's foundation draws inspiration from Conway's Game of Life, a 1970 cellular automata program. In this system, a simple grid of cells evolves based on a few rules, leading to complex emergent patterns. Koster described Stars Reach's simulation as "Conway's Game of Life. Do it in 3D." Instead of just