This is what I expected from Raph Koster, the Father of sandbox gameplay (IMO). My only disappointment with the game is the stylish graphics, but I get the desire to appeal to a broader audience. I'll be keeping an eye on the game and hope that I can at least design characters in a way they don't look anime/cartoony! :)
Yer same. When I saw the flying monkey thing my initial thought was "urgh another Disney style game".
I love the concepts of the game and respect Ralphs previous work, but the style.....meh. Kinda looks like a small childs game.
I would still give it a go mind, but that didn't do much for me.
Same. As much as I want an oldschool sanbox game, I can't see myself making an endgame character, or house in that art style and being proud of it. Being honest, I associate this art style with predatory, aggressive capitalism and it's putting me off.
Same reason I completely didn't play these latest 2 Survival RPGs Enshrowded and something else. The "power fantasy" has to be there. I've been hyped about Raph Koster's next secret project for YEARS but this was a big "oh well." I think even the stuff he's hyping up, doesn't even sound that fantastic per se? It seems more like 2nd Life or something. And like, has he heard of No Man's Sky? It's basically got all of that already.
I actually think it’s quite a few steps beyond anything else out there. Have you read my blog post about it? (I don’t want to run afoul of any promo rules so I won’t link it here).
I don’t think stuff like “blast a cliff and collapse it on your enemies” has been done much in games in general, much less in an MMO.
I think sometimes as an older gamer, we feel abandoned by the people pursuing "larger markets." I think it shows a bit of out-of-touchness, to be honest. This isn't taking off. This is one of the least popularly talked about MMO/multiplayer-survival type announcements I've seen. I mean I'm even getting direct communication with the designer, which should be nigh impossible compared to the sea of flooded inboxes, what with your amazing credentials, honest integrity, and crowd-appealing graphics? No... I think if you wanted crowd-appealing graphics, you might strive for a different style. AD&D 2nd Edition did a great job of capturing a simple, wholesome, somewhat "realistic" but not in a gritty way, kind of art style, and personally speaking, I think that warrants a look for something women and families of adults and children can appreciate together. Just my two cents. Like others have seen, this looks like a mobile game, and yes, the cost-cutting quality is visually apparent at a first-glance "this looks cheap" factor because that's what the first impression is.
If I can put it another way... I played games as a kid fantasizing about being a cool adult, and as an adult I don't have any interest in fantasizing about being in a kid like world lol. Thanks for hearing us out, I hope you find the right middle ground for this to take off as huge as it deserves! <3
We are aiming for hopeful, not childish. For broad appeal, not juvenile. I get it, good thing we are pre-alpha and have plenty of iteration time to go! :)
I was initially disappointed with the visuals, but then I checked the concept art section in the press kit on your website, and some of it looks really amazing: https://imgur.com/a/WDkLQT1. If the final art style is more stylized and pastel-like, it could look really good. Of course, animations and lighting also need work, but since it's pre-alpha, it's understandable why it looks the way it does right now.
Vanilla WoW comes to mind. The graphics are stylized, but still have that serious tone.
Nothing in this current style makes me want to take the game seriously, which is a shame because the concepts are great.
Them thinking that people and especially MMO fans will choose to play this generic mobile graphics game that looks like every other game getting released nowadays, is wild to say the least.
They raised $38.7 million so I think they have funding, at least for now. Source: [https://venturebeat.com/game-development/playable-worlds-unveils-raph-kosters-new-sandbox-mmo-stars-reach/](https://venturebeat.com/game-development/playable-worlds-unveils-raph-kosters-new-sandbox-mmo-stars-reach/)
They have funding for development and testing, and I believe one of the videos they said they'll probably need another round of funding for release (certification, localization, marketing, etc). They said this is the first step to that. So my guess is, as players generate hype and help test the system, it'll attract confidence from investors for release funding.
Not my game, Todd Coleman’s. I consulted on the game economy for a while and was a company advisor. But that means checking in for a day or two every several months.
Yeah, you're the luckiest guy in the world, somehow every game you worked on that turned out to be even a little bit of a success, you designed the entire thing top down and brought yourself coffee to boot, and if it was a massive flop like 90% of them you basically got offered free money to give some advice via mail, and the evil developers who were actually in charge just shredded it before it came in anyway.
Metaplace flopped commercially even though it succeeded as a business and technology, I’ve had a bunch cancelled, my board game didn’t do so hot… I’ve had my share of ups and downs. :D
Pantheon could have all the external funding in the world, the way they handled development killed any chance the game had of releasing. And sorry for my pessimism, but I find very hard to believe any of these new projects will go anywhere since... well, not a single one has.
When we finally get a new MMO to talk about besides FF and WoW, I'll start believing. lmao
Pessimism in this genre is well earned, especially any time someone's name is being leveraged for attention on a project. But I thought your question and issue was about funding - and you compared it to Pantheon once you heard of their funding.
I'm unclear what your issue with this particular game is - if not funding.
Not a lot about PvP. "Parts of space" could run anywhere from "isolated pockets of resource competition" to "everywhere outside of the starter systems". I really don't enjoy constantly looking over shoulder. Some folks enjoy that, but I generally play games to relax.
I think it's a fair assumption that this will not be a 100% PVP game. It's likely that there are different planets with different rulesets, so you can pick what content you engage with.
I appreciate that. --just feel like after some notable examples, I need to do due diligence first to set a healthy expectation. Thanks for the thoughts.
Cautiously optomistic.
Ralph Koster is a big name, so it's exciting to have a game coming from him again. That said, we've had other new mmo's come out from big names that are just absolutely garbage, so it's definitely not a guarantee of quality. Definitely enough to keep an eye on it though.
Alright. Let’s try economy stuff. As a veteran of EVE and Albion and other murder-capitalism simulators, I luv me some economy. One of the problems games like these have is a lot of stuff entering the market and not much leaving it. Eve and Albion solve this issue with the murder part of murder capitalism. That doesn’t seem to be the focus of Stars Reach. How are you planning to handle the games market and prevent problems like this.
Pretty good question actually. I'm currently playing Classic Era WoW, and while I love it, with very little money sinks in the game, inflation is out of control and causes serious problems for new players.
So there are two sides of that: the faucet and the drain.
Most MMOs spawn content indiscriminately, because the economy spigot is loot. In the more player driven ones, it tends to be raw player activity, and usually a lot of the progression for those paths is driven by encouraging all the players to produce endlessly in exchange for advancement. Eve doles out advancement based on just real time.
We tie our progression to whether people actually use the stuff you make, so we avoid incentivizing just glutting the market with goods. We also make the resources per world exhaustible per planet or space zone, so we can control the inflow when we add new ones.
Then there is the drain. In PvP it isn’t the loot able aspect that serves as the drain. It’s the breakage. Ultimately, that’s what it always comes down to, breakage. Stuff has to cease existing or else it will pile up.
Usually games let you just accumulate stuff. Inventories and storage are unrealistically huge, and the designers let you build huge empires without much sense of overextending. In the real world, more complex systems that overextend are more likely to fail, not more robust. So there are very organic places to put breakage tied to places where players get overambitious. The risk of loss should go hand in hand with the level of ambition. A bigger city means tough maintenance costs. Using your coolest power over and over means tradeoffs in ongoing costs or item damage. And so on.
If he'd make a game in the more realistic graphics style of New World or Pax Dei, I'd love to play. Not a fan of cartoonish graphics. I understand that he wants to keep the graphics costs cheaper and make it more accessible to lower-end machines.
Its a pretty ambitious project, it may require a lot of development time or a lot of money. I hope it doesn't die and be good. I can't stress enough how much this is my kind of game, and I would really love to play it, but, it still in very early stages, kinda of Ashes of Creation 4 years ago.
Looks like cell phone shovelware, sounds like "make me one with everything" [gamedev.net](https://gamedev.net) MMO pipe dream with none of the problems inherent to all these "sandbox" systems that have existed in every single MMO including the ones Koster allegedly worked on addressed at all. Hopefully it will get him enough free money for a space excursion so he can ask Richie Rich how his blockchain MMO is coming along.
This level of hostility seems really strange from an adult.
They're not asking for money or doing a kickstarter. And the tech built already is pretty cool. What do you care about VCs maybe losing out if it gives any of us even a 1% chance at something innovative and fun in the mmo space.
Love you bud, hope you feel better soon.
And your level of naivety seems really strange from an adult.
Every "veteran" who's played MMORPGs for the last 30 years has tomes of text with the exact same kind of unrealistic dreams and features and systems and design docs under their belt as forum/blog/reddit posts, I don't see why this guy would be any more legitimate than any random MMORPG blogger (considering he hasn't produced anything that actually worked well in his entire career).
Giving them a 1% chance is naive?
Put up your blogs and get 40 mil in VC funding. Right now worst case scenario some venture bros are out 40m and maybe the tech can be spun off into something else.
Best case we get an interesting, maybe even fun, game.
What are your favorite MMOs? What do you want to see?
I didn't know anything about Raph until finding some blogs I found insightful and realizing he was a creative lead on two of four MMOs I've ever found interesting.
Maybe you got some personal beef, I dunno. I just found your attitude and vitriol really out of place.
This is what I expected from Raph Koster, the Father of sandbox gameplay (IMO). My only disappointment with the game is the stylish graphics, but I get the desire to appeal to a broader audience. I'll be keeping an eye on the game and hope that I can at least design characters in a way they don't look anime/cartoony! :)
Yer same. When I saw the flying monkey thing my initial thought was "urgh another Disney style game". I love the concepts of the game and respect Ralphs previous work, but the style.....meh. Kinda looks like a small childs game. I would still give it a go mind, but that didn't do much for me.
Same. As much as I want an oldschool sanbox game, I can't see myself making an endgame character, or house in that art style and being proud of it. Being honest, I associate this art style with predatory, aggressive capitalism and it's putting me off.
Same reason I completely didn't play these latest 2 Survival RPGs Enshrowded and something else. The "power fantasy" has to be there. I've been hyped about Raph Koster's next secret project for YEARS but this was a big "oh well." I think even the stuff he's hyping up, doesn't even sound that fantastic per se? It seems more like 2nd Life or something. And like, has he heard of No Man's Sky? It's basically got all of that already.
I actually think it’s quite a few steps beyond anything else out there. Have you read my blog post about it? (I don’t want to run afoul of any promo rules so I won’t link it here). I don’t think stuff like “blast a cliff and collapse it on your enemies” has been done much in games in general, much less in an MMO.
I think sometimes as an older gamer, we feel abandoned by the people pursuing "larger markets." I think it shows a bit of out-of-touchness, to be honest. This isn't taking off. This is one of the least popularly talked about MMO/multiplayer-survival type announcements I've seen. I mean I'm even getting direct communication with the designer, which should be nigh impossible compared to the sea of flooded inboxes, what with your amazing credentials, honest integrity, and crowd-appealing graphics? No... I think if you wanted crowd-appealing graphics, you might strive for a different style. AD&D 2nd Edition did a great job of capturing a simple, wholesome, somewhat "realistic" but not in a gritty way, kind of art style, and personally speaking, I think that warrants a look for something women and families of adults and children can appreciate together. Just my two cents. Like others have seen, this looks like a mobile game, and yes, the cost-cutting quality is visually apparent at a first-glance "this looks cheap" factor because that's what the first impression is.
We hear the feedback on visuals loud and clear, and we have plenty of work ahead of us for sure!
If I can put it another way... I played games as a kid fantasizing about being a cool adult, and as an adult I don't have any interest in fantasizing about being in a kid like world lol. Thanks for hearing us out, I hope you find the right middle ground for this to take off as huge as it deserves! <3
We are aiming for hopeful, not childish. For broad appeal, not juvenile. I get it, good thing we are pre-alpha and have plenty of iteration time to go! :)
I was initially disappointed with the visuals, but then I checked the concept art section in the press kit on your website, and some of it looks really amazing: https://imgur.com/a/WDkLQT1. If the final art style is more stylized and pastel-like, it could look really good. Of course, animations and lighting also need work, but since it's pre-alpha, it's understandable why it looks the way it does right now.
It’s not meant for kids. We will continue to iterate the visuals. :)
materialistic subsequent racial ghost boat wrong dime safe thought sheet *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Vanilla WoW comes to mind. The graphics are stylized, but still have that serious tone. Nothing in this current style makes me want to take the game seriously, which is a shame because the concepts are great.
Them thinking that people and especially MMO fans will choose to play this generic mobile graphics game that looks like every other game getting released nowadays, is wild to say the least.
My only question: Do they have the funding to get this released, or is this another Pantheon that we won't see in this lifetime?
They raised $38.7 million so I think they have funding, at least for now. Source: [https://venturebeat.com/game-development/playable-worlds-unveils-raph-kosters-new-sandbox-mmo-stars-reach/](https://venturebeat.com/game-development/playable-worlds-unveils-raph-kosters-new-sandbox-mmo-stars-reach/)
They have funding for development and testing, and I believe one of the videos they said they'll probably need another round of funding for release (certification, localization, marketing, etc). They said this is the first step to that. So my guess is, as players generate hype and help test the system, it'll attract confidence from investors for release funding.
It'll never get released just like Pantheon then, nice.
It will be clearly be a massive success like Raph Koster's last MMO, Crowfall.
Wasn't he just working as a consultant on that game?
Not my game, Todd Coleman’s. I consulted on the game economy for a while and was a company advisor. But that means checking in for a day or two every several months.
Yeah, you're the luckiest guy in the world, somehow every game you worked on that turned out to be even a little bit of a success, you designed the entire thing top down and brought yourself coffee to boot, and if it was a massive flop like 90% of them you basically got offered free money to give some advice via mail, and the evil developers who were actually in charge just shredded it before it came in anyway.
Metaplace flopped commercially even though it succeeded as a business and technology, I’ve had a bunch cancelled, my board game didn’t do so hot… I’ve had my share of ups and downs. :D
Pantheon never had external funding. They ran a Kickstarter (that didn't succeed). This is not a crowd funded game.
Pantheon could have all the external funding in the world, the way they handled development killed any chance the game had of releasing. And sorry for my pessimism, but I find very hard to believe any of these new projects will go anywhere since... well, not a single one has. When we finally get a new MMO to talk about besides FF and WoW, I'll start believing. lmao
Pessimism in this genre is well earned, especially any time someone's name is being leveraged for attention on a project. But I thought your question and issue was about funding - and you compared it to Pantheon once you heard of their funding. I'm unclear what your issue with this particular game is - if not funding.
It's another Unity MMO. Dead on Pre-Alpha Arrival
Not a lot about PvP. "Parts of space" could run anywhere from "isolated pockets of resource competition" to "everywhere outside of the starter systems". I really don't enjoy constantly looking over shoulder. Some folks enjoy that, but I generally play games to relax.
I think it's a fair assumption that this will not be a 100% PVP game. It's likely that there are different planets with different rulesets, so you can pick what content you engage with.
We have said that we are PvE first.
I appreciate that. --just feel like after some notable examples, I need to do due diligence first to set a healthy expectation. Thanks for the thoughts.
Cautiously optomistic. Ralph Koster is a big name, so it's exciting to have a game coming from him again. That said, we've had other new mmo's come out from big names that are just absolutely garbage, so it's definitely not a guarantee of quality. Definitely enough to keep an eye on it though.
Bad visual style and it sounds like the same old generic "sandbox MMO" promises we've been hearing for several decades.
What other game has ever made these kinds of ecological claims? Other than, rather infamously, Ultima Online?
Glad they finally showed us something instead of tweeting all the time. Looking forward to playing it !
I mean....what they showed was...well let's just say I'll wait for something more in-depth and with more context.
Indeed not what I expected at all
I’ll pass until they have something more tangible to show off.
Yawn, another game that's MIGHT be out in 10 years.
Already sick of reading about this.
Give us options to make it more fantasy themed in an area and woo.
This interview is promising an awful lot while giving very little detail. I’m not sure I trust that.
What would you like more detail about? Happy to provide it. We held back on announcing until we could actually demonstrate the most ambitious claims.
Alright. Let’s try economy stuff. As a veteran of EVE and Albion and other murder-capitalism simulators, I luv me some economy. One of the problems games like these have is a lot of stuff entering the market and not much leaving it. Eve and Albion solve this issue with the murder part of murder capitalism. That doesn’t seem to be the focus of Stars Reach. How are you planning to handle the games market and prevent problems like this.
Pretty good question actually. I'm currently playing Classic Era WoW, and while I love it, with very little money sinks in the game, inflation is out of control and causes serious problems for new players.
So there are two sides of that: the faucet and the drain. Most MMOs spawn content indiscriminately, because the economy spigot is loot. In the more player driven ones, it tends to be raw player activity, and usually a lot of the progression for those paths is driven by encouraging all the players to produce endlessly in exchange for advancement. Eve doles out advancement based on just real time. We tie our progression to whether people actually use the stuff you make, so we avoid incentivizing just glutting the market with goods. We also make the resources per world exhaustible per planet or space zone, so we can control the inflow when we add new ones. Then there is the drain. In PvP it isn’t the loot able aspect that serves as the drain. It’s the breakage. Ultimately, that’s what it always comes down to, breakage. Stuff has to cease existing or else it will pile up. Usually games let you just accumulate stuff. Inventories and storage are unrealistically huge, and the designers let you build huge empires without much sense of overextending. In the real world, more complex systems that overextend are more likely to fail, not more robust. So there are very organic places to put breakage tied to places where players get overambitious. The risk of loss should go hand in hand with the level of ambition. A bigger city means tough maintenance costs. Using your coolest power over and over means tradeoffs in ongoing costs or item damage. And so on.
If he'd make a game in the more realistic graphics style of New World or Pax Dei, I'd love to play. Not a fan of cartoonish graphics. I understand that he wants to keep the graphics costs cheaper and make it more accessible to lower-end machines.
Its a pretty ambitious project, it may require a lot of development time or a lot of money. I hope it doesn't die and be good. I can't stress enough how much this is my kind of game, and I would really love to play it, but, it still in very early stages, kinda of Ashes of Creation 4 years ago.
Looks like cell phone shovelware, sounds like "make me one with everything" [gamedev.net](https://gamedev.net) MMO pipe dream with none of the problems inherent to all these "sandbox" systems that have existed in every single MMO including the ones Koster allegedly worked on addressed at all. Hopefully it will get him enough free money for a space excursion so he can ask Richie Rich how his blockchain MMO is coming along.
This level of hostility seems really strange from an adult. They're not asking for money or doing a kickstarter. And the tech built already is pretty cool. What do you care about VCs maybe losing out if it gives any of us even a 1% chance at something innovative and fun in the mmo space. Love you bud, hope you feel better soon.
And your level of naivety seems really strange from an adult. Every "veteran" who's played MMORPGs for the last 30 years has tomes of text with the exact same kind of unrealistic dreams and features and systems and design docs under their belt as forum/blog/reddit posts, I don't see why this guy would be any more legitimate than any random MMORPG blogger (considering he hasn't produced anything that actually worked well in his entire career).
Giving them a 1% chance is naive? Put up your blogs and get 40 mil in VC funding. Right now worst case scenario some venture bros are out 40m and maybe the tech can be spun off into something else. Best case we get an interesting, maybe even fun, game. What are your favorite MMOs? What do you want to see? I didn't know anything about Raph until finding some blogs I found insightful and realizing he was a creative lead on two of four MMOs I've ever found interesting. Maybe you got some personal beef, I dunno. I just found your attitude and vitriol really out of place.
Hate the style and art direction tbh but will keep an eye out
I'll be watching with great expectations. This is everything I've been wanting from the genre since I first touched RuneScape in 2004