What Stars Reach Is, and Is Not

No game can be for everyone. And even though we want Stars Reach to have broad appeal and to bring together multiple playstyles into one world, it also can’t try to be all things to all people.

These vision items and pillars and the rest are as much about excluding and ruling out as they are about what is included in the game. Some of you may be reading them and going “this game is not for me,” and that’s fine, that is part of why we are posting them!

Yes’es and No’s

One of the tools we use for this is having a list of what we are, and what we aren’t. This serves as a really quick and simple razor for settling design debates. Here’s what our lists look like:

The single biggest topic we have seen people debating about our game online is “won’t all this freedom lead to griefing?” Well, griefing is on our No list. But “the player is in control” is a Yes. How do we reconcile those two?

When online worlds started out – long before MMOs came along — they were all about being shared worlds. There were no instances, and there was no “phasing”. The world was the same for everyone. If people swept through an area and killed all the monsters, you waited until they respawned, and if you didn’t move fast enough, someone else might beat you to the monster and then you had to wait again.

To a modern player, that may sound terrible. But it wasn’t. It was a tradeoff. Because when a player was on the quest to slay Grendel’s mother and needed the Sword of Weland from the fell dragon Fadhmir’s hoard, and took it, well, they angered the dragon, who then came out and terrorized the entire zone. And that was awesome.

Sure, perhaps it was a bit inconvenient that a player had loosed a dragon on everyone else. But at the same time, that was what made the world feel more alive, more interactive.

Back on LegendMUD, when I designed a zone based on Kipling’s Jungle Books, when a player found the way to temporarily restore the lost city of Oodeypore, it transformed each of the apes of the Bandar-Log back into the ghosts of the humans who once inhabited the city. That wasn’t a phased thing – everyone saw the room descriptions change, the inhabitants change, and then watched mournfully as the illusion popped like soap bubbles and returned to its ruined, natural state.

A lack of trust

Like so many things from the history of online worlds, things have changed. Instancing was invented so that players could avoid the impact of other players, exactly inverting why you have something be an online world in the first place instead of a single-player RPG. When it first came along, it was meant as a tool to allow more controlled experiences for small groups. Something that felt more like running a hack n slash D&D module with your friends, perhaps.

We can frame that up pretty simply: it was invented to give developers more control over the player experience. Specifically, so that another player couldn’t come along and mess up the pacing and progress. And over time, the trendline has been that developers control more and more of the experience in MMOs, with the freedoms gradually disappearing. Because freedoms are also how players impact one another.

A lot of this was because the old way of doing things required players to have a basic degree of trust in other players. And as we learned through quite a lot of pain in early MMO history, it’s pretty dangerous to extend that trust in a setting where players cannot enforce social contracts on one another the way they could in the smaller population sizes of MUDs.

We know a lot more about trust in games now than we used to. Prosocial design has become a very important topic in online game design. Oh, not just because of idealism about people coming to know each other, and the other sorts of lofty ideas that I talked about last time. 

There are playability reasons to do it: odds are excellent that a given player’s friends won’t be available online when they want to play, especially the shorter the play sessions get. Scheduling time with friends gets harder and harder as people’s lives get busy, and so on.

There are crass business reasons to do it: community ties are the biggest predictor of whether a player sticks with your game, and in these days of high dev costs, you need that to justify the spend of making the game in the first place.

I could go on.

All of this adds up to the idea that there was something to the older idea that people should make new friends in the game, not just live lives cocooned away from everyone else.

We are paying very close attention to these principles. Our commitment is that we will not mandate play with untrusted players, and that we will not invite griefing, and that we will reward social play and trust, and give players more control.

Playing alone together

There are some players who just don’t want to be impacted or impinged upon by other players in any way whatsoever. A quote from one comment about Stars Reach on an MMO site recently:

I don’t want to compete with other players, be it for resources, influence, land control, or anything else; I want the game to make it so every single in-game possession could theoretically be had by every single player at the same time, where what others earn or control don’t limit in any shape or way what I can earn and control. It’s, for example, why I consider housing that isn’t fully instanced to be utterly and completely useless, as without fully instancing it I would need to compete with other players for the prime housing plots, and if that is the case I just avoid the whole housing system altogether; any part of the game where I would be competing in any shape or way with other players for limited resources is a part of the game I will simply not play.

Stars Reach is not the right game for this person. “Permits player competition” is right there in the “Yes” column. And no game is for everyone.

Losing the shared aspect of the virtual world has deep impacts that go far beyond whether someone can grief you. In most MMOs, the trendline towards cocooning players away from one another has reduced the ability to be generous to each other (“can’t give you a gift, sorry, everything worth having is soulbound”) – when all the literature on trust building says that generosity is the first step.

It has encouraged the most pernicious aspects of modern business models – because it’s a lot easier to nickel and dime you if you are each on your own separate progression track in a bubble of single-playerness and can’t engage in trade for mutual benefit.

It has driven the growth of budgets through the roof, reducing the number of MMOs you get, and worse, also the breadth of the experiences they can offer as developers and publishers avoid risk and innovation.

I recognize that some players have enough distrust of everyone else that even the idea of getting passive buffs from standing near a stranger sounds like too much risk (this is also a real comment, one we got on our Discord). I would go so far as to say that losing the shared aspect of virtual worlds is a big part of why people end up feeling this way.

Too many online games have abdicated the responsibility of solving for prosocial play, and instead settle for just keeping you apart.

Well, that’s not what our game is about. And yeah, that means that we have a lot of work to do on making sure that the game offers freedom and security. It means that our game systems have to offer onramps – the ability to play solo when you don’t trust anyone, the ability to gain benefits from playing near each other with no commitment implied, the ability to give and receive gifts when you’re ready to, and the ability to start to trust one another when you feel able to commit.

A guild can own a planet

Our most basic step down that road is to enable something that MMOs haven’t before. The basic model for MMOs is to have a public space controlled by the developer, and maybe little pockets of housing or guild spaces controlled to a greater degree by the owner of that space. But a ton of online games have thrived since the MMO boom first began by creating smaller worlds that are controlled by players more directly. Examples include the entire survival genre, of course, including so many thousands of Minecraft servers.

(If you read some of our older articles, you will discover that under the hood, our technology is actually a lot more like a network of separate Minecraft servers than it is like most MMOs you are used to).

We’re trying out a new model. What if you could have that public space controlled by the developer – and instead of just your little pockets of housing, you could treat each planet or space zone much like you treat a player-controlled server? What if a guild could own a planet? Now you have public space, private spaces, and group spaces.

These group spaces have both more freedom and more control for the group. You could set the PvP ruleset for your area. You could set the tax rates for shops. You could allow or disallow modifying the terrain. Someday, we could enable modding these worlds, or letting players do level design! It’s a new arena on which to play which is built of group problems, the player cities of Star Wars Galaxies writ large.

And they get more interesting because they exist in this federation of worlds, where different planets have different economic conditions, have been tended well or poorly, have attracted one sort of player or another. They have economic ties, rivalries, and needs. It can give us multiplayer that is actually about massiveness.

Since we first started talking about this idea online, I’ve seen several players concerned about the idea that groups controlling parts of the map means that they are going to be at the mercy of those groups. That it means they will be able to impose their will on you.

But thanks to our cloud native model and world generation systems, you shouldn’t ever need to go to those places. We can make more planets. It should not impinge on your play any more than a player having a house does – unless you want to live there, in which case you are choosing to engage with what the group play implies.

We don’t expect the solo players to want to jump right to participating in something like that. But we do expect that there will be guilds that take pride in running planets that welcome the solo player and don’t ask anything of them, because it will serve that guild’s desire to be rich and powerful. (And yes, we also expect some guilds to build pirate dens to murderhobo on).

I can’t promise that you will never be impinged upon by another player. It’s a massively multiplayer game. It’s in the name. Stars Reach is about finding ways to get along – but we are not so naïve as to think that it will “just happen.” Building trust is hard work, and we have to build in the game systems that help it along.

In the end…

We understand how nervous players are about griefing. And we will work hard to prevent that griefing.

But fear is why the world doesn’t change around you in these games anymore. Fear is why you cannot rule a fiefdom in these games. Fear is why you cannot build a home in the world, with the layout you choose. Why you can’t trade an item, or dig a hole.

If we want what MMOs can be instead of what they are – what we have settled for – we have to stop being afraid and instead embrace the potential. There’s a galaxy full of possibility out there.