Making an MMO is like "founding a city" says Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies veteran, but his ambitious new sci-fi fantasy game sounds more like a "parallel world"

If anyone knows how to make a good MMO, it's Raph Koster. From serving as the original creative lead and lead designer on Ultima Online, to the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, Koster knows his stuff when it comes to the genre. His passion shines through as he talks to me about Stars Reach – the game he previously described as the one "I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years."

Stars Reach sounds, frankly, unfathomably large – both in its size and what players are able to do in it. The sci-fi fantasy MMO boasts far more than one world to explore – it's shaping up to offer thousands, as well as the depths of space itself, where you'll be able to fight aliens, build and reshape environments, and even become the leader of towns, cities, and whole planets. Perhaps most importantly, it's also packing MMO elements that Koster thinks have been left largely forgotten for too long.

There's no shortage of good MMOs out there, but Koster, creator of Stars Reach and CEO of developer Playable Worlds, believes that the genre has "been in a rut for a long time," and "we haven't seen a lot of innovation in the space." That's been compounded by a lack of "major titles" gracing our screens over the last couple of decades, he argues: "The template set by World of Warcraft continues to kind of dominate, and it's narrowed down what used to be a much more diverse genre."

A blast to the past

No one is denying the success of WoW, Final Fantasy 14, The Elder Scrolls Online, or any of the more recent popular MMOs, but Koster believes that many games in the genre are missing something. Namely, features from "sandbox-y games" like RuneScape and EVE Online just aren't seen that widely. These include "peaceful ways to play being just as important as combat," as well as housing for players, "player-driven economies," and games generally "embracing more of the social gameplay and the creativity, which we've seen people want to do in Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley and all these other kind of cozy games which are also an offshoot of sandbox MMOs."

Sandbox elements come up a lot during our chat, with Koster also noting that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a "key" motivator. "In many ways, [Breath of the Wild] plays like a one-player sandbox MMO. It has all of the kinds of features that are typically in a sandbox MMO, but it did it in this modernized, streamlined, console friendly way." Considering its popularity, it was clear to him that people love those elements, but "can't get it at MMO scale anymore." With Stars Reach, "the hope is that players find all that depth of the sandbox MMO" but with "that Breath of the Wild [approach to] instant access, instant fun."

It all sounds wildly ambitious, and Koster says the "whole point" is to "revitalize the MMO genre" by bringing in these somewhat forgotten sandbox features and ideas – not as they were 20 years ago, but as they could be now. "We see that as a really large open space that isn't being served." There's "a lot of enthusiasm" for it, too, with Koster pointing to the popularity of Isekai anime like Sword Art Online and even the virality of Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the COVID-19 pandemic as proof that players crave that "fantasy of a more immersive parallel world."

Crafting a true living world

That parallel reality is exactly what the team at Playable Worlds is hoping to create, with the tech required to make it happen now available. "Living world has become a cliche, but most games that claim [they have a] living world are mostly faking it," Koster explains, arguing that many MMOs "feel much more like you're just on a carnival ride instead of in a world," with players not having an actual impact on the environment they're playing in.

But what does Playable Worlds' "truly alive world" look like? "The centerpiece of it is the fact that we simulate everything," says Koster, lighting up as he lists just some of the things his team is building. "Our water flows. Every tree is actually an AI that can grow, can spread. Forests can burn down and grow back, and they respond to the seasons. The water even erodes the river banks, and the river banks collapse over time. It is all alive."

He explains that players could irrigate a desert to "make it bloom," that ice spiders from the snowy peaks could invade a settlement during the winter, and that players could even drive creatures extinct and damage a whole planet's ecosystem by doing so. Players are part of the "dynamic simulation" they inhabit, and have the option to shape worlds, whether that's by rerouting a river or destroying a mountain. "There isn't anything else out there like it, I don't think," says Koster.

This isn't some far off, distant dream. Things like this are already happening to the players testing Stars Reach. "We had a city flood, and everybody had to go dig out the basements that collapsed," Koster describes. "Players discovered ways to create geysers of water, because you can heat up the water and turn it to steam and it will float away and precipitate down someplace else. Players who were mapping the planet banded together, pulled out freeze rays, froze lava back into rocks so that they could walk across bridges that were melting behind them, so that they could finish mapping the planet."

Even as we're talking, Koster laughs, players are "collaborating on building an undercity in the caldera of an extinct volcano," where a "huge cave system" has been discovered. The freedom sounds almost dizzying, as he suggests you could even venture off into space and "carve out the interior of an asteroid and build inside it."

Building a future

It sounds like the content will be practically endless, too, with "a very advanced" procedural generation system in place to create planets and their varied climates, landscapes, and behavior of native creatures. There's a plan in place for tidying up any unpopular space rocks, too, as the wormholes used to travel to them can "collapse from lack of use." This won't happen if they're being regularly visited, and new planets can always be discovered. "The map isn't fixed," says Koster. "It's always changing in response to what players do."

Acknowledging the size of Stars Reach, Koster is well aware that players only have so much free time to give to games in the first place – especially if they already have ongoing titles to keep up with. Playable Worlds has done its best to make Stars Reach "friendly to that drop-in play," that doesn't demand you to log in at the same time as your friends in order to avoid being forced to play with strangers.

Given how hands-on players can be with Stars Reach, it seems appropriate that Koster describes making an MMO as being "less like making a game and more like founding a city." Pointing out how long one of his previous works, Ultima Online, has been going for (it turns 28 this year), I ask if that longevity is what every MMO developer strives for? If they don't, offers Koster, then "they should."

"As long as you keep reinvesting in [MMOs] and bringing them up to date, engaging in some urban renewal, they'll keep pulling in new people," says Koster "So I try to design for that long haul. I try thinking in a horizon of decades."

Stars Reach doesn't have a release date just yet, but after five years of development, Koster previously stated that it's "reasonably close to the finish line," which is reassuring given its Kickstarter campaign goes live tomorrow. Ultimately, Koster believes that the "number one predictor of people staying in an MMO is the friends they make, and whether their friends are there," so if he can successfully foster that environment here, then it sounds like he's onto a winner. Personally, he's already got me on board with the mere idea of crafting a little asteroid home.

In the meantime, be sure to check out our roundup of the best MMORPGs for something to play right now.