Playable Worlds’ Stars Reach could be the next big sandbox sci-fi MMORPG

Stars Reach, the new sandbox sci-fi online game coming from Playable Worlds, aims to be the next big sci-fi massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It’s in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s going pretty well.

Stars Reach hit its Kickstarter goal of $200,000 in one hour and it’s now crossed $499,000 with 23 days to go. (sunday march 2) Raph Koster, a veteran MMO developer, and seasoned game exec Eric Goldberg started this project in 2019. I interviewed them both about the progress they’ve made. The project has thousands of players kicking the tires now, but Playable Worlds isn’t disclosing the exact number.

Koster, who has been making big online game worlds since 1994, wrote the vision doc for the game with dozens of pages, with the full simulation of virtual worlds. It was the dream for a game that Koster had wanted to make for 30 years, where gameplay would emerge from the way that the physics of the world worked. If you dug a hole into the ground without enough structural support, it would cave in. That’s what he meant by emergent physics.

He used that to raise money with cofounder Eric Goldberg. He hired engineers he had worked with before to make an Unreal engine-based prototype. Then they switched along the way to make the game on Unity. The principles of the game worked and the engineers made it faster. Then you could run around in a world, where you could set oil on fire, see water pour out from lakes. And that answered the technical question of making the physics-based world work at scale.

The San Marcos, California-based company’s goal is to make “the most alive game world ever made,” where the “galaxy is yours to shape.” And the Kickstarter campaign is less about raising money and more about getting players excited about what’s coming and giving them a chance to directly support the game. The campaign is about getting help from players to finish the game and fully test it.

Playable Worlds has been successful raising money, scooping up $10 million in June 2020 from Galaxy Interactive and others. And in the midst of the metaverse hype, the Playable Worlds raised $25 million in funding from Kakao and others in 2022.

Now, Playable Worlds can show through its prototypes what it means when it comes to physics. With rain, a patch of dirt will get muddy. A forest can grow back after a devastating fire. Lakes freeze in winter. Rivers can change course. Your actions leave a mark on the world. It’s a “living, breathing galaxy shaped by you,” Koster said.

The team has created tools so so that players can resculpt landscapes, build entire cities, and ruin more planets just like humanity ruined their original eight homeworlds (per the back story). Koster wants the galaxy to be endless, full of aliens where you will have to fight them for control of the habitat.

After five-plus years of development, players are actively testing and exploring the game. The game is in its pre-alpha testing phase.

The vision for the planets and the galaxy

They won’t run out of planets to explore because the worlds are procedurally generated. Each has its own unique climate, gravity, and ecosystem. No two worlds are ever the same.

Players can develop their own playstyles and progress through their own skills. They can be characters such as a ranger, miner, xenobiologist, weaponsmith, leader or politician, journalist, entertainer or pilot. Skills and professions are integrated into the player-driven economy.

Combat is fast-paced and action-driven where movement, timing and physics play roles. Enemies react dynamically. Some flee when outmatched, others call for reinforcements. Environmental destruction matters. Blow a crater in the ground, and it stays there. Weapons are diverse, ranging from precision sniper rifles to devastating sci-fi melee weapons. You can terraform your world into a green planet or a barren wasteland. Your world has a health bar that tells you how it’s doing.

In Stars Reach, every item is crafted, traded, or discovered by players. There are no loot boxes or random drops. If you want the best gear, you’ll either need to craft it yourself or trade for it. Weapons, ships, and tools break over time and must be repaired or replaced.

Space is also alive and dangerous. Smugglers can transport illegal goods. Pirates can steal your stuff. You can govern entire planets and manage player-run civilizations. As for the galaxy’s backstory, long ago, a mighty alien civilization called the Old Ones terraformed the galaxy into a vast, cosmic garden. They carved wormhole highways across space like roads, exterminated civilizations and reshaped planets to suit their needs, and built marvels that still bend reality to this day. Then, without warning, they vanished, leaving behind only ruins and technology that might as well be magic. Now, humanity is leaving its homeworlds and exploring the galaxy.

Kickstarter backers of the Reacher tier ($30) and above will be at the head of the line for the remainder of the closed testing phase. During the testing phase, the servers will not be open 24/7, and wipes will be frequent, but players will have daily access to the dev team. The team will eventually release an early access build, per haps this summer, with Kickstarter supporters getting admission. The goal is to be in beta in the late part of the year and officially launch in the first half of 2026.

In addition to the Kickstarter, the company expects to continue to raise money from investors and publishers. The scope will change based on the money raised.

A cloud-native game

Goldberg said that the industry has become so risk averse, as noted in Matthew Ball‘s 224-page slide deck about the state of gaming. One of the solutions for that, Koster said, is this game. Titles like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto VI are expected to be wildly popular because they can keep up in the graphics race. But some titles like Ubisoft’s recent games are falling off in terms of big audiences.

The unusual step that Playable Worlds took was to make a “cloud-native game,” where new kinds of gameplay are possible and constant updates are available because the development happens in the cloud, where the game resides. You don’t have to constantly update the game’s local version. The cloud-native version scales more like the web at web speed, delivering assets the way the web does.

“When you look at the moments where the games market has really expanded, historically, it’s usually been when new technologies and new platforms have come along that allow games to do things they couldn’t do before,” Koster said. “Otherwise what you get into is, ‘Let’s make what we already make only slightly nicer.’ Usually, that means it’s nicer and more complicated, and it gradually gets more complicated and actually caps out the audience.”

Koster said that happened with flight simulators that grew too complex for many gamers, as well as war strategy games that also became less accessible thanks to too many features. That spirals into higher costs and fewer players.

“When we see expansion, we often see it with new platforms. We see it with new controls. We see it with new distribution or technology benefits. That might be touch screens, it might be Flash, allowing distribution, web, embedded and so on. In our case, what we’re doing by going cloud native is bringing a lot of those benefits, actually similar to what Flash had, with the ability to have constant ongoing updates to far more malleable environments than what we can do.”

He said the way the team builds the game is now is creating new forms of gameplay and more varieties of experience. That opens up new markets, he said.

“All of those kinds of things are things that our tech is set up to do. We’re starting, obviously, with just one game,” Koster said. “The response from players in our testing has been, ‘Wow. I’ve never seen things like watching a forest grow around me, or draining a lake into a cavern, or things like that.’”

Koster said everyone is saying the industry is in a tough spot. The answer, fundamentally, is that you can’t keep doing business as usual, Koster said.

“You have to take some swings that are outside of the normal comfort zone. And that’s at the heart of what we are doing,” Koster said. “We are pushing technical boundaries in order to deliver experiences that you can’t get any other way. It is something that gets you out of the spiraling costs for diminishing returns trap that everybody is buzzing about in the industry now.”

Goldberg said that the cloud tech means the company can make changes in the game while it’s operating in the cloud, often within minutes or hours. Programming changes can happen fast, while art changes are dependent on the artists to get something out fast. That means the pre-alpha keeps changing.

“We’ve been adding features at a pretty breakneck pace since we’re able to literally change the game several times a month,” Goldberg said. “When it’s ready, we can just throw it in and you don’t have to recompile the game. The game runs in the cloud.”

Discovery?

And while it’s hard to get discovered now, especially for brand new intellectual properties, the good thing for Playable Worlds is that players can see that it’s different and they’re spreading the word. That’s why the Kickstarter is going well and the player count for testing is good.

“For us, the answer has been let as many people as possible into our Kickstarter, into our testing,” Koster said. “Even though the game is still pre-alpha, we use standard business metrics like net promoter score and customer satisfaction index to measure what people think of what they’re playing.”

Around 50 is good net promoter score, where people will recommend it to someone else. Playable Worlds’ Stars Reach has a net promoter score of 80. That means the players are the evangelists, Koster said.

The business model

The likely business model is for the game to be a mix of free to play and one-time payments for certain features. The company has been dropping new content into the game every couple of days. And the bild tells the players about new features when they login. A bunch of blog posts describe what’s new at the company’s web site as well, and there’s a narrative recap.

The good response from the players is giving the team an energy boost, Koster said. The team is also being as transparent as it can be about the development process and its schedule, Goldberg said.

As for the state of competition, it’s been hard for a lot of companies to run big online games. Sony shut down Concord as it couldn’t generate much of an audience. Koster, however, has been doing this for decades, starting with Ultima Online, and Goldberg has been in games for decades too. South Korean game companies have been doing well with free-to-play online games.

The players so far

So far, the core early adopters of the game are sandbox MMORPG players, like those who have played Star Wars Galaxies or Runescape and so on.

“We’re attracting a lot of MMO fans, but from there, it expands outwards. We’re starting to pull in folks from survival games, Minecraft and Trove, and games like Enshrouded and Valheim. We’re seeing the potential for a pretty sizable audience that goes beyond standard MMOs,” Koster said.

The game is playable in short bursts, where players can login and do maintenance on their homes or shops and then hop out in five or ten minutes. You can play on your smartphone if you wish. If someone on your usual team doesn’t show, you can find another person, Goldberg said. You don’t have to play 40 hours a month to get enjoyment out of it, he said.

“A lot of the beauty in games is that the control is in the hands of the players and not necessarily in the hands of designers,” Koster said. “That doesn’t take anything away from The Last of Us Part Two, of course. But it does speak to the idea that if you have ways to give players greater freedom, that is something that they respond to. It’s a thing that games can do uniquely. And we see that in the titles that have popped up in the indie scene.”

Some players are peaceful, while others love player-versus-player combat. Many want to live in an alternate world where they live, explore, fight and so on.

“It’s more about the people who dream of visiting another world, right, and adventuring and leveling up,” Koster said. “We’re also catching a chunk of the cozy game players because we have of all of the crafting adn we have the survival, sandbox game players too.”