New Gameplay Trailer and Q&A With Raph Offers Glimpse at Sandbox MMO
Playable Worlds has announced its first title, Stars Reach, a fully-simulated, massively multiplayer sandbox game for all to explore. This is a modern MMO set in a smarter, more natural, and more reactive galaxy, thanks to a first-of-its-kind architecture running partly on the cloud. Water flows, generating natural currents. Forests can catch fire. Flora changes as heat and humidity change. Creatures migrate when food sources are depleted. This is a single, global, persistent universe that doesn’t reset at downtime. The actions you take affect the landscape, are visible to all, and are permanent.
Stars Reach is set in a colorful, optimistic science-fantasy setting that appeals to a wider audience than just the MMORPG faithful – with gameplay that scales from casual to hardcore, from a quick five-minute session to a full on gaming marathon. A lot of MMORPGs will let you build your own home, but Stars Reach lets you build that home on the planet you choose, a subterranean lava mining facility, an underwater domed farm, an orbital starport…even wormgates to reach other solar systems. You’re limited only by your imagination. No classes, and no rails – just a wide-open world of adventure at your fingertips.
Created by the designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, Stars Reach is an intelligent, living, fully-modifiable universe that offers players a unique opportunity to experience life on distant worlds. The galaxy continually evolves, featuring procedurally-generated planets that are as intriguing as they are varied. Gameplay options are equally diverse, allowing you to engage with the aspects that interest you the most, or to change your focus as often as you like – there is no single best path through this game.
Currently in pre-Alpha, a launch date has not yet been announced. Playable Worlds is gearing up for friends-and-family testing this summer, focusing on key slices of the game. A new website is now live, welcoming sign-ups for future updates and testing at www.starsreach.com.
“I have been working towards this game for thirty years. Now that technology has caught up to our dreams, we can build the living alternate world we envisioned when we were creating the MMORPG category,” said Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Worlds.
Key Features of Stars Reach:
- Gameplay you haven’t seen before. Everything — terrain, creatures, plants — reacts to what you do and to local conditions. It isn’t pre-scripted, it’s organic and simulated.
- Every planet can be different — Different seasons, years, climates… and once players set up a government there, other things like tax rates, build permissions, or even the PVP rules may also vary.
- Living planets. These worlds work the way the real world does: whether you break it or build it, you the players own it. Our trees grow, throw off seedlings, and spread into forests. They also burn down. Our rivers flow, and you can dam them up or irrigate a desert.
- Exciting combat featuring customizable weapons that enable both fast-paced action and tactics more like what traditional MMO players are used to – on both the ground and in space!
- A fully player-driven economy including mining through deformable terrain, crafting a wide array of objects, building entire cities with your friends, and engaging in missions set by other players.
