Stars Reach – new social sandbox MMO by Raph Koster announced | Hacker News Reader

Stars Reach – new social sandbox MMO by Raph Koster announced

starsreach.com

29 pointshooby15 comments

I dont know who Ralph Koster is or why this announcement deserves the front page, but I have to say the art direction is surprisingly dull: there are plenty of indie games made with just free asset packs that have more personality than this…

Raph is a prominent game designer, one of the designers of Ultima Online and writes a lot about game design. This is interesting at least because people have high hopes that he will build another good systemic sandbox MMO.

I agree though that this looks surprisingly dull and also that the trailer doesn’t do a great job selling the systems side of things either.

Is there a better resource that talks about the systems side of things? It looks like there might be something interesting there but it's too opaque to figure out what that might be

The things I could tease out:

* Fully modifiable worlds

* "living worlds", or at least grass grows and other ecosystem-y things

* No partitioning of player base, all in same realm

The Discord is currently the probably best place with the most information...

https://discord.gg/starsreach

Check "A brief, subjective history..." in "community-forum", for a rough summary of what is known so far.

He did a Q&A on MMORPG subreddit "creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies"

https://old.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1dqodoo/im_raph_kos...

The lighting, textures on the characters has a weird feel and lighting on them.

Yeah it does - but it is early work in progress, and is gonna see several more passes before getting close to release.

According to Raph the goal is for the visuals to end up somewhere between Genshin Impact and Wind Waker. Roughly.

"I don't know why this deserves the front page"

When you catch yourself writing that, just go ahead and delete it.

Eventually, you'll prevent yourself from even thinking it in the first place.

Life will improve.

This game is definitely gonna be known for it's systems, mechanics and simulation, and not for it's graphics - that much is sure.

Just last week I was wishing that another MMO in development would consult with Raph because they desperately need his input, wondered what he was up to these days, and then bang, this.

At the least I think he has a much higher chance of delivering than Garriot has done.

Logo looks kind of Star Trek. So does the ?cat? creature. The early animated show I guess? Is Stars Reach a unique enough name though? I'm getting results with and without the apostrophe.

I'm surprised the webpage and FAQ doesn't answer the single most obvious question: does this support player housing?

Full player housing, with building options similar to Landmark. Also player-cities, and even player-governed planets.

One of the tweets from official account said that it does.

The trailer shows some house building in it.

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