Star Wars Galaxies' Raph Koster Unveils "Stars Reach", A New Sandbox MMO Where "Everything Reacts" To You

Playable Worlds, founded in 2019, has been holding a countdown all week. Founded by Raph Koster, designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star War Galaxies, the studio has been working on a new MMORPG that they planned to officially announce this week.

Today's the day.

The new MMO is called "Stars Reach" and the team bills it as a sandbox MMO the likes of which have never been seen before. “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 Koster.

Stars Reach aims to create a universe where players can travel from planet to planet, find a place to call home, get busy building, and chart their own patch through a procedurally-generated, no rails, world. Heard all that before? Yep, you bet we have.

So what's different here?

According to the team, and an interview video I've included below, Stars Reach runs on "a first-of-its-kind architecture running partly on the cloud" that creates a galaxy where grass grows, forests can burn down, and weather impacts the local plant and wildlife. Everything reacts to you whether you find a desert planet, a lush jungle planet, or a lava planet to call home. If you terraform or change anything, it is permanent and all players see it. Want to irrigate a field? Reroute that river and get to it.

Everything is up to players, though. The economy is entirely player-driven and and there is no clear path through Stars Reach. If you want to be a miner, go for it. Want to engage in combat on the ground and in space? That's here, too.

It's incredibly ambitious and gives off the "No Man's Sky in an MMO" type vibe to me. I'm interested, but skeptical.

Pre-alpha is underway and no release date or window has been announced yet. Friends and Family testing will take place this summer. If you want to sign up to receive information as we get it, you can do so on the official Stars Reach site. You must use a Google account to sign up.

Below I've included a look at pre-alpha gameplay, a chat with Raph Koster discussing his vision for the MMO, and a bit of a Q&A video the team put together. Koster also held a reddit AMA where he posted quite a few replies if you're interested.