"The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO," Koster Continues To Talk Stars Reach Design Pillars

Look, we've still got a fair amount of time before MMO players at large get their hands on Playable Worlds' sandbox Stars Reach. Footage we've already seen is clearly very early development and the team, including co-founder Raph Koster, have been talking up some of the "new" aspects the game hopes to bring to the MMO space. As I've said before, there's a lot of very cool ideas being talked about here, but many could seem like just hype talk.

But then again, maybe not.

I really like the way Koster is communicating. It's easy to list things you'd like your game to do or feature, but Koster and Playable Worlds aren't just doing that. It's easy to say, "our world will do things MMO devs just never even think about doing." It's easy to say that the game world will evolve around player actions or even without any actions. It's easy to say that the cloud will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

It's a different story to lay out your design tenants and then break them down into smaller concepts AND talk about HOW you execute those. Koster already did this in a video or two and a post a few days ago, and in a new post, we're back at it again.

Koster talks about the feeling that MMORPGs haven't evolved much. Sure, new genres like looter-shooters and others have stemmed FROM MMOs, but the MMORPG itself hasn't grown too.

Stars Reach aims to do that...without sacrificing the accessibility. Keep the "big world feeling" while losing the "there's too much and it's confusing". I love the way Koster words this point, "The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO." This is an "elegance over complexity" play. "Deep systems, easy to use UI" is a nice way to think about it.

The next pillar focuses on bringing tried-and-true systems and small things together to cause unexpected results. The final pillar focuses on things feeling similar from a control standpoint.

It's all about keeping things simple, familiar, and intuitive, but allowing that simple player-facing premise to do very complex and intriguing things in the background. I'm here for it, and am eager to see if it works the way it is envisioned.

So the waiting continues.