By Raph Koster

I think this may actually be the last of the posts outlining the high level goals of the game! And just in time too, because the very first Reachers are going to be landing on a planet in Sterne Reichweite this weekend. That's right, it's time to start testing! If you're interested, be sure to go sign up, and join the Discord und wishlist on Steam while you're at it.

THIS IS A SANDBOX GAME

As you have maybe read from the other articles in the series, SR is very much a sandbox. That means that it is about living in another world, not just chasing XP pellets to complete gear sets. There is no single goal that a player can pursue, except perhaps to work together with other players to try to solve the large scale thematic problem the game presents.

In many ways, then, SR is more about play than it is about advancement. Advancement runs out or becomes an infinite treadmill; whereas if you get bored of playing one way, you can go play in another way and keep having fun.

This means that there isn't any one journey through Sterne Reichweite. Instead, players choose their journeys. So how do we pick what features we will have?

In themepark games, you build one feature – player-vs-environment combat, usually – to a huge degree of depth, with a ton of progression and advancement in it. You then spare a thought for everything else, because progression is what holds the player.

Back in the day, we used to speak of "elder games," which meant features and subsystems that were not dependent on content treadmills: stuff like economic play, social play, PvP, and so on, which were much more about interaction with others.

Today, with themeparks having dominated the landscape, we instead speak of "endgame." Levelling up – the journey – has come to be thought of as the obstacle in the way to getting to "the real game," which is increasingly group raid coordination.

"End" isn't really a word you want sitting next to "world" though. Raids are another form of content treadmill, just they call for groups. There are gear sets and color coded items and all the same jazz that there is around the basic levelling game. Very much more about advancement than just play.

SOME THINGS TO DO

So what are some ways we want you to play? Well, here's a list from our early design documents:

• THE ADVENTURER
  • Run across the geyser fields towards a crashed Old One ship, before the Cornucopia get there.
• THE TRANSLATOR
  • Observe aliens speaking in strange glyphs; match them up, and crack the code of what they are saying.
• THE EXPLORER
  • "Beep! Beep!" Audio signals help you find a soft spot in space to open a new wormhole.
• THE FARMER
  • Plant red wheat under a violet sky; crossbreed strains to get a valuable healing variant.
• THE MEDIC
  • One press of a button conjures a healing bubble around you as you call your party closer.
• THE XENOBIOLOGIST
  • Sneak up on house-sized carnivorous bunnies and draw their blood; gotta sample 'em all.
• THE PILOT
  • Collect crystals fallen from shattered asteroids and drag them in bags behind your ship.
• THE MINER
  • Tunnel underground – the map is fully destructible. When the gold is gone, it's GONE.

In a game that is more about play than it is about advancement, we want to embrace the idea of horizontal progression: that you gain more abilities as you skill up, rather than just numbers going up. And these should give you tactical growth and the feeling of finding new ways to play over time.

So we would want a newbie to be able to blast away at space spiders or alien ice worms in an asteroid field. They should be able to explore a lost Old One laboratory hidden within the mountains of a volcanic planet. They should be able to try to tame a feral blunderhog and name it Fred, or take a mission to smuggle radioactive antigravium through a wormhole.

But an advanced player, someone who has been around the block, ought to be able to use their faction powers as a member of the Purity to call in an airstrike on a nest of the Corruption. They should be able to restore a dead world to life by importing creatures and materials from a distant world, or lead their guild to claiming a new planet, and perhaps become that planet's first governor. Maybe they make it a pirate den, or they build a powerful corporation by supplying the best spaceship engines in the Galaxy.

GETTING PRACTICAL ABOUT DEVELOPMENT TIME

Now, you might be thinking that sounds great, but also like we will ship in 2047. And some of that is because we are all so used to themepark progression. If you are designing a sandbox with many features, none of them have all the content progression treadmill that a themepark game devotes to PvE. Instead each one of those systems is small, in terms of implementation. Instead, we rely on the dynamics of the individual feature, and how it connects to other features, to provide the depth.

An example is that alien languages feature mentioned above. It's basically a codebreaking minigame. All our creatures "speak" their internal AI state over their heads, a lot like the Sims speak Simlish. But it's all encrypted, and it's encrypted differently on different planets.

It ties into the collection minigame (you have to collect the glyphs before you can assemble enough to crack the code). And it ties into the economy – once you crack the code, it generates economic value, because you can sell a translator module to a player who doesn't want to play this way but does want to know whether a creature is about to attack.

But the feature itself is just picking an encryption method. It's not that different from using code to generate Sudoku boards. If the core puzzle is solid, like Sudoku is, then there's going to be demand for lots of boards. If they have to be handcrafted, you're back on the content treadmill.

We strive for every feature to have these qualities: simple elegant rules, deep dynamics, and interconnection to other systems.

PICKING WHICH FEATURES TO MAKE

Even then, though, we can't make them all. We have our razors to help us cut our own ideas: what the game is about, what the vision items are. But we also have to think about it in terms of who will be playing.

We did a bunch of research to dig into what the demographics were for MMOs of various sorts – high fantasy ones, sci fi ones, games like Minecraft und Fortnite and many others. We looked at what ages the players tended to be. We needed to prove to ourselves that there was a market for the game we were contemplating. And we needed to understand why people chose to play those games.

We've worked with two different systems for that over the years. One of them, which we will be asking all our testers to use, is Solsten's. But when we started out, we used the Quantic Foundry model to think about what drives players.

When we looked across these motivations and examined which ones were most common across ages and genders, some commonalities and differences popped up pretty quickly:

• "Completion" – meaning, collecting stuff and completing sets and task lists – is pretty much in everyone's top five.
• "Destruction" skews younger, and also male.
• "Fantasy," the motivation driven by immersion, is universally popular.
• "Story" doesn't pop as high as you would expect!

After some debate, we decided that for our game, we would treat these things as the core of our unique appeal:

• Community: The enjoyment of interacting and collaborating with other players.
• Fantasy: The desire to become someone else, somewhere else.
• Completion: The desire to complete every mission, get every collectible, and discover hidden things.
• Discovery: The desire to explore, tinker, and experiment with the game world.
• Design: The appeal of expression and deep customization.

And we decided that these items were not core. That doesn't mean we ignore them or have no features for these motivations, but it helps us define what we are not:

• Challenge: we are not Dark Souls. We want players to feel challenged, but we don't want to center the game on being the hardest experience ever.
• Story: we are not Uncharted. We want players to feel immersed, but we aren't going to have them sit back while we tell them a story.
• Power: we are not a game that someone wins and dominates everyone else, like say League of Legends. In fact, we are going to have a bunch of mechanics that cap people's power, in the name of serving community.

We then went through every feature we wanted to have in the game, and looked at which motivations they could serve. And we invented features and cut features until we had more things in the columns for the elements that are core, and fewer in the columns for the motivations that are not core.

TESTING ASSUMPTIONS

After all that, we made game for a few years. And relatively recently, we were able to go back and test again, to see if what we've made is getting close to that target, which has evolved as the market has. We put together descriptions of what the game has evolved into, and asked possible players to respond to what they heard.

We told them we were making a shared multiplayer world with many planets but a single universe. A world where you can play any role and learn any skills, with no class limitations. Where you can explore new planets, harvest resources, trade, craft, fight aliens, collaborate with others and transform for the worlds themselves.

We told them you could craft thousands of items both useful and decorative, and that someday you might get so good at it that visitors might come from far away to buy items with your brand on them.

That you would trade across the galaxy in a player-driven economy, where goods have varying prices in different locations. Buy low, sell high, smuggle or own a shop.

Sculpt the worlds, terraforming them and replanting, rerouting rivers and shaping them to the needs of you and your friends. Planets where every substance has unique properties, and creatures have needs and desires. A sophisticated ecological simulation where forests can catch fire and lakes can freeze over, and more.

Active combat with dodging and blocking and situational awareness, with an arcade style but also with options for people who have bad aim or no aim at all. And which players of different skill levels can still play together.

A social world where you can earn XP from helping each other or helping players. Where you can become a leader like the mayor of a town or governor of a planet, but can also play solo and only return to town when you need to buy and sell.

And we asked them to imagine exploring these worlds, traveling through wormholes to discover planets with unknown flora and fauna, unknown resources, and unknown mysteries.

What we got back was a lot of interest. In fact, exploring those living worlds scored through the roof! We also got back worries about griefing, about whether there would be a clear sense of which goals to pursue, and whether the game might be too grindy.

Most importantly, we found that there absolutely was a market for the game we are making. In fact, there's quite a big market.

We make decisions every day on how deep or detailed to make a feature, or whether we can afford to build it at all. There are plenty of cool ideas we have had which are pushed off to post-launch. We have to be realistic about what we can make.

But it feels great to know that you are making something that not just you feel excited about, but that there's a lot of other people who will be excited once they hear of it.

And that's why this weekend is so exciting too. Oh, those poor first Reachers will barely get to see anything! We expect to just crash the client over and over.

But with any luck, we will post a group selfie screenshot of the first strangers to join us on the limitless frontier of Stars Reach.

von Raph Koster

Hallo zusammen,

I'm kicking off a little series of posts here on what our core game pillars are. Dies sind die bestimmenden Philosophien, die alles im Spieldesign beleben. Sie sagen uns, was das Spiel ist und was das Spiel nicht ist.

Wenn wir an der Gestaltung arbeiten, schauen wir immer wieder auf diese Grundprinzipien zurück und überprüfen unsere Arbeit an ihnen. Wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir den Ideen, die im Zentrum des Spiels stehen, treu bleiben, weil alle Spielsysteme von diesen ausgehen.

We didn't just come up with these out of the blue. These were based on doing market research, looking at what things players have been asking for, what things have been missing from MMOs for a long time, and so on.

Es basierte auch auf Träumen darüber, was heute mit der aktuellen Technologie möglich ist. Wir haben das Gefühl, dass MMOs irgendwie stagniert haben. Damals, als ich an Ultima Online träumten wir von vollständig simulierten Welten, von Welten, die auf die Aktionen der Spieler reagieren können. Stattdessen haben wir uns in einem Modus eingerichtet, in dem wir als Entwickler dazu neigen, Freizeitpark-Fahrten für die Spieler zu machen, kleine konservierte Erfahrungen, durch die sie laufen, anstatt alternative Welten.

So our first pillar to talk about is therefore this one. Before you read it I should say, it's obviously aspirational, all these pillars are!

Die lebendigste Online-Welt, die es je gab

Die Art und Weise, wie wir uns diese Säule beschrieben haben, war die folgende, die wir direkt aus dem internen Entwicklungs-Wiki ausgeschnitten und eingefügt haben. Tatsächlich ist dies eines der ältesten Stücke der Entwurfsdokumentation des gesamten Projekts und geht der Erstellung von Code voraus!

Wirtschafts- und Umweltsimulationen bilden die Grundlage des Spiels, und die Spieler können aus einer breiten Palette von Möglichkeiten zur Interaktion mit den Systemen wählen. Die Spieler werden in der Lage sein, im Spiel Dinge zu tun, die sie schon immer erwartet haben: Gegenstände fallen lassen, Bäume in Brand setzen und Löcher in den Boden graben. Sie werden feststellen, dass die Welt Dinge tut, die sie erwarten: Der Wind kann einen tatsächlich umherwehen, man kann von einem steilen Abhang abrutschen, und der Schnee wird sich tatsächlich auftürmen und Dinge begraben. Und schließlich und vor allem werden die Spielercharaktere in eine lebendige Gesellschaft eingebunden, mit der Absicht, starke Gemeinschaften zu bilden.

Wie Sie sehen können, we intentionally defined "alive" as including what Spieler tun, nicht nur das, was die Welt tut. Wenn das, was die Spieler tun, die Welt beeinflusst, und wenn das, was sie tun, für die einanderdann verstärkt sich das Gefühl, dass es sich um einen alternativen Ort handelt.

In fact, you've heard us talk about our living world simulation tech a lot, but the fact is that the economic simulation that players are participants in is ebenso wichtig, even though it's not nearly as visually cool.

Ausgehend von dieser übergeordneten Säule haben wir drei spezifische Ziele, die wir anstreben.

"The game will run off simulation."

Die besten Spielzeuge werden durch Simulation gesteuert. Lego. Hot Wheels. Minecraft. Die Sims. Having building blocks that interact with each other in magical ways is what encourages a playful attitude to the game, which then leads to players surprising us with emergence. (But we won't be zu überraschen, denn wir werden von Anfang an auf diese Entwicklung hinarbeiten). Daraus ergeben sich dann neue Spielmöglichkeiten, neue Wege für die Spielwelt, zu wachsen und zu gedeihen, und so weiter.

The tension between simulation and what I call "stagecraft" has a very long history in online game design in particular. If you use stagecraft, you are basically "faking" reality, in ways that help guide players. This is often really necessary – it's very easy for players to feel like they are confused or lack guidance.

On the other hand, simulation, and consistent underlying rules, is where you get emergent gameplay from. This is both a blessing and a curse – it's hard to predict the outcomes, and they could be good or bad for fun! So when you design in a simulationist way, you have to always temper your approach and think of how to end up with Spaß Ergebnisse, im Gegensatz zu realistischen Ergebnissen. Realismus macht oft nicht viel Spaß.

Our core simulation is, of course, the environment. One of the questions that always comes up when we talk about our game with other developers is "what gameplay impact does that feature have?" And it's the rechts Frage.

We don't want to just have different types of dirt for no reason. They have to matter to a game system – such as farming. If we have different sorts of rock, the differences should matter – to crafting, say. If you can melt that rock, that can't just be a cool gimmick with no purpose. It has to matter in terms of giving players fun things to do. Maybe you can melt stuff to the point where its transmogrifies into something else! Maybe you can melt holes in front of creatures so they fall in and die during combat!

The point being, having a simulation that exists but doesn't provide gameplay is kind of pointless. We're not building a science experiment, we are building a game.

"The game will be a true persistent state world."

You can't have real history without persistence. You can't have pride of place. You can't tie players into the world unless there is a world to tie them into. This is what allows the crazy experiment players made to stick around and be experienced by others. This is what drives returns out of nostalgia. This is what leaves traces of lore to be found.

By itself, this is a technical requirement. Not a small one, either! But it's really about human behavior.

Worlds that are more theme parks don't have history within the game. Oh, sometimes developers have done things like destroy a zone as part of an event, or have expansions alter the map that already exists. But small things don't change day to day, and it means that players kind of just move through the environment.

Wenn wir die reale Welt erforschen, ist ein großer Teil dessen, was wir gerne finden, in Wirklichkeit die Spuren derer, die vor uns kamen. Wenn wir in der realen Welt von unseren Hinterlassenschaften sprechen, meinen wir damit die Dinge, die wir anderen hinterlassen, damit sie sie eines Tages erleben können, wenn wir nicht mehr sind. These are profoundly human feelings that games aren't tapping into.

Und ja, sie machen auch noch Spaß.

The history of online worlds is partly the story of slowly adding more and more persistence to the experience. In the earliest text based worlds, you only saved the state of your character. The world fully reset around you every once in a while. Eventually, this evolved into resetting each zone independently. I remember when the innovation of having repops per mob came along and it felt like the world had taken a big step forward is realism! ("Mob" is the term of art for "mobile object," so think "monster or NPC").

Similarly, we went from saving just what you carried (and often not all of it) to saving your corpse if you died, and then the contents of bank accounts, and so on. The definition of "your character state" got bigger over time.

These days, the largest way in which players tend to be able to modify the world is using a player housing system. But so many games tuck that away into an alternate dimension, basically, so that players don't leave a trace. It's really just a big inventory bag that looks like a house.

That's really not all that human structures are, despite our habit of hoarding stuff. The monuments we leave behind are often public works, plazas and pyramids, theaters and halls of government.

And yeah, it's okay if the works of players past, like those of Ozymandias, turn to ruins someday.

But it's really the last one of these three where it all comes together.

As an MMO, we are a live service game, and that means that we live and die based on people coming back, making the game their hobby for extended periods of time. That's just a survival thing, for any MMO. We have to design within business realities, not just for fun factor.

Luckily, the two can often coincide. But it means a big ol' block of text! Remember, what you are about to read may sound like it's cynical business talk, but it's not.

"The game will be driven by player community and interdependence."

Retention is driven by community above all. Social ties in the game are the biggest predictor of retention. Particularly now that streamers and the like are the biggest social hubs, replacing guild leaders, it's incredibly important that we tie users to us, not to the streamer or celebrity.

Wenn Welt von Warcraft eingeführt wurde, stahlen sie alle hochrangigen Gildenleiter von EverQuest. Similarly, we don't want someone to be able to steal our audience by persuading streamers away from our game. We have designed this game so that people don't identify with only one social hub. That's why we have systems such as multiple guild membership that drive loyalty to multiple hubs.

People can be very important to your life even if they aren't close friends. Think of that plumber or electrician you rely on, even though you don't really know them. Those relationships are called "weak tie" connections, and despite the name, they actually make the social network stronger, reducing the dependency on central hub people. When people depend on you, you are less likely to leave.

Und schließlich investieren wir intensiv in Spielerstädte, planetarische Regierungen, Wohnungen und andere dauerhafte Einrichtungen. Das sind alles Dinge, die man nicht mitnehmen kann, wenn man sie verlässt - und das macht es weniger wahrscheinlich, dass man sie verlassen will. Indem wir den Platz pro Planet begrenzen, verhindern wir, dass ein sozialer Knotenpunkt zu groß und damit zu mächtig wird.

Diese Bindungen sind wichtig, weil es sich um echte menschliche Beziehungen handelt. It's that healer you really trust in a fight to have your back. It's that crafter who makes the best armor, the one you trust the most. It's the person who shares similar play hours to you, and you come to know each other as friends. These are real ties, not fake ones. Real relationships.

Der Aufbau dieser Art von Freundschaften erfordert Arbeit, und in der realen Welt geschieht dies allmählich, wenn die Menschen einander vertrauen. Wie funktioniert der Aufbau von Vertrauen? Nun, es beginnt in der Regel mit Formen des Austauschs - einer erbrachten Leistung, einer Zahlung. Von da an werden Gefallen getan und Geschenke gemacht, und schließlich werden Vertraulichkeiten ausgetauscht und Gefühle geteilt.

This is why the player economy, and people needing each other for varying goods and services, is so important. It's an on-ramp to friendship.

Auch wenn unser Bedürfnis, die Spieler für eine lange Zeit an das Spiel zu binden, eine geschäftliche Notwendigkeit ist, erfüllt es auch ein sehr reales Bedürfnis der Spieler: die menschliche Bindung. Und genau das war schon immer der Kern des MMO-Genres. Es ist das, was MMOs von anderen Spieltypen unterscheidet. Bei MMOs geht es um die anderen Menschen in der Welt. Sie sind virtuelle Orte, an denen wir zufällig Spiele aufhängen.

But this is plenty long, so I'll talk more about those games next time!