Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious upcoming galaxy sandbox MMORPG, had its successful Kickstarter a few months ago, but longtime virtual world developer Matt Daly writes that a thriving player community has emerged -- even before the crowdfunder. Groups are already evolving and building in fascinating ways:
Stars Reach keeps subverting my preconceived notions of player/community motivation in metaverse / sandbox / MMO spaces.
This is GUNC guild’s little enclave - a communal effort of a bunch of players (guild members and not), terraforming, creating land bridges, planting trees, building (including a GUNCies restaurant), over the course of less than 2 full days… and all of this will be wiped in a week or so.
And they've done many versions of this before, across various planned pre-alpha testing server wipes, for months, before the Kickstarter bandwagon etc, just for the love of building, together.
There isn't even an in-game currency yet, or really much FUNCTIONALLY to do in these built cities yet… so it’s like a little product study trapped in amber, worth observing, because those systems and more will come, and by that point it's a product manager’s job to sort signal from noise, but for now the lack of those systems paints a pretty clear picture.
And it’s not due to the official Discord live chat either, as there are countless builds that have sprung up since the last wipe that have usernames on them I don't even recognize.
It’s been motivating me to document and curate a bit. It’s like the best of the modern artists like Lozano-Hemmer whose work is often designed to decay or disassemble itself.
In a time dominated by product management funnels and bottom line predatory Skinner box monetization models, and on the opposite end metaverse graveyard platforms that have no central thesis, this is pretty refreshing.*
Again, this social building is happening despite (because of?) Stars Reach being in pre-release, and all these user-created builds are regularly wiped from the world servers.
"People still going HARD in the paint building and refining, even though the wave is about to erase their sandcastle," as Matt puts it to me. "It's amazing."
Especially impressive because Raph's world isn't a traditional leveling MMO:
"Games like Rust do periodic wipes. Dune awakening will follow suit I think. Conan has them. But [Stars Reach] doesn't even have the mechanics to buttress that pain -- it's currently just pure building. So its just kind of awesome to see how intrinsically powerful that loop is to certain player types."
Matt tells me Stars Reach user creation is similar to worlds like Rust and Second Life, by the way:
"Terraforming more like a super super atomic and reactive version of voxels," as he puts it. (Watch above.) That also means multiple players can build in real time:
"This one is my own edit of [the guild's] live stream where they needed to contend with the actual physics of sand to create a dig site by building."
Very cool emergence so far, even long before the game world is officially launched.
*Re-posted with permission from Matt's very active LinkedIn feed.
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