MMO game designer guru Raph Koster just updated his venerable blog with a slew of screenshots from the closed beta version of Stars Reach, his upcoming sandbox MMO. (Which had a highly successful Kickstarter earlier this year.) The worlds themselves are created through procedural generation, and then the early player base is using the game's UGC tools to build on top of them:
Remember, our worlds are effectively created on the fly. They’re run by AIs in every cubic meter. Everything you see is malleable and changes around you, and players can resculpt every inch of it. Heck, every tree and every bush is a mobile object.
Players have invented ice rinks and heat pumps and most recently, even an elevator, using the in-game physics. They’re building crazy stuff. It’s awesome to see. All of this stuff is player built, using one of the three building methods (or all three!): terraforming, block building a la Minecraft, and tile building.
Much (much) more here, then read Matt Daly's guest post on the early Stars Reach building communities that are already emerging. Between this and Nyric, another AI-meets-UGC multiplayer sandbox game, I think we may be seeing the emergence of a new subgenre -- super-charged sandbox MMOs where the sandbox actually contains a galaxy of AI-generated, user-enhanced worlds.
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