Stars Reach

 This blog is my blog.  It goes where I go.  I am probably one of the biggest Raph Koster fan boys out there.  He even once posted on his blog about me.  Yes, me!  Now Raph is making waves in the MMO community with his new game Stars Reach.  So why haven't I talked about Stars Reach yet?  Well that's simple: I've been playing games and blogging about them.

 Blaugust is a great chance to switch things up a bit and talk about fresh topics and Stars Reach is right up my alley.  It also fits well with the "get to know me" week of Blaugust because in order to talk about Stars Reach we need to step back and talk about Star Wars Galaxies (SWG)!

 First I should note that I am a huge Star Wars fan.  I can't pinpoint specifically where in my life that I became a fan, but I do have a core memory of sitting on the living room floor as a kid and watching the opening scene of A New Hope being broadcast.  My family didn't go to the movies so catching a movie on the TV was about it.  Eventually I was known to check out every Star Wars book from the local library and the rest is history (and I still maintain the original expanded universe, now called Legends, is far superior to what Disney is doing).

 Now take a love of Star Wars and combine it with the early days of massively multiplayer games and throw in a shaker of Raph Koster and we got Star Wars Galaxies.  For me personally I saw a lot of Ultima Online in SWG and that was exciting.  At the time I didn't know much of Raph Koster but through being in early alpha tests for SWG I learned about him and found myself nodding along to most things he was saying.

 I ended up having a love-hate relationship with SWG.  I loved that it was Star Wars and that it was an open world where I could build my house anywhere and be the moisture farmer I always wanted to be in Star Wars.  I hated though that the game didn't focus on the moisture farmers and eventually with the infamous New Game Experience (NGE) it was clear combat was the focus.  SWG never delivered on the promise for me.

 Fast forward today and we have Raph Koster hard at work on a spiritual successor to SWG.  He even went so far as to say the words out loud: Koster calls Stars Reach a “Star Wars Galaxies 2.0,”.  So what does that mean?

 It means an online game that is focused on more than just combat. A game that is trying to do so much more than  just be a themepark.  To do the scope justice let me pull from Raph's announcement blog post:

Stars Reach uses simulation to a degree never seen in an MMO before. We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

 That is a lofty goal and takes me back to memories of SWG.  For example; SWG had dynamic materials that could be gathered from the world.  There was an entire path for players that wanted to be nothing more than gatherers whereby they improved their ability to scan for and find materials.  That information could then be sold to others and it had value.  Why? Because the materials in that exact state with those exact variables were finite and once mined were gone forever.  Those materials then were used in blueprints that could only use those materials resulting in limited runs of items such as blasters and armor.  Materials gone?  So were those specific outputs.  The inner moisture farmer in me was jumping for joy.

 Stars Reach is aiming to take this level of dynamic world to another level and multiply it across a universe.  That has me super excited for what they bring forward as a game.