Stars Reach feels like it might be a giant leap for MMORPGs. Read Eddie's thoughts on the upcoming game here:

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I’m skeptical of the proposed technology behind Stars Reach, but what I saw feels like the next big step in cultivating a virtual life in online gaming. The post ‘Stars Reach’ Shoots For The Stars With Exploration And Player Expression appeared first on But Why Tho?.

Stars Reach is an ambitious new MMO from the creator of Ultima Online that hopes to bring the genre back to its more creative and open-ended roots.

YouTube video by Controlled Chaos Gaming

We talk to Raph Koster, the creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, about his ambitious new MMO and how the genre at large can survive.

It's been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due. As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as "my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is."

It's been six years now since the early days of the Covid pandemic. People who were paying super close attention started hearing rumors about something going on in China towards the end of 2019 -- my earliest posts about it on Facebook were from November that year. Even at the time, people were utterly clueless about the mathematics of how a highly infectious virus spread.

YouTube video by Stars Reach

YouTube video by Blade Spirit

YouTube video by Stars Reach

So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not useful for getting better at making games, which is usually why people read articles like this. The fun of a bit of confetti exploding in front of you, and the fun of excruciating pain and risk to life and limb as you free climb a cliff are just not usefully paired together.

For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing all the plant life and flora, and we have hundreds of those assets that had to be redone. Further, they all need to grow, change in response to seasons, be able to catch fire and burn, freeze, shed leaves and die, and so on.

I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn't mean I haven't been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024…

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It's been quite a while since the site was refreshed. I was forced into it by a PHP upgrade that rendered the old customizable theme I was using obsolete. We're now running a new theme that has been styled to match the old one pretty closely, but I did go ahead and do some streamlining: way less plugins (especially ancient ones), simpler layout in several places, much better handling of responsive layouts for mobile, down to a single sidebar, and so on.

YouTube video by Controlled Chaos Gaming

Stars Reach is the lifelong dream of game design legend Raph Koster. In some ways, it’s the game he has wanted to make for over 30 years now. The culmination of all his ideas and ambitions for virtual...

YouTube video by Kaezlo

I've been remiss in posting updates on Stars Reach here. I mean, the Kickstarter finished back in March (late pledges still accepted)! Today, though, I want to brag about our awesome AI and proc gen driven worlds. Over the last few releases, we have been rolling out yet another series of improvements to the look of the worlds. And we're getting to the point where I think the alien worlds are starting to look like the covers of sci-fi novels (especially with some player help building weird structures):

YouTube video by Bingohomeslice