Interview: MMO Pioneer Raph Koster on Stars Reach and the Future of Sandbox Game Design

Few designers have shaped the MMORPG genre as profoundly as Raph Koster. From Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies to decades of experimentation with virtual worlds, Koster has consistently argued that MMOs are at their best when players create their own stories rather than simply follow scripted quests. With Stars Reach, his new company Playable Worlds is attempting to bring that philosophy into a new era, combining persistent sandbox gameplay with cloud-native technology designed to support living worlds that permanently evolve through player actions.

Unlike traditional MMORPGs built around static environments and linear progression, Stars Reach places players inside a dynamic galaxy where forests regrow, ecosystems evolve, settlements expand or collapse, and every object exists as part of a persistent simulation rather than a fixed world. The game also abandons rigid character classes in favor of flexible progression systems that encourage players to become explorers, builders, traders, politicians, or warriors as their interests evolve over time.

We spoke with Raph Koster about why now is finally the right time to build the MMO he's envisioned for more than three decades, the cloud technology powering Stars Reach's persistent worlds, lessons learned from Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, designing large-scale ecosystem simulations, and why the future of MMORPGs may lie in player-driven communities rather than theme-park quest design.

You’ve described Stars Reach as a game you’ve been dreaming about building for 30 years. What makes this the right moment, creatively and technologically, to finally build it?

Raph Koster, CEO at Playable Worlds: There are two things, really. First is the maturity of cloud technology. I started working with cloud-based tech when I did Metaplace back in 2006. MMOs are fundamentally server-driven games; that’s where the worlds you explore live. Cloud tech has opened up the potential for new ways of building MMOs that leverage the cloud more. Streaming assets down on the fly, leveraging cloud compute on demand for generating content on the fly or running more sophisticated AI for world simulation, and in general, the ability to make worlds that feel more alive.

The other side of it is that it felt like MMOs were finally free of the fever dream of imitating World of Warcraft. The rise of sandboxy gameplay in multiple genres at once showed me that maybe the time was ripe to try to show the potential of MMOs for broader gameplay. In a world that has been through Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Valheim, No Man’s Sky… It’s clear that there’s interest and demand for more than killing orcs over and over.

Stars Reach is being pitched as a modern sandbox MMO that brings back the freedom and community feeling of older online worlds. What do you think today’s MMOs have gained over the years, and what do you think they’ve lost?

Raph Koster: I’ve often said that MMOs cut more gameplay from MUDs than they preserved. It’s sort of the optimization that you make when you chase a particular market. You streamline things, and along the way you lose stuff – sometimes stuff that is really core to what makes MMOs special.

The unique thing that MMOs bring is a persistent world, and large numbers of people. There’s nothing wrong with smaller survival games, but they don’t have the large numbers. There’s nothing wrong with looter-shooters, but they don’t have the persistent world.

No other form of game offers the canvas that comes with having both of those things. I hear people say things like “social media means MMOs aren’t special anymore,” but they don’t have the world there either.

If we embrace the unique qualities, design games that actually make use of the persistent world, that actually make use of the large populations, I think that there’s enormous novel territory to explore.

The game is built around a living galaxy where player actions leave lasting marks. How do you design systems that create meaningful consequences without letting the world become chaotic or unreadable over time?

Raph Koster: Ironically, the chaotic mess that a player leaves behind after having modified the world is very readable! But it’s still an issue we had to tackle, of course.

A big part of it is making sure that the largest impacts aren’t done by solo players, but by the accumulation of player actions, collective play like building towns. We built systems that encourage players to work together to make big changes – or prevent them, if they choose, by claiming land and setting rules or just repairing it. The most active guild in the game right now is actually a nature conservancy that repairs damage to the ecosystems.
We also have little failsafes – forests grow back, for example, as long as there is enough still there. When you tunnel, you leave behind tailings, and these are pretty loose, tend to flow and fill holes, and gradually turn back into dirt and grow grass.

Stars Reach features ecosystems shaped by climate, wildlife, rivers, forests, fire, resources, and player behavior. What were the biggest design and technical challenges in making those simulations work at MMO scale?

Raph Koster: It is essentially brand-new technology that hasn’t existed before, even in other fields. We had to solve a lot of technical issues to even make it possible. We have increased its speed a million-fold from the original versions, and we have taken it through multiple programming languages along the way.

In terms of the design, it’s been less about the challenges with the system itself, which was instantly fun to play with! As usual with MMOs, it was about what players can do to each other through the system: flooding or burying each other’s houses, or melting lava near someone. It’s tricky to catch indirect damage done, in general, and having a more dynamic world made it even more so.

Playable Worlds’ cloud-native technology is described as enabling a global persistent universe on a single server with no resets. What does that architecture make possible from a game design standpoint that traditional MMO infrastructure could not?

Raph Koster: The big thing is actually the real persistence coupled with streaming dynamic objects. All the terrain is modifiable, but persistent. Every object you see is streamed down from the server, which means it can change, it can go away, new ones can appear, and any of them can have behavior. Even a fence post could therefore be running behaviors and act like a monster in other games. None of it is a baked static mesh.

So what does that mean to a player? Every object in the world can be interactive. Everything you place can be there tomorrow. Everything you see can change and evolve. The world isn’t static anymore. And that opens up, well, whatever you want. Castle sieges where you blow holes in the wall? Forest fires? Digging defensive trenches against enemies? A crystalline entity that spawns and spreads across the landscape and consumes it? Really, it’s whatever you want. You don’t have to work around the static mesh you built because there just isn’t one.

The game has no fixed classes and encourages players to become explorers, builders, traders, fighters, leaders, or something in between. How do you balance that kind of freedom while still giving players clear goals and a sense of progression?

Raph Koster: Each track basically has its own XP and its own sense of progression through a skill tree. So that much is pretty straightforward: you progress down a track with pretty clear goals and new ability unlocks. If anything, the confusion players usually feel is in picking one to start with. Our approach is to give them a sampling platter at the start – you get to do and try them all, then if you double down on something you like, you get on the progression track.

The trick is to not have the tracks in competition with one another. There isn’t any such thing as balancing a chef against a rifleman; they just do different things. In practice, things like the game economy end up causing some of the balance, in the sense that players who crave making money in-game will gravitate towards filling niches that aren’t being served.

Player-driven economies and settlement building can create some of the most memorable MMO stories, but they can also be difficult to balance. What lessons from Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies are informing the economy, crafting, and governance systems in Stars Reach?

Raph Koster: The biggest is probably about wealth concentration. SWG had a real issue with specific very successful players essentially locking up markets, dominating the economy for a server. So we are paying a lot of attention to the idea that scale should increase risk of collapse. If players overextend by having too many shops, too many mines, whatever, the costs of that should be such that they run the risk of losing it all. Treating it as a push-your-luck game is what people do in the real world, after all. Getting big should increase your overhead, not reduce it.

We have similar mechanics everywhere – for example, running a big city should carry with it a lot more costs than just having a house.

Stars Reach is entering Early Access this summer, with major systems like factions, political structures, PvP, and the planet-eating hive mind planned for later. How are you thinking about staging such an ambitious sandbox experience during Early Access?

Raph Koster: Actually, the planet-eating hive mind will be there! But yes, we have always said that PvP was a post-launch feature and that we were focused on the PvE experience first. Political systems are in already, actually, but there’s more to come.

Our philosophy in general is to get the core in, and build on it. That political system is present, but there’s much more that can be built on top of what’s there today. It’s better to build atop a solid foundation. In the case of a big sandbox like this, the foundation has to be pretty large. That’s what we have been testing for the last year and a half.

Community behavior can shape sandbox MMOs as much as the mechanics themselves. How are you designing Stars Reach to encourage cooperation, discovery, and player-led stories while still accounting for conflict, exploitation, or griefing?

Raph Koster: Sometimes, it’s simple things, like anyone being able to revive someone killed. That earns you leadership experience, which goes into being able to lead parties effectively via special skills, and eventually to running guilds and cities. We have soft grouping, so you get XP bonuses just from being near someone else doing the same thing as you. Little prosocial design things like that add up to a big difference in time. Focusing on non-zero-sum experiences, so that everyone comes out a winner.
If you empower players, the stories just happen.

Looking ahead, what would success look like for Stars Reach if players truly embrace the idea of discovering, building, governing, defending, and permanently changing the galaxy together?

Raph Koster: It looks like a community, doing the things that communities do. Cities growing, and sometimes failing. Players having adventures and making friends and setting goals and reaching them and sometimes not making it. It looks like an alternate reality where you can be someone you aren’t, in places you couldn’t be. 

That’s the beauty of it. We don’t really know. That’s the point.