This new video game’s dirt sounds amazing
With some $45 million in funding and a desire to shake up the MMO scene, Stars Reach's developers are trying some exciting things.
On a Monday morning in Los Angeles earlier this year, I was reminded how exciting it is to hear Raph Koster talk about a new video game, even when he is just talking to me about digging holes in the virtual ground.
Koster is a veteran game designer, former lead developer on seminal massively multiplayer online games Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
That morning, he’d welcomed me into a high-ceilinged hotel room where the latest vessel for his big video game ideas, the MMO Stars Reach, was running on a PC.
I took a seat and took control of a character who descended onto one of Stars Reach’s galaxy of planets. I was armed with some sort of terraforming beam. Koster encouraged me to point to a rocky part of the planetary surface and shoot.
“If you tunnel through this rock, it could cave in on you, because there is over a dozen kinds of soil with different pH.”
Stars Reach, he told me, had all kinds of rocks, some 200 types of materials and minerals. “And they all behave physically correctly,” he said.
I could liquify rock into lava with my laser. It would flow, then it could cool and congeal.
Koster then explained the game’s “chronophaser” to me. I could use it to advance a rock’s “geological time,” speedily eroding it. Or I could turn back the clock and liquify it.
“If you erode, for example, marble into limestone, into chalk, into sand and then you melt the sand, it’s going to turn into glass,” he said.
This, I recalled from a couple of decades of occasionally crossing paths with Koster, was what it os like to talk to him about video games: One wild detail after another, from a man whose dream is… well, I told Koster that the great game designer Hideo Kojima once told me that the thing he was chasing in video games was the rendering of a perfect sunset.
Amid this mind-blowing demo for Stars Reach, I asked Koster what his version of Kojima’s sunset was, and he had a good answer for that, too:
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