It's rare that I'll open up a preview about a game by saying "hear me out", but in the case of Stars Reach, it's appropriate. I will readily admit, upon a cursory glance of Stars Reach's Steam page, that my inner cynic (who I try not to pay too much attention to) had written it off as a bog-standard, boilerplate survival game with MMO elements.
I'm not here to tell you that Stars Reach will knock your socks off—it is a deeply ambitious thing that might burn up in atmosphere—but it's certainly far more interesting than its trailers give it credit for. And that's not even to knock the people who made them. It's a difficult game to describe, one that's trying to spin a lot of plates at once, and revive a genre of MMO that's fallen by the wayside.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing its creator, Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies)—he described it to me as a blend of SWG, RuneScape, Eve, and Ultima Online. The makeup of Stars Reach is a web of procedurally-generated planets that players can lay claim to and establish rules over.
The vision being that said player...
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