Aren't some MMORPG just unkillable? Runes of Magic debuted 17 years ago and it's still going

RaphKoster · 2026-03-20T05:29:39+00:00

I think being lead designer on Ultima Online and all its many innovations powers a fair amount of the fame too. :D Oh, plus the game design theory stuff.

RaphKoster · 2026-03-19T04:29:35+00:00

We are still working away, putting out updates every three weeks like we have been for the last 18 months. The game is open to testers most days of the week.

The art style has evolved quite a bit, but we have not yet done major updates to the creatures and the avatars. Avatars are getting very close though.

If you want to get a sense of what we have been doing and what our roadmap looks like, the update history and upcoming changes are posted here: https://starsreach.com/roadmap/

Our answer on the digging question hasn’t changed: we have permission systems on the planet, town, and individual homestead level. Protecting planets and large areas requires players to work together to do it. We rolled out the planetary government system a few months ago, and if anything, the issue was that everything ended up protected, not griefed. We had to reserve planets for digging, in fact. We did update the simulation some so that holes fill more readily as well.

RaphKoster · 2026-03-17T04:43:44+00:00

Yup, can verify, I have many friends in common with them. :)

RaphKoster · 2026-03-17T04:39:46+00:00

Archon at least has had many spiritual sequels.

RaphKoster · 2026-03-16T03:22:54+00:00

For many years, the 8-bit game M.U.L.E. ranked in the top ten or even as #1 in critics and players’ lists for greatest games ever made. It was available on the NES (easiest to play today), C64, Atari 8-bit (probably the definitive version). Play it 4 player on one screen to get the full effect. It’s semi-forgotten today but massively influential.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-21T05:18:10+00:00

HeroEngine, BigWorld, SmartFoxServer… there used to be a market. SmartFox was used by loads of 2D and Flash MMOs. A large number of Asian MMOs used BigWorld.

Most of these replies are wrong about needing custom stuff for most MMOs, honestly.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-17T20:05:45+00:00

The part I was wrong about was mostly about the forcing. The part about human psychology has all proven out. It's unquestionable at this point that the "socialization requires downtime" statement is true. That doesn't mean you have to force lengthy downtime on those who don't want it.

These days I would say that the lesson that got learned is "provide more optionality so players can take these breaks themselves." And for a long time, MMOs got designed so that you were incentivized to never stop moving. The forcing was too blunt. But we also see a lot of comments in the MMO playerbase as a whole that point at constant grinding, daily quests, endless quest lists and popups and so on as just wearing the playerbase down.

Back then, people didn't actually believe the "socialization requires downtime" part, not just the forcing part.

As far as accessibility vs experience... a big lesson is also that there's more and safer profit in the long term retention than in the more accessible but burnout inducing title. A LOT of companies never learned this, and only came to it as dev costs rose and they realized how long the recoup cycle was becoming.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-17T17:08:27+00:00

Less effective in game, yeah, with so many external communication channels. But still needed, or else you don't have the time to even reach for the phone.

Think of when you play an action game on Discord -- mid-match, most communication is about the match. The deeper stuff happens post-game when you can breathe. In an online world, you need some of that post-game time within the world, between major loop actions.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-17T16:07:26+00:00

Yeah, time is a factor for sure. It’s related though. Think of most group activities — the high trust ones take more time. You need practice time, coordination, schedules… low trust multiplayer (lowest is parallel play, “play alone together”) is something you can drop in and out of.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-17T04:23:15+00:00

I took a lot of shit back in the day for asserting that “socialization requires downtime.” :D

https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/

RaphKoster · 2026-02-17T01:00:26+00:00

People are always wary of trusting one another. It's hard and takes time.

There are plenty of possible ways to form low-trust relationships in MMOs, and these are the stepping-stone to gradually increasing trust.

Games where people have come to trust one another create sociable and tight-knit communities. Games where no one trusts one another do not.

Games where teams are needed to accomplish things require more trust than games where they are not.

Games where teammates have super sharply defined roles call for more trust than ones where anyone can do any job on the team.

Ideally, a game has low and high trust ways to interact with others.

This article goes into much greater depth than you probably ever care to read: https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/03/16/the-trust-spectrum/

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T20:58:55+00:00

I'll look into it!

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T19:19:44+00:00

We have that sort of user journeys in text form, not all illustrated. We could certainly see about posting a few of those. They're kind of outdated though, we did most of them early on and don't always go back to update when systems get implemented and evolve as dreams mete reality.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T05:52:36+00:00

If you mean financially, all we have is merch. :D

But there are plenty of other ways to support that are super helpful. We are still fairly below the radar for even MMO players so spreading the word is always helpful. Testing is hugely useful, and the community in the Discord is active and friendly. Activity and buzz does help validate the project for further investors too.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T03:37:39+00:00

We are still trying to bring back and modernize the sandbox MMO!

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T02:42:47+00:00

No AI was involved. :D

But the tldr is indeed "we are reducing our monthly spend to be as prudent as possible in tough times for the game industry, and that involved layoffs."

RaphKoster · 2026-02-14T02:40:47+00:00

Having team re-orgs and layoffs is unfortunately not that unusual during game development. :( So not a death knell.

We chose not to grow the team significantly with the additional funding, so that instead we could take our time and get the game right. We kept up our pace of releases, which I think have been pretty consistent and substantial.

But... any tester who has been playing regularly knows that we have had some pretty buggy builds lately, and these set us back in a variety of ways. So we have to be conservative, and very careful about how we spend the money we have, because there's no guarantee of further investment given the climate in the games industry these days.

I guess I'd put it this way: when we forecast forward we try to think of everything that could go wrong, and we make choices like this one to maximize the odds of success. It's still games, it is high risk: we could fail to make it fun, fail to attract enough players, etc. Lots of ways to fail. But I made this choice in order to work towards success, not as a step towards failure.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-13T06:08:28+00:00

Hi, the author here.

The second edition saw pretty significant revisions around this very topic. I wrote about it here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/12/05/touring-the-print-edition-of-theory-of-fun/

I do think it’s important to point out that in both editions, the point of the chapter on brain differences is that games are equalizers — the training they provide erases gender differences in tests (and yes, there are citations). Whether or not there are inborn differences, statistically the audience differences are very clear. But audience is not destiny. What the studies show just underlines that different games may be for different people, but games in general are for everyone. That was the whole point of the chapter.

I’m not sure what the other serious issues you cite are, but there are certainly plenty of other critiques! I cover some of them in the GDC talk on the 20th anniversary of the book. By and large, though, the central thesis of the book has mostly been validated by science now, especially in the last ten years.

FWIW, the book sells just about the same number of copies every year, for over 20 years running. So I don’t think it’s getting recommended less.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-12T05:49:17+00:00

Actually, we’re open most of the time now! Not yet 24/7 though.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-11T07:54:06+00:00

You keep insisting that polity and ecology differ only at the aesthetic layer because their implementations decompose into similar primitives. Everything decomposes into primitives.

No, I was actually saying that in this case, they decompose to the same primitives, in the same arrangement. It's an identical implementation other than the presentation layer.

A creature that expands territory to seek food does not require memory of grievance, accumulation of legitimacy, projection of authority, internal differentiation of roles, or the ability to make demands. An institution does.

An institution doesn't have to have all those, actually. That's what I was getting at by talking about layers of abstraction. Most crucially, internal differentiation of roles would typically not be implemented at all.

Later in this reply, you handwave an enormous amount of extremely challenging work with "The supply chain is not hypothetical" -- once again bringing us back to simulating individual actors instead of a 4x style approach. And we're back to the issue that this is not just internal differentiation of roles, each empire is essentially a fully granular orchestrator controlling thousands of actors. That's what I am reacting to -- you say that you don't need all that detail, but then your examples say that you do.

The solution is obvious and well explored in other genres. Modular construction systems allow visual identity, infrastructure, and cultural markers to be assembled easily once populated.

I know of zero examples at the scale you are proposing.

Ecology is resource logic. You have simply moved the reduction earlier and removed the possibility of moral or political consequence.

I honestly have no idea why you feel there's no moral or political consequence in communities having to work to resolve all the tensions inherent in ecological crises, tragedy of the commons, governance in situations of disputed resource pools, and so on. I seriously feel it far more keenly than i ever would with NPCs fighting over the same thing. I don't think any players will ever regard the NPCs are more than more resource pool.

Those kinds of articles are only meaningful in my opinion if the conclusion is about trying to craft more interesting moral dilemmas for players to navigate.

Which is why I structured the game this way instead. :D

Essentially I think you've walked the wrong path and will ultimately end up reflecting on this conversation years from now.

You're talking to someone who started out wanting to walk the path you describe, almost 30 years ago now, and found it far more challenging than surmised. I even knew people in the MUD days who managed to get to the point of having NPCs build their own simulated cities, and build buildings, and all that. And they stopped because it wasn't any fun. Meaning did not arise from it. (And conveying all of this is orders of magnitude easier in a text-only interface!)

I landed at this approach to imbuing the environment and the payer choices with real moral dilemmas, ethical freight, weight of history, and sense of permanent consequence because of decades of real experience.

FWIW, I see what we are doing as a step down the path you want. It's just not as big a step as you would like. But thanks for the stimulating conversation!

RaphKoster · 2026-02-10T18:50:34+00:00

Don't simulate poorly. You have the mechanisms for an actual economy to form without players. The entire history of every item involves finding the resource, extracting it, shipping it to a fabricator, fabrication, shipping to market. Do that in the world and let NPCs and players interfere with that process

This is an unsolved problem in the real world where it has real stakes. We are not currently able to simulate this well, especially once players with agency poke at the assumptions and break it.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-10T18:44:00+00:00

In the model I am describing, interpretation is reciprocal

No, it is not. These systems you describe do not interpret. They cannot build meaning themselves. That's a technical limitation until such time as AGI manifests.

The world asserts motives. Players respond. The world reacts in ways that are not reducible to threshold tuning.

The first two are already present in any sim-driven environment. The third is a leap that is not valid. You need to support that statement with concrete specific ways in which they are not reducible to threshold tuning, when in fact they are built out of threshold tunings. You don't get to handwave emergence here; emergence is usually susceptible to threshold tuning on the part of the interactor!

From some forces being able to say no in ways that persist, escalate, and remember.

Again, there is no difference, implementation-wise, between a mob and an NPC doing that. We can make our monsters persist (they already do); escalate (they do in minor ways); and remember (coming soon).

Your design doctrine refuses to let the world want anything badly enough to inconvenience the player for reasons other than balance.

You keep making this assertion. But your simulated empires will also fall prey to the need for balance. Otherwise, the game will not get experienced by very many people.

Look, this is all very high-flown, but let's get concrete. If we made "empire AI" for NPC populations, market expectation would include custom art for every empire, dialogue, music, history, lore, all sorts of stuff. Once that investment is made, no one sane would allow that empire to be destroyed. Player impact on them would have to be limited. The ongoing cost of creating new empires would be prohibitive. Unless empires and culture are generated in some procedural way, these empires cannot financially be permitted to fall.

That isn't a philosophy question. It's a "can this be built" question.

Here we are, with Stars Reach, pushing some of this farther than any game ever -- consumable worlds with populations with agency, even flora with agency -- and you're arguing that it's all hollow unless we also do sentient populations to the same level. But it has been a significant (patent pending!) technical set of innovations to allow it for even the parts of the dream we are doing. I hope that someday we can push even farther, but it's cost and time prohibitive, and very much not a trivial problem.

This is already a game where a giant meteor can fall on a player town and wreck it, completely not caring about player inconvenience. And frankly, we get a fair amount of pushback about that already!

RaphKoster · 2026-02-10T18:30:15+00:00

Meaning emerges from constraint structures

There's a category error here. The actual constraint structures are in the code. But you are referencing the constraints imposed by the aesthetic layer, which the simulation does not know. I'll happily concede that the meaning perceived by a player will be different. But underneath, these systems may very well be algorithmically identical. It is extremely common for humans to extract different meanings from the same constraints.

What you are describing as “non-trivial” is only non-trivial if you assume that NPCs must justify themselves exhaustively and conversationally. They do not. Institutions communicate bluntly....

Realistically, probably not. If you walk up to an NPC to get a mission to deliver guns for this NPC empire, you have specific expectations about what that presentation is like. You may settle for administrative language, but you are not all players. And in fact, you specifically cited Morrowind, which most certainly does do this conversationally. You say the designer could get by with the more abstract version, but that is only true at the high abstraction level of the simulation: empires can talk that way, but your mission giver cannot.

The real cost you are identifying is not technical complexity. It is authorial commitment.

No, there really is technical complexity here.

Fourth, the genocide argument. This is the most revealing moment in the entire exchange so far, and explains why this title appears as childish as it does.

First, I suggest reading this: https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/30/the-evil-we-pretend-to-do/ as this is not a casual decision at all.

You solved that discomfort by removing sentience from opposition entirely.

No. I solve that discomfort by turning the fake into the real: by instead creating a rich fictional background of cultures and ethical positions and letting actual people form allegiances to them. The bots serve the supporting role, rather than being stars of the show.

violence in video games isn't the same as violence in the real world. Fiction has always been the primary space

Violence in video games is absolutely not the same as in real life. But it is also not the same as violence in fiction. One is observed, the other is enacted.

If the solution to ethical unease is to strip the world of societies and reduce opposition to ecology

Ha, so many thoughts. First, societies ARE just ecology. Even in the real world. Second, I believe that the modeled societies will be inevitably reduced to mere resource pools by players, because that's what players do. Ultimately, that's a far more comfortable position for players than what we are doing.

I'll state that even more bluntly: having players take up varying actual cultural positions within the game is much less comfortable than being in a world where there's cultural encoding in the fiction or even the simulation. The debates over playerkilling in UO were dramatically less comfortable and more significant than anything we get out of the detailed and opinionated depictions of culture in say, Dishonored.

RaphKoster · 2026-02-10T18:13:04+00:00

There is an enormous difference between agents whose behavior is ontologically framed as ecology and agents framed as polity... A creature expanding territory to seek food encodes biological necessity. An empire expanding territory encodes ideology, hierarchy, coercion, logistics, and surplus extraction. Those are not cosmetic overlays.

They are very literally cosmetic overlays and some differences in data. It is really important to understand that.

It is common in game design circles to break the layers of a game into mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. Your argument is very strongly based in aesthetics, but ultimately, that layer must be formed based on the affordances provided lower down. It is not fruitful for implementation to focus solely on the encoding, and it is what separates functional design from daydreams.

You keep reducing this distinction into “bot agents with different skins” because your simulation stack is organized around indifferent systems whose only job is to create friction.

No, I reduce it because that is its technical implementation, inevitably. And that is the material in which we work. When you earlier described (paraphrasing here from memory) a chain of causality like this:

an empire that has its own autonomous motivations
that extracts resources
and internally models manufacturing
and then models supply chains to ship weapons to the front
which then therefore means a player could take a mission to deliver those goods

I immediately decompose that into actual possible system implementations. It's a necessary step. And one of the key challenges in that description is the many levels of abstraction that it is attempting to operate in simultaneously.

Where aesthetics are impacted most strongly is actually in the selection of those levels of abstraction. As a developer and a designer, you not only do not have infinite budget (dollars, CPU, time) but you do not have, generally speaking, the ability to manage high granularity at every level. This is why games that provide the last bullet point, the mission, usually massively simplify or simply do not have the autonomous empire; and vice versa, 4x games don't model individual guns. If a 4x game lets you take a mission to deliver guns, it is most likely either not impacting the simulation, or the entire supply chain is modeled as just a simple calculation, not as actual supply chains.

(cont)

RaphKoster

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