I dont know who Ralph Koster is or why this announcement deserves the front page, but I have to say the art direction is surprisingly dull: there are plenty of indie games made with just free asset packs that have more personality than this…
Raph is a prominent game designer, one of the designers of Ultima Online and writes a lot about game design. This is interesting at least because people have high hopes that he will build another good systemic sandbox MMO.
I agree though that this looks surprisingly dull and also that the trailer doesn’t do a great job selling the systems side of things either.
Is there a better resource that talks about the systems side of things? It looks like there might be something interesting there but it's too opaque to figure out what that might be
The things I could tease out:
* Fully modifiable worlds
* "living worlds", or at least grass grows and other ecosystem-y things
* No partitioning of player base, all in same realm
Just last week I was wishing that another MMO in development would consult with Raph because they desperately need his input, wondered what he was up to these days, and then bang, this.
At the least I think he has a much higher chance of delivering than Garriot has done.
Logo looks kind of Star Trek. So does the ?cat? creature. The early animated show I guess? Is Stars Reach a unique enough name though? I'm getting results with and without the apostrophe.
