"You can literally reroute a river into a desert and cause it to bloom": Star Wars Galaxies lead says of his new sandbox MMO Stars Reach

Julian Benson — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Raph Koster's career spans the evolution of the modern MMO. Creative lead on MUDs, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and EverQuest 2, the systems and mechanics his teams developed live on in every active MMO today and many games besides. "People made fun of me for having dancing in Galaxies," Koster tells me. "Fortnite ought to give me royalties."

But the promise of his new game, Stars Reach is a scale bigger than everything he's made before. A sci-fi MMO set in a procedurally generated universe, where every world is a sandbox composed of material that behaves according to real-world physics. Feeling playful? Freeze a lake to create an ice rink. Feeling industrious? Boil it to become steam to power machines you've constructed. Looking for something a little deadlier? Electrify a salt deposit to create chlorine gas.

While Stars Reach has an overriding story about invading aliens that will appear on planets through emergent events, forcing players to band together to save one of their instanced, procedurally generated worlds before it falls to the mysterious Cornucopia, my discussion with Koster focused on the sandbox underpinning developer Playable Worlds' MMO.

Most immediately, why bother?

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"You can literally reroute a river into a desert and cause it to bloom": Star Wars Galaxies lead says of his new sandbox MMO Stars Reach