Former Ultima Online lead says MMOs have ‘been in a rut for a long time’, and that cozy games like Animal Crossing have been filling a non-theme park hole

The golden age of MMOs is no more—while it does still get new entries as a genre, we’re long past the gold rush of the early 2010s, where it seemed like everyone and their mum was trying to make a new multiplayer world to jog around in. The handful of big boys remaining aren’t relics by any means—they still have new, fresh expansions and bustling playerbases—but there’s a reason why most popular current MMOs are at least 5-10 years old.

That’s something that Raph Koster, an MMO designer vet who worked on the original granddaddy of MMOs, Ultima Online, has observed in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+. In it, he discusses his upcoming MMO, Stars Reach (there’s not a missing apostrophe there, before you ask) and its place within the industry.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Stars Reach seems poised to be one of them sandbox MMO jobbies—resurrecting the same kind of player-generated-content vibes that Star Wars: Galaxies had going for it back in the day, but with all the fancy modern tech and base-building stuff you’d expect from something like Minecraft.

That Star Wars: Galaxies thing is an apt comparison, too—since, as promised on its Kickstarter, there’ll be lots of non-combat skills to level up. The promised roster of potential jobs includes (but is not limited to) things like explorers, crafters, botanists, merchants, and journalists. Finally, some representation!

This is important context for a quote I’m about to gently pick apart, wherein Koster states that MMOs have “been in a rut for a long time … We haven’t seen a lot of innovation in the space. There haven’t been that many major titles over the last decade or two. The template set by World of Warcraft continues to kind of dominate, and it’s narrowed down what used to be a much more diverse genre.”

Koster theorises that it’s down to ‘cosy’ games (your Animal Crossings and such) giving players what they used to get out of more socially-driven MMOs. “We’ve seen [what] people want to do in Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley and all these other kinds of cozy games which are also an offshoot of sandbox MMOs, so all of those kinds of things are mostly absent these days from theme park MMOs.”

Koster does have a point—the socially driven, sandbox-style MMO where players can properly carve out a niche for themselves has, indeed, given over to the theme park-style gameplay, where killing stuff is the focus and everything else is sort of secondary. However, I think it’s a bit of a misnomer to say they’re absent. The people who yearn for this stuff have just made their own second world. With blackjack, and night clubs.

Most MMOs have a housing system, one which allows them to create some pretty outstanding stuff. Even WoW, which has been dragging its feet on that front, is ramping up to do player housing in the future. Coming from FF14 primarily myself, I can say for certain that player housing is a huge part of the ecosystem—potentially even to its detriment.

While systems-driven roleplay classes have gone the way of the dodo, a lot of that energy has been funneled into roleplay communities. Games like Final Fantasy 14 still have night clubs, markets, and tournaments—go into the right server on World of Warcraft, and you’ll see players emergently doing similar. It’s just firmly in the realm of imagination (and interface addons) now.

In other words, the “fantasy of a more immersive parallel world” Koster cites is still very much alive and well and being held up by the genre’s more dedicated digital LARPers, but as far as a game where the mechanics themselves support that kind of stuff? Player housing aside, it’s true—no-one’s modernised that old-school template yet. Koster’s adamant, though, that he doesn’t want to pull a Wildstar and try to rehash things “the way that they were 20 years ago”. Stars Reach has already soared over its initial Kickstarter goal, and I’m keen to see if his team can pull it off.