Can I Kick It? Yes You Can!

On Friday I got an email from Playable Worlds. It was brief and enigmatic. "We’ve got some announcements to share", it said. "Join us tomorrow for our Fireside Chat".

These chats are a regular event in which Raph Koster talks about the game, how it's progressing and what's being planned for the future. So far I haven't felt the need to attend. Anything I need to know will come out in a more concise form soon afterwards and I've always found listening to people talk a less efficient way to learn things than reading. That's why I stopped going to lectures halfway through my first term at university.

Sometimes, though, you just want to hear about stuff as it happens, not read about it later. And I was curious, especially when  a second email arrived the next day, announcing a new build and a four-hour test and reminding us all of an "important announcement during the Fireside" That's Playable Worlds' bold type there, not mine.

Obviously, something was up, not least because the email went on to suggest "we expect a lively conversation and plenty of questions." "Lively" in this context is usually code for angry or upset so it seemed likely whatever was going to be announced could be controversial. I had a few ideas what that might be. None of them correct, as it turned out.

There's no point my building this up to some kind of big reveal because obviously anyone who's interested in Stars Reach will already know what the big announcement was. MassivelyOP had a news item up about it almost before Raph finished talking. I'd have loved to be able to be that quick with my response but the Fireside didn't start until 10.30pm for me and I was working all day Sunday, so this is the first chance I've had to get to it.

Just in case anyone reading this really doesn't know what happened, let me tell you now. There's going to be a Kickstarter for Stars Reach. 

Is that big news? Is it a big deal? Depends on where you stand, I guess. In the MOP piece Bree points out that Raph said only last June that there were "no plans" to do a Kickstarter. If you were of a mind to be upset about it you might work that up into something but anyone who has even a basic understanding of  interview technique would know that "having no plans" at best means "we might" but more likely "we will but we're not quite there yet".

The actual campaign doesn't begin until February but there's a landing page up already. It's worth a read. It lays out what the game is aiming to be in clearer terms than I remember seeing before. 

As one of the "hundreds of players who have been playing for six months", I can't say I recognize everything in the lengthy description of  howStars Reach is supposedly going to look when it's done but most of what I have seen for myself in the pre-alpha is fairly represented. There are a few things I'd quibble with but on balance it seems like a pretty straightforward pitch.

And it needs to be. One of the things Raph came back to repeatedly in the Fireside was the degree of suspicion in which many gamers and especially MMO players hold Kickstarter projects these days. He used the word "burned" several times when talking about gamers' previous experiences with the funding platform and the first person from the audience to raise a question after Raph finished mentioned Star Citizen as an example.

It's true the shadow of huge, over-ambitious projects like Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation or Camelot Unchained looms menacingly over any would-be MMO developer who dares to ask for money for a game as yet unmade. These are games that promised to be done in a year or two but which are still deep in early development, often behind firmly-closed doors, years going on decades later.

Raph took trouble to emphasize the reasons Stars Reach is not one of those kinds of projects and he makes a convincing case. The game has been in development for five years already, something I'm not sure was widely known and which does explain a lot about how "quickly" the current, quite playable build appeared. 

More importantly, it is playable and people are playing it. And enjoying it. Without an NDA, I might add, all of which significantly increases confidence.

He also says it's "5/6 of the way through development", by which I have to assume he means by some specific, technical measure. I can't see how the game as we know it now has 5/6 of the content, or even the systems, described in the pitch.

Undoubtedly, though, there is a real game there already. It's in pre-alpha right now but Raph says alpha is very close and Early Access ought to come within the year. Based on other games I've played that label themselves "alpha" or "Early Access" that seems entirely plausible. 

The main thing that's missing would seem to be scale. The current game has four planets whereas the pitch promises "a galaxy". That is disturbingly similar to Star Citizen, which proposed to have a hundred star systems but after ten years has only managed two.

Nevertheless, I think a much more apposite comparison and one that reflects much more favorably on Playable Worlds would be Project: Gorgon. That game also had a very playable micro-version available well before it started asking anyone for money and, although it famously failed to fund on the first two attempts, once the threshold was reached on the third Kickstarter, most that was promised quite quickly came to pass.

People who pledged Project: Gorgon seem to have been satisfied with what they got, by and large, so there's proof it is possible to run a Kickstarter for an MMORPG and not leave everyone feeling let down or lied to. That said, it doesn't happen as often as it should. 

Mostly, the history of kickstarted MMOs is a trail of unfinished or abandoned projects, scarred by a handful of outright scams. I'm sure that the huge majority of failures come down to a combination of wildly over-optimistic expectations and very poor estimates of the costs and challenges involved. In this regard, Playable Worlds has a considerable advantage. Of all the big names in his corner of the field, Raph has a deserved reputation for being the least hyperbolic and the most realistic. Then again, Dave Georgeson is on the team...

There were several intriguing revelations during Raph's Fireside talk on Saturday, among them the confirmation that "hundreds" were in the testing program but that "tens of thousands" had signed up. The disparity, it was explained, was because Playable Worlds couldn't provide the server capacity for the numbers of people who wanted to join the tests and even if they could it would have meant effectively running the equivalent of a live MMO.

I have pondered here before about the potential popularity of Stars Reach and this casts considerable light on the reality. "Tens of thousands" sounds like a lot but it needs to be contrasted with numerous reported pre-testing sign-ups for MMOs like Once Human or Tarisland or Lost Ark, which regularly run an order of magnitude larger and not infrequently two orders.

For all its ambition, Stars Reach is a small project with a small audience. It seems from what Raph says that the numbers it has already could provide a sustainable income for the eventual live game but even so one of the main reasons for the Kickstarter is to draw eyes. Indeed, I suspect publicity is the main reason.

Raph was very clear about the difficulty of finding funding in the current climate. He confirmed  that being able to show evidence of player interest by way of metrics like Steam wishlists and now Kickstarter followers is going to be instrumental in securing further funding from outside investors. The pledge money we provide is not going to pay the bills.

Or that's how it sounded. Of course, as yet we don't know how much Raph is going to ask for. Again, he was very clear in his talk about the dangers of setting the funding bar too high and, by failing to reach it, ending up with nothing at all.

We'll find out next month how well he's judged it. I am already decided on pledging although it will be at a fairly nominal level, more to show support than in expectation of any eventual reward. I will also almost certainly buy in to Early Access, when it arrives, which I hope will indeed be later this year, always provided pricing is reasonable.

I'm still broadly in favor of Early Access, despite it's many well-known problems. When it comes to MMORPGs, I like to get in as early as possible, partly for the blogging opportunities but also because, in my estimation, the majority provide less fun the more "developed" they become. There are exceptions but it's been my experience more often than not.

Raph didn't mention anything about the future of the current round of testing or how that might change as the game transitions into alpha. So long as I have access, I intend to carry on testing and writing about what I see and do in the game, although while the testing schedule remains as it has been, my opportunities to engage with it will continue to be limited. I couldn't find time to take even a short look at the new build that dropped on Saturday, for example, and I would have liked to because there were reportedly some substantial changes.

Overall, I feel Stars Reach is coming along nicely, even if I still have my doubts whether, as a Live game, it will look anything much like the rosy picture Raph paints. I suspect there will be a lot more mayhem, anarchy and chaos than he's suggesting. As a big fan of emergent gameplay, however, I doubt that will bother him all that much and it will certainly give me something to blog about so I'm fine with it, too.

Until we can all get in and play under some form of expanded testing or Early Access, Raph and the team would very much like everyone who's even a little bit interested to go sign up at Kickstarter to make that interest public and thereby convince some people with real money to send some of it his way.

I'm going to go and add my name to the list. I would have done it already but it turned out I was on the wrong email account or something. So far, only 1,163 people have signed up but it was 1,139 when I started this post so at least it's going in the right direction.

Next step - the Kickstarter itself. I'm curious to see both the pledges and the target. Meet back here when we find out.