Use It or Risk Falling Out of Practice

Under the leadership of Raph Koster, Playable Worlds is steadily advancing towards the release of their MMORPG, Stars Reach. They have regularly updated us through blogs and videos highlighting their development decisions. Although some of these discussions may appear trivial, such as discussions about movement, their approach to these apparently ordinary elements is quite revealing. It suggests how they might tackle future, more significant development challenges.

Observing their work from the outside has been a fascinating experience, and today is no different as their latest blog provides insight into skills and progression in Stars Reach.

It may seem straightforward: “if you use it, you gain XP”. However, it’s slightly more complex than that. Naturally, most MMO players are familiar with the concept of leveling up their skills with weapons, much like how it was done in World of Warcraft. But there’s a catch: you have to prove utility.

Understandably, if you fight with a weapon, you gain XP. Randomly swinging your sword at nothing won’t yield any results. But, when you take risks and engage in combat, you earn sword XP. And it’s not just with weapons; all skills follow the same rule – you have to demonstrate usefulness.

Consider crafting in previous MMORPGs; it’s likely that you discovered a pattern or recipe that would increase your level, made lots of them until no more gains were possible, and then repeated the process with the next pattern that gave XP. However, this won’t be the case in Stars Reach.

Remember, you must prove your usefulness. You gain XP when building weapons if they are actually used in the game. If you build camps and they are used, you level up. This philosophy applies to every skill and skill tree. Furthermore, you can freely level any skill tree and unlock “Specials” which are unique abilities associated with the tool or trait you’re learning. Bear in mind, you can only enable 2 Specials at a time, but you can learn all of them if you wish.

You have the liberty to learn every skill if you choose. But, you can’t use all of them simultaneously. Only a certain number of skills can be active at one time. To learn new ones, one of your existing skills will have to take a back seat and will be subject to atrophy. Upon reactivating it, you are not required to start learning from scratch, but you’ll have to refine your skill to return to maximum efficiency.

The above chart offers an idea of what to expect, though it may not be an exact representation of what players will see. However, we can look forward to exploring the first few “player-facing” trees in upcoming tests.

It’s quite a novel concept. Whether MMO players will embrace the idea of skills atrophying is uncertain. The principle of needing to brush up on skills if you haven’t used them in a while makes sense in reality. However, in a game setting, adopting “real world” behaviors can sometimes be tedious.

That being said, I’m still on board for this unique approach. Despite the chance that I might sometimes find myself in need of taking some time to re-learn certain skills, I am excited to see how this plays out.