Open-world survival games with a heavy online component abound nowadays. You’d have to live in a cave, still only playing retro classics, not to have noticed that. It’s also hard to deny that publisher Snail Games is among the few that seem to have cracked the code thanks to hits like Ark: Survival Evolved (remastered as Ark: Survival Ascended), which has a sequel on its way too. Now, its next huge project, For The Stars, is taking online adventurers to outer space.
The new “open universe” AAA title comes from Snail Games USA and has been in the works for almost four years now. Earlier this week, we were lucky enough to sit down to have a chat with Primus Majda, game director on For The Stars, who was quick to point out the main difference between their game and other big titles in the same space, such as No Man’s Sky: “We want you to really feel like you’re a scientist exploring the universe and revealing things for the first time, but you’re also expanding into that universe as you find unique and interesting things. And so we’ve taken some elements from 4X games into our game, and that kind of merging between like a massive multiplayer sandbox experience with kind of elements of 4X, but it’s really played like a sandbox survival game. I think that’s something that’s really going to be compelling to the audiences.”
A survival MMO adopting elements from a genre as radically different as 4X strategy is an enticing pitch, to say the least, and we were curious to learn more about that angle. It seems to be linked to the game’s core premise and narrative, and Majda didn’t shy away from elaborating on that a bit more: “The explosion of exploration has just been unlocked. And there’s a ton of worlds out there to explore, and it’s a rapid frontier style expansion to find those worlds, unlock their secrets. Each one has its own unique secret elements to it, and then use that to fuel technology advancement that allows you to go to new planets that you couldn’t reach before, that you couldn’t survive on before, that have challenges that you’re now learning how to overcome.”
Of course, another big question whenever a huge space exploration game is presented is whether there are other sentient species in the universe or not. According to Majda, both living species that we’ll interact with and an extinct civilization (a classical sci-fi plot point by now) factor into the journey and the progression systems: “There are human technologies that you can advance, that you can research. You can find new resources that allow you to research new ways of doing things and new ways of crafting, new ways of building… But then if you do come across an alien ruin, then you can set up an outpost, spend some time, you know, real-world time researching that location, unlocking its secrets. Maybe those secrets are new technologies. Maybe they are a factory or facility that has been lost to time that you can actually renovate or bring back to life if you spend enough time studying it, and that might give you access to new resources or change the gameplay on that particular planet.”
For The Stars appears to be focusing, first and foremost, on the wonder of discovery and learning from the scientific process. But of course, different types of players come into these games looking for different types of experiences…
On the matter of base building, a major element in ongoing online hits such as ARK or Fallout 76, it seems that Snail Games wants to make sure to cover all the basics we’ve come to expect from the subgenre while also giving players the tools to more easily create actual living hubs, something we’ve already seen in Fallout 4 mods like Sim Settlements.
“We have at one end of the spectrum the ability to manipulate down to the smallest level of detail what goes into a room, and this might be something that you use for your base or for your own personal room, and then at the macro level we’re really trying to allow people to build eventually cities that are populated by NPCs.”
In turn, all the promised options regarding base and town building made us wonder whether the more dedicated but solitary players will be able to experience everything For The Stars has to offer on their own. Slightly bad news here; right now, Snail Games isn’t looking at that option. Majda, however, promises the universe is “segmented” into different areas of gameplay: “Some of them might be more oriented towards an individual. Maybe other people can’t join that unless you invite them in. And, you know, maybe that’s one planet or one solar system.”
He then goes on to completely acknowledge the team knows some players aren’t as socially active as others, so For The Stars will try to cater to both types of space explorers.
For the more social crowd, factions/organizations are confirmed to be a thing and are actually the “preferred way” of playing the game: “We have a lot of different roles that you can perform, not necessarily explicit roles, but implicitly somebody’s going to want to be the expert in, for example, exploration for your team or crafting or scientific research, and they’re going to know the most about that. And there’s a lot of stuff to juggle. So if you try to do that alone, the progress is going to be a little bit slower. But if you have a team to do it, you can kind of specialize in different areas. It’s going to be a lot more effective more quickly. And, you know, that’s where our priority of focus is right now… trying to build that kind of collaborative experience.”
On top of these interactions with other players and groups, explorers will also be able to align with certain NPC factions and either earn their favor or become their enemy.
What about the technology powering all of Snail Games’ ambitions and ‘next-gen’ MMO design? There have been upgrades, Majda confirms, and in fact, the team is trying to achieve impressive things that haven’t been tried before on this scale.
“We actually switched on Unreal 5. It allows us to achieve a really beautiful world… but we are trying to do something that’s unique in the industry that we haven’t seen done successfully yet. One of those things is, voxel gameplay on a spherical planet in a stylized, realistic-looking game… We’ve worked a lot on optimization, certain planet sizes, maybe you can’t dig all the way through the core right now, but other planets, if they’re small enough, you can literally dig out the entire planet, you know, any presence in the universe, you can transport those resources to other planets. So that’s one of our main technological achievements that we’ve accomplished. That’s gonna set us apart from a lot of other games out there; it’s a really difficult thing to achieve.”
As impressive as all this sounds, it may raise some alarms, as many open-world survival games have struggled (and continue to struggle) with performance as the direct result of the creative vision overtaking the actual tech capabilities of the development teams. Snail Games is well aware of this, and it appears the process when implementing new tech and huge leaps has been quite methodical:
“Right out of the gate, we understood that what we’re trying to do is very ambitious. And there’s a reason other teams haven’t done this before, because it’s really hard… That sort of technology requires investment up at the front. But we also have to be constantly aware of performance. We’re not going to be able to get close to launch and then say, ‘OK, guys, let’s optimize it and realize we made a bunch of mistakes that are, you know, that we can’t walk back on.’ And so we’re making sure that every time we add something, that it doesn’t affect the performance overall or that we know what the effect is so that we can reach our goals.”
This also ties into Majda’s own past experiences in huge companies such as Riot Games or Treyarch. “It’s always good to have a backup plan,” he quickly states when asked about the good and bad of AAA development.
“You have certain features you don’t think are going to work, or you’re not sure are going to work, but you think they’re really compelling, and so you want to put them out there. But what if they don’t work? What are you going to do? Are you just going to cancel the game? Are you going to ship something that no one likes?”
Working on a project as massive as For The Stars surely requires having backup plans just in case, as we’ve seen time and again players outright reject conceptually compelling features and systems, such as entire PvP systems in other survival games. For Majda and his team, it appears that having the ability to pivot quickly if needed is a priority: “You can’t really wait until the last moment to figure that out. Modern development is so much different than when I got into the industry.”
Before we wrapped up the conversation, we also asked Majda about the possibility of cross-play, which has become kind of a must for online games in recent times, and the answer was positive, saying that it will be included. (official channels haven’t confirmed it yet though). As for cross-progression, navigating such waters might be trickier due to all the parties involved: “We have really good relationships with both Xbox and PlayStation, with Snail being one of the biggest publishers in terms of individual games that we have on Steam and on those platforms. So hopefully we’ll be able to negotiate something that allows us to do that. But that would be my guess is that the difficulty is not technological, it has more to do with getting permission from everybody involved.”
As for what to expect from the game in the coming months in terms of marketing and online activity, there’s nothing set in stone, but we’ve been told to expect to hear more from the team sooner rather than later, as Snail Games isn’t looking at going silent for a year or so in such a crowded and fast-moving market. It’s safe to say, however, the devs still have a long road ahead of them, and we walked out of the interview excited to see it all come together, as Majda and his team sure are shooting for the stars.
For The Stars will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Further launch details haven’t been shared yet, but there should be some gameplay tests before launch.
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