Former Ultima Online lead wants his new MMO to satisfy the "huge, huge appetite" for "a more immersive parallel world" like the ones in Sword Art Online and Animal Crossing

gamesradar.com:

Former Ultima Online lead designer and Star Wars Galaxies creative director Raph Koster says games like Animal Crossing and anime series like Sword Art Online are proof of a demand for more immersive games, and that's what he hopes to achieve with his new MMORPG, Stars Reach.

For the uninitiated, Isekai refers to an anime or manga that primarily focuses on its main character being transported to another world, dimension, universe, what have you. In Sword Art Online, to use Koster's example, the main characters are trapped inside of a virtual reality video game while their real-life bodies are in a state of suspended consciousness. If they die in the game, they die in real life, and the only way out is to essentially beat the game.

Of course, vaguely similar ideas have been explored in other forms of media since at least the 1800s with books like The Wizard of Oz and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but Koster is obviously referring more to the relatively recent explosion of modern Isekai anime and manga.

Talking to GamesRadar+, Koster points to the Isekai boom as evidence that people are hungry for transportive virtual worlds.

"It's a fantasy of a more immersive parallel world, and players crave it, we think," Koster said. "Like, we see you. Look at, for example, all the Isekai anime, the Sword Art Onlines, and all of those. When you look at those, like the games that they show are not theme park games. They are immersive alternate realities, right?"

As someone who's made lifelong friends playing Ultima Online specifically, Koster is speaking straight to my soul here. I love the idea of a modern, more immersive, more interactive sandbox with the same depth to the social elements and open-ended PvP as Ultima Online. I don't know if that's what Koster is working to achieve with Stars Reach, but he's definitely taken notice of the popularity of another, wildly different game: Animal Crossing.

"When you look at the rise of all of these other sandboxy forms