Space games require lots of compromise

In space, you can't have it all.

I love space games.

Set a game in space and I’m instantly interested.

I’ve played them all (unless they are scary), ranging from powerful Indie titles like Tacoma, to simulation type games like Elite, all the way to your open world adventure like No Man’s Sky or Starfield.

The one thing I’ve identified through my thousands of hours in space gaming, is that this genre requires a lot of sacrifice and compromise to make it work, to make it fun.

Because, you can’t have it all.

Space is massive, and that means that there is a lot of space to fill (pun not intended).

To make the perfect space game, would be to make the ultimate open world game. A game where you can visit multiple planets and star systems. Land on any spot, on any planet. You’d need multiple cities and towns, a never ending stream of unique assets for terrain, architecture, vehicles, humans, aliens, and weather.

You’d effectively have to create a game that had multiple GTA V sized games inside of it, at a bare minimum.

It’s simply not possible. We lack the technology, the game budgets and methodologies to even pull that off.

So sacrifices have to be made.

Elite Dangerous, offered over a billion star systems to travel to, with millions of planets you could land on. What it couldn’t offer were towns or cities to walk around in. Meaning RPG like quests, NPCs or a story. They couldn’t even give you the ability to walk around your own ship (something I’m personally very upset by).

Starfield, a game I poured over 300 hours into and enjoyed, made plenty of sacrifices, much to its own detriment. To offer a curated space with one thousand planets, and ship building, a storyline, NPC’s, companions, and populated locations, meant that those ‘cities’ were no bigger than a small town. It meant that whenever you landed on a planet, it would procedurally generate locations for you, which get repetitive pretty quickly.

Not to mention, because the game was aimed at the mainstream audience, they couldn’t have you realistically fly to places, because that would take too long and get boring, so they added fast travel which basically removed much of the magic involved in space flight.

Sacrifices have to be made, and every studio understands that, though much to everyone’s chagrin, the marketing teams do not. Every single one of these games promises the universe and quite predictably fans are upset when reality hits.

Remember the launch of NMS? Elite tanked their own player base when they simply couldn’t deliver what they promised, and Starfield is quite a milk toast game that did upset a decent number of players.

I don’t knock these games for trying, and they get very good at sticking to their thing, but I can’t help but feel like space enthusiasts like me, are never quite satisfied, because its so clear what we can’t have.

Despite all that, I still love the genre, compromises and all. I can’t speak highly enough of the more conservative efforts in the genre. Loved Tacoma, Observatory, Star Trucker, and Hardspace Shipbreaker. Not to mention the over 100 hours in NMS, 300 hours in Starfield, and 1200 in Elite Dangerous.

O7 Commander.