😯 Are you saying it's not now? When did that happen?? Heck, I'm old enough to remember when gaming was merely an illicit thrill you got from using the computer your parents had bought you "to help with your homework" for anything other than work. Man, good times.

😀 Hated physics as a general subject but LOVED TV programs about science and astrophysics, never had Lego Technic but OMG Superheroes! I still can't get enough of my superheroes!

🙁 Sadly, I think you may be right there. Which is why sites like this, that bring us together, give us a place to hang out and interact, are desperately important.

Quoted for truth. Good post, slayniac.

I still dream of this Slayniac, and hopefully in about 10-20yrs we can all have a get together of a flight into space and after that my life will be complete and I can die a happy man.

100% agree here. I think its a nice learning experience watching kids grow and react to things and what interests them. And the one thing that they lack today is a IMAGINATION. That is missing from out youth today. I think that is why the 30+ gamer today is so passionate about there games is because we still have this and we had to. I didn't have computers until I was older, I had a backyard, sticks and friends and we played our asses off outside and had a blast with what we imagined up as play. Today it is almost a punishment to go and play outside for my kids.

Easy and mindless gaming does sell. Out of all my kids friends that come over and play on the PS3 and I talk to them about games there has only been one kid that actually says they want more story and great single player experience and says MP gets old.

Only one?! 😮

No wonder most games have a bland storyline, the devs are pressured to focus on graphics and multiplayer...

The only game I can think of to this day with a great story was C&CYuri's Revenge, which came out 9 years ago.

Maybe Space Sim is out of interest because there is no? game outside that tries to combine FPS/Browser/Online game characteristics. So players can flip from one to the other. How great to trade from one planet to the other. And then leave your ship a make a walk through the alien milk-bars?

It would be not an easy task to manage but I believe it would be possible.

Anyway. I agree that most of the players now out there are changed there behaviour and are only consumers. They are mostly happy with what they have as long as they have larger/bigger/stronger gaming accounts as the others. And trying to reach that is there living.

30 years ago the people had cars and houses. Today they have gameaccounts.

I think people mainly do want this, if you combined Mass Effect with Freelancer you would have a good game in my opinion but it is all a huge risk. And with game budgets for A list games going into the several hundred million dollar range it is hard to warrant the cost for a scifi game of that caliber. One that might come close is Salvation Prophecy or Northstar (if they complete this one).

Well what do you guys think of this (sorry, don't know how to link in a wmv)

http://www.galaxyempire.com/DemoVids/GE_Demo001.wmv

I am in the process of mixing space and fps style play. Already built the first mission in the story line as well. On top of that the video posted above is from less than 3 months of coding...

I believe the problem is that people now have short attention spans, either give them instant gratification or they won't play it. If it takes even the slightest modicum of intelligence to figure a game out then it's not fun. I spent 3 weeks learning how to play Wing Commander properly and loved the storyline. Hopefully I can do the same with the link I posted above and hopefully I don't suck as a story maker.

BTW, the above is a mix of Freelancer and my Galaxy Empire series. It includes both SP and MP modes, also MP will have the story available for players to play through online.

Its an impressive looking demo, nice one 🙂

Is the ground texture from Googlemaps?

Hahaha, you are the only one to get close, actually it's a composited image from Google Earth of Atlanta, Georgia...

Looks good.

This is the kind of game I have in mind.

Artemis for PSN & Xbox in a Persistant massive universe would be cool.

I apologise now, I havn't read the whole thread yet, I wanted to post this whilst the thought is fresh in my mind. I promise to read it right after posting this.

I don't understand why the genre is not more popular, and why there aren't more veriations of it out there. I can think of several from the top of my head which have either completely gone from the games market or are so rare I can't find them on google.

With the popularity of Multi Player and specifically console multiplayer and the simplicity of voice communications over the net I can't see why there aren't more ship co-op style games out there were people have to work together to manage and run a single ship.

Also it seems space exploration games have gone from the market in favour of the less intellectual FPS pew pew games (not that I have anything against these type of games but when I can finish most single player FPS games in a matter of days I am starting to find them too easy and am loosing interest in gaming) where are the games that required us to think (not to play minigames in the game aka TombRaider) but more to think of is there a way to get to such and such without tacking on that huge Robot/Group of NPC's that will kill me in a matter of seconds? Or a way of getting past things without setting off alarms/motion sensors ( I am thinking along the lines of SplinterCell here, some of the features in that game were awesome)

My final grip (you may have read it in another post on this forum) is the nature of MMO's in recent years; they seem to have lost there way, surely the idea of the game, whatever game it is, is to play with lots of other people? Yet there are so many out there where you can even forget its an MMO and just run around like its just another single player game. The clue is in the description... MMO Massive Multiplayer On-line... not Massive Single Player...

I feel I must apologise once again, I have rambled but seem to be having some personal gaming issues at the moment, probably because I have been unable to work for the last 6-8 weeks due to an injury, I need a game that will keep me focused and get my mind working without being overly repetitive. I want something that encourages me to work with other people to achieve a mutually beneficial goal, and above all else, it has to be Fun (none of the grindy ness of games like World of Warcraft, which I am playing but stopped for a few days again due to the grind factor)

Any suggestions would be great.

*Caution: Rambling old man ahead. Proceed at your own risk.*

They have killed the great sun jester

He can touch the stars no more.

The genre is pretty much dead, outside of a few brave developers who either still care about it, or at least see that there is a niche that they might fill and manage to pay their bills with. The last commercial space sim projects were anything but memorable.

Oh well. Time for a trip down memory lane. Why the hell have I been playing those games in the past?

Well, back then there were two "schools" of space sims. One being the Elite type, where you were given a ship and a sandbox to fly around in. And the other the Wing Commander type, where you were given a ship, an enemy and a story.

I wasn't overly fond of the Wing Commander type, but admittingly, they were fun. There was eyecandy, pretty explosions, cool enemies, and a nice story. Unfortunately, it has become exceedingly hard to impress the jaded generations of todays gamers, all story tropes seem to have been done to death and back, and pretty visuals are common. So common, in fact, that they are more or less expected. Back then, a few snazzy cutscenes and a decent soundtrack were enough to get the people to look. These days, they're expecting Avatar-quality visuals and a symphonic orchestra, and that's just for the trailer. For what it's worth, nobody outside a few japanese game designers seems capable of designing a good enemy - a bunch of guys you love to hate, and yet have to admit that their uniforms and ships in fact DO look snazzy.

Back when some screens of text and a decent storywriter were good enough, you could really do a long storyline, maybe even throw in a few twists and branches. People love that kind of stuff.

But today? That high quality render seqences cost money, require insane manpower to design and construct the visuals, and good voice actors don't come free, either. Today, you simply can't afford a 120-hour campaign with state of the art visuals and audio. It'll take too long to create and will be to costly, pretty much requiring you to have a AAA+ topseller in order to break even.

Now throw in the fact that the game might *not* appeal to everybody and their dog due to a variety of reasons (like say, being challenging, or not having a brand recognition), and you'll see that you're better off publishing the umteenth sequel to "The Sims: Hot Pursuit of the Desert Warfare Medal of 1943-45".

Making games has become exceedingly expensive if you're gunning for a AAA title. So, don't expect anything besides lowest common denominator crap to come out of the big companies. Those companies are run by managers, not by gamers. They give a flying rat's ass about the game content, as long as it sells...

...ah, yes, the other school of space sims. Elite and its brothers and sisters. Yeah, I'll get to that right away. No point in rambling about things I'm unlikely to change.

I've always had a fondness for those games. I love sandbox style games in general. To me, those space games always were about freedom and decisions. I liked that. My ship, my ways, my choice, my story. To boldy go where no man has gone, and maybe fondle a few green-skinned space babes while I'm there. To fight, not because I'm told that all the Kilrathi are evil and want to eat our children, but because I want the other guys cargo or the bounty on his head. Or simply because I bought this kick-ass Kill-O-Zap Triquoquaric Annihilator and can't wait to fry someone with it.

It was about these choices. Yeah, and the ability to get out of my skin for a few hours. In the real-time world, I'm the schlub who does your tech support 5 days a week. Out there, I'm a starship captain travelling the endless void in search of riches, mysterious alien cultures or simply some cheap target practice. The more immersive the experience, the better.

Like most of you, I've grown up in a time where you needed a healty dose of imagination to really enjoy video games. Your eyes saw some blocky visuals and the rather abstract representations of equipment and environments. But your minds eye saw the brave soldiers of the X-Com fighting the alien menace, with you starring as their commander. Admittingly, your "character" was a faceless, voiceless and genderless entity most of the time, the classic generic adventurer person - but in a way, it was easier to identify with than with a commander Shepherd who gets beautifully rendered facial scars and the choice between 2-3 canned (yet awesomely sounding) voiceovers in any give situation where he is allowed to speak, and whose choices change jack as far as the overarching cliche-ridden plot is concerned. You're going on a suicide mission, player, and you will like it. You need motivation? Well, there's some alien boobs in the last chapter. So bend over and take the plot like a man...

Meaningful choices. True Discovery. Replay value. Those things seem gone from todays games. Meaningful choices are gone, because developers can't afford to create alternate storylines. True discovery is gone, because it takes too much money and manpower to create each place, so it has become preferrable to use a handfull of pretty places instead of many symbolic and functional ones. Which in turn kills the replay value. Once you've reached the end of the theme park ride, you're unlikely to return.

There's hundreds of roguelikes out there. They work by randomizing things. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. But at least, it's different and doesn't bore you the second time around. Ah, of course, they're ugly as sin. Even if you use prettier tiles and render them in 3D, they're still generic. Game reviewers don't like that. The whiners in your forum don't like that. (But for the books, those are the same pricks that will chew you out if your game can be completed in 20 hours!). The results can't be predicted properly.

But let's just imagine that we have a program which can generate a universe from a seed, fill it with semi-randomized factions at the push of a button and generate an overarching set of goals for our intrepid protagonist. Maybe throw in some exzessive customization of said protagonist's assets, the ability to create a place he can call his home and fill with treasures, trophys and useful trinkets.

Now add game mechanics that make interacting with said universe fun, be it through a great starship combat system and the ability to land on and explore planets.

Triple A title? Unlikely, since it won't be pretty, and will be rough around the edges. But it has the seeds for all the things I've been missing. There's discovery, there's replay value, and there are meaningful choices - the aliens you decide to piss off today might have a big warlike empire somewhere just around the corner, and you'll live in interesting times. Maybe you would just be harassing them, stealing what you need. Maybe you would try to unite their enemies against them. Maybe you would just get shot to bits after running into one of their battleships. Any way, it beats a scripted showdown in my books.

Multiplayer? Haven't I ranted enough already? Well, fine. Here we go.

I'm not too fond of it. Most of the time it boils down to PVP. Which means that you will lose a good 50% of the time in an even match, and far more often under proper combat conditions. Which in itself wouldn't be all that bad if the people you'd play against were upright sportsmen. Which they aren't. Visit the forums of any PVP-based game and you'll hear the high-pitched whine of the 50% that did lose so the other 50% could win.

Myself? I spent months doing PVP in World of Warcraft. Don't ask me why, I guess the item treadmill got the better part of me. To be honest, this wasn't fun. I don't remember a single combat that I would deem "great". Most of the time, it was just a massive dogpile, die, kill, respawn, die, kill, respawn, until you were done for the day. The same holds true for most FPS I played online. It's a blur at best.

What I really fondly recall was when I did quests with a few buddies. Running around the world, cracking jokes, fighting side by side and back to back, and generelly having a good time. No stress. No whining. Just a few guys having fun. Even better, I met most of those guys in the game when either them or me were getting our asses handed to us by some oversized mobs. We decided to help the other guy and then chatted for a bit. Good times. Nowadays people are more likey to wait politely until you get killed, so they can finish off the beast, loot your corpse while they're at it and then maybe speculate a bit about your parents marital fidelity. Chivalry is dead, after all.

I'd still like to see a coop-mode within a space sim. Along with a consensual PVP option.

But neither of this will happen as a commercial release. These concepts and ideas have become alien to todays generation of gamers. Can't blame them, though, they've never experienced the games of yore, or spent their afternoons reading a book or playing a pen&paper RPG. These concepts are alien to them, and from their point of view probably terribly old-fashioned. The hand that feeds them the games doesn't care about the games themselves.

It's days like these when I'm feeling truly like a relic of some other time. Maybe it even was a happier one. I crave good games. Games where the developers still care about the game, and not too much about meeting a deadline or things like marketing budgets.

So today, I'm stuck with the guys that still care about the game. Enter the indie developers. A bunch of foolhardy dreamers on a shoestring budget. Without eyecandy to rely on, most of them have learned to rely on the game underneath as a selling point. Which, in my eyes, is a good thing. It gives me a reason to keep buying PCs, and every once in a while I get a really decent game out of it.

The space sim is a relic of the past, unlikely to experience a large-scale commercial revival, barring some miracle. But as technology and time progresses, there will be people that are capable and willing to cater to the likes of us, to fill that niche of the market and turn dreams into software.

And maybe even earn a few bucks while doing so. If you make it, I will buy it.

-Blackthorne

If there are people out there willing to put the time and effort in with no promise of reward besides making "the perfect Space Sim Co-op game" I am willing to do the same with the ideas (and I may even learn stuff on the way to help complete and continue such a project) I can do basic art work, and basic to slightly above basic web design, thats my limits really 🙁

Such dreamers aye.

As for Pen and Paper, it is amazing to hear (or read) some one make a reference to such a thing, it is something I usually do on a Friday night with a small group of Friends.

We are currently playing Deadlands and it is great fun, I am a trigger happy gun slinger (who has probably just died at the end of the last gaming session due to a heroic and selfless act of pot shotting a small box of very sweaty dynamite... I still have to roll on the death table...

I loved the Vampire games, well the first one, I didn't get much chance to play the second one.

I just tried to google World of Darkness Online but couldn't find anything official, do you have a link please?

There's precious little about it right now - no previews, no screenshots. It's pretty much just rumors and footnotes on the CCP website (yeah, that's the guys behind EVE).

http://www.ccpgames.com/en/products/world-of-darkness.aspx

IIRC, White Wolf (the guys behind the Vampire - the Masquerade RPG book line) and CCP now belong to the same company, hence the license. There also used to be rumors about an EVE pen&paper RPG, but that one has pretty much died down.

-Blackthorne

Blackthorn made some good point in his post and I feel that the space sim genre still has huge potential, but it needs to evolve and it may simple be no longer possible to make a game which set just in space especially for a mass market.

Games like Precursors or parkan or even Universal Combat point the way as to what these games could become, its about giving the player something which they have not been able to do before.

When I played Elite I always wanted to fly from space to the planet surface.

When I played Frontiers I always wanted to get out of the ship and explore the cities.

18 years later I’ am still waiting for some one to put it all together.

Amen to that brother 😀 . Although to be honest, is very demanding job to try and merge two different genres (Space Sim and FPS/RPG). One genre has to have precedence to the other IMHO.

This is what I am talking about. I played it a little and I liked it. (Now it's on this huge "to play" games list, that I have 😀 😀 ).

But a Mass Effect 1 and Freelancer? How about that? (But since you would need a huge sum of assets to make a game like that, you would have to simplify one or both of the parts). By the way have you played Space Rangers 2? And if you played it , did you liked it?

The mixing of two game genre is not a new idea remember the Mercenary games on the 8 bit computer or Sundog and there are a few others but as already been said getting the balance right between the two parts is crucial.

The FPS part would have to be an hybrid RPG/FPS like Boiling point,Stalker or GTA.

Finding a living GTA style city on some distant planet would be amazing. Anytime I play one of the GTA games and I take to the skys, I just want to keep on going until I left the planet all together. Yes, this is what a next gen space sim should be aiming for, but perhaps that vision is beyond the reach of present day tech?

Love to see Rockstar take a crack at doing a space sim.

I dont think its beyond the present tec, you can see how it would work in game like Precursors or even older games like Megatraveller 2 or the citys in syndicate.

What it seems to be is beyond the will of most game deves to even try.

has this been mentioned before (I skimmed through the long thread)? Joysticks, I think this may be the very reason there aren't many space sims. Used to be if you had a pc you had a joystick. Games tend to be console ports these days, and consoles don't have joysticks (I'm not a console gamer so I could be wrong) or mice for that matter. Either way I think this may be the reason why.There also may not be any huge successes lately and no "big names" (like the Chris Roberts) so it is a bit of a catch 22. I still believe that people love space sims equally to other games. People love Star Trek/Star Wars/Battlestar galactica series. Freelancer did ok and was praised, so did Homeworld and Homeworld 2.

Actually making a space sim is very attractive to an indie because... I don't have to worry about animating models.

I totally agree, the story is important and also the consequences of your decisions, combined with a bit humor. In fact, that was why Freelancer was fascinating to me because it came close to these ideas: There was an interesting story, a not too difficult game play, your actions changed your reputation and you could even talk to people (though I wish there had been more variations). What I dream of is a mixture of Freelancer, Poineer and The Sims. It could be this way: A big anchient alien ship wreck was detected and several gadgets are needed to repair it. Now you have to go and find them and have several options, e. g. talking to people in bars, trade with goods, visiting aliens on planets (each alien race could have a strength which could be useful to what you want to find), get in contact with pirates or just go treasure hunting on planets. To spice this with humor, you had to do a favour to the one who can help you, from something simple like giving ketchup and french fries to translate an information, providing moneyor medicine, doing a space rallye or fight one of his emenies. The game should be fair and always guide you to the places and people you need but it is on you how to interact with them. The more gadgets the alien ship has, the more easy could it become to find the other ones, and if all gadgets are installed, you will be able to start the alien ship and explore the universe. Maybe I am expecting too much, but this could be a "plus" for the genre, so that even non-sci-fi-fans could be interested in.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards

SpaceRider

You have been able to get joysticks on console for years as far back as the Atari 2600 in 1970s. In fact I think it was Atari that set the standard 9 pin joystick port we had for many years and mice have been available since the mid 1990 for most consoles.

ahhh, just had a magnificent daydream of a space-RPG, elder scrolls style.... no, not mass effect.. I mean real RPG where you can also say.. yeah.. screw doomsday, i just want to be rich, where you can fire a weapon in the vicinity of civilians, where I can do something for two hours without having any specific goal in mind and find mysterious items on far forgotten worlds..

I've been following bethesda softworks ever since Skyrim was announced, and must say, if I expect any company to be able to pull something like that off, it'd be them. Their design philosofy just fits.

I think that, apart from the countless great arguments in this far too long topic :), there is no good reason why there shouldn't be any new great space games coming up. I think the only problem is nobody is doing it. I must make one correction: I think the true flight-sim, which I personally would crave, is indeed something that will never really grow to be big, simply because they require alot of effort to enjoy and the trend is .. not to require effort :P. I really wish for games where my understanding of the cockpit determines my succes, but I don't think it is fair to request that, knowing I am a tiny minority.

But I see no reason why space couldn't be used alot more in other styles of games. Dead space is a try, but it used space as a skybox, where the actual game was for the most part simply a confined space shooter, which might as well have been underwater. Halo has some of the same problems, though it is alot bigger and has the intergalactic threat thing going on. Mass effect is nice, taps into the vastness of galactic civilization, but, contrary to my great hopes when i learned of it, really doesn't use space at all, merely as a means of fast travel. I love it for what it is though ;), I just initially REALLY hoped for some awesome space-battle.. and not the cut-scene kind. Eve online has many great elements, but it lacks those crucial to my acceptance. It builds a galactic commnity and even a real economy, which I think is an awesome accomplishment, it really uses the vastness of space, yet also has territorial battles and strategic points. It doesn't have nice worlds and cultures, but in part that is the beauty, because whatever cultures and worlds you find, are in fact other players somewhere on the globe. But it lacks nearly every element of space flight you can think of. All YOU are doing is docking, buying modules, fitting them, undocking and managing all the modules while you are apparently fighting another ship who is doing the same thing. To me it seems strange you would even be on that space-ship, you might as well be hiding on or behind a nearby planet remote controlling the craft(s), you're being something of a copilot anyways.

I can't think of any games where the actual control of your spacecraft, or in fact any of the influences of space environment are used. I've never worried about my oxygen, temperature, radiation levels or floating away from my space-ship, "if my engines die now, i'm seriously f*cked", or crashing into my mothership, while that is in fact is the very nature of what space-flight is! I wish there would be a developer that would find a way to create the popular game, inside the realistic space environment. You don't have to make people study manuals to understand their cockpit, but at least let the essence of space, the fact you're in a tiny life-sustaining bubble that can easily burst, the thought that you are among planets, floating in the immenseness of a timeless universe, the only thing capable of bringing you back to your wife/beertap a piece of metal in the back,... capture that! and then if you REALLY want to make me happy, add a manual flight mode that DOES require hefty training 😛