this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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We just had a discussion about Star Citizen the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there's been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it's kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn't add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it's a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman -- an indie fighter combat game (not space -- atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat -- did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I'm thinking that maybe there's room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of "Hollywood space" -- fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around -- were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don't have that around any more.
There's a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it's that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn't handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you've got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it's just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we're past that point.
Have you played Everspace and Everspace 2? They're more arcade-y but they scratch the same itch for me. The core gameplay is just fast paced space dogfights
I think what you're noticing about on foot sections in modern space games is because merging that sort of experience with a space sim is truly the space sim's "final frontier", so to speak. It's the only part of an immersive gameplay experience that is yet to be executed as cleanly as the in-ship portion of a deep systems driven sci Fi space exploration game.
It's why Starfield is the way it is, they tried to conquer that frontier as well, and had to make a lot of concessions to do so and didn't have any prior experience in that sort of genre. I think it is safe to say that Starfield didn't succeed well enough or deep enough to be the definitive shining example of a space sim with equally executed space and ground gameplay styles (partially because it's not truly a space sim at all, more like an arcadey take on it )
One day a game will, and it'll be awesome, but it'll probably still be a while. Starfield showed that even if you throw lots of money and a professional team at it it's not a sort of game you can easily make.
"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time..."
I was saying something about X4 in another thread recently regarding the on foot portion, but I feel like it does add something, at least for me. Egosoft started down that path with X Rebirth and it was pretty bad, and it seems like what is in X4 is mostly just a cleaned up version of that and they didn't try to add any more and attempt any FPS type gameplay because it almost certainly would have sucked.
But what it does is give a really cool sense of scale, being able to hop out of your ship on a giant landing platform and see a line of some of your other ships docked there, smaller ships buzzing about, even watch ships get built and take off. It isn't forced on you much at all other than to go talk to NPCs for quests, and otherwise is just a nice little bonus.
Oh, yeah, I agree that it doesn't add non-zero value. It's just that I look at these and think that it takes the developer resources to put into all these -- like, implementing anything is ultimately a tradeoff. If you model and add functionality related to walking around space station interiors, then you can't be using those same resources on same combat. I mean, you can play X4 like X3, sure, but I'm not trying to compare X4 to X3, but rather X4 to what X4 could have been.
The real question is whether the tradeoff is worthwhile. Like, the question isn't "does this feature have value", but rather "does this feature have more value than anything else that the developer could have done with the same resources". And...in general, my gut reaction is that it probably isn't. That is, there's something of a dearth of space combat games coming out these days, and I can think of a lot of neat things that one could legitimately implement in space combat. More-complex interactions with wingmen; "air-to-air" refueling, covering to counter various tactics (e.g. there's no Thatch Weave) in space combat games). More-sophisticated damage models. More-sophisticated representation of those (like, actually letting one blow a hole in the side of a modeled capital ship). Incorporation of other forces, like tractor beams, or manipulation of time or gravity into combat. More sophisticated sensor models, limiting situational awareness (e.g. only partially-identifying potential unknown targets), sensor countermeasures, sensor interference with other objects (remember the Millennium Falcon escaping while hiding in a cloud of garbage), jamming. Context-sensitive music models -- like, music that ramps up to be more-exciting as combat begins. Incorporating morale; most real-life conflicts don't have people fanatically fighting to the death, but rather retreating once a conflict looks like it's going south, and covering retreats is a significant real-world problem; Prey described ships using tactics to cover the retreat of others, and I think that one could legitimately incorporate that into gameplay. There's probably a lot that one could do with stuff like teleportation or wormholes. The New Hotness in 2023 air combat military theory is shifting to having unmanned drones support manned aircraft; there isn't a lot of unmanned drone stuff going on in space combat games, but I'd imagine that there could be. It was a big deal when FPSes stuffed the ability to make use of cover into NPC AI -- space combat games still don't, that I'm aware of, have ships attempting to get solid objects between oneself and something dangerous, even though combat in an astroid field is a staple of the genre, and even though ships have recharging shields and the ability to get out of the line of fire for short periods of time in such a ship would be really useful.
I saw people on the sub who wanted more space combat games complaining that Starfield wasn't that. That is, they were hoping that they could get a new, AAA space combat game, and instead what they got was a Fallout or Skyrim with light ship-to-ship combat elements. The ship-to-ship combat game is...not really very sophisticated. So, for Starfield, let me reverse the question: let's say that Bethesda had, instead of trying to make the game more-sprawling, instead of adding light ship-to-ship combat elements, just focused on the first person environment, which is really what they're good at and what the core of the gameplay is. Like, I think that there's a lot you could do with squad-based combat in FPSes that hasn't been done, or interesting interactions with your companion. Balance perks more-effectively, so that every perk-related decision is a hard tradeoff to make. I think that it'd be neat to have ambushes and people tracking you...and for that matter, Doppler effects from gunfire, to help guess where an ambush is coming from.
Or even the base-building aspect -- that's something that they've put into two games now, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, but it was always more of a tech demo for the engine, wasn't really that important to gameplay. Say they'd made outpost-building more-sophisticated, put something more like a Sim City aspect into the thing, so that there are interesting problems around laying a base out, or more things that one might want to spend time around a base doing. But instead, they chose to expand away from what was already not-all-that-core of an element. I'm not sure that that was a good tradeoff. Sure, I don't dislike the space combat in Starfield, but nobody is going to buy Starfield in the hopes of getting a great space combat game. It's not clear to me that, had the game been done without the space combat, it would have been much worse, and I can think of a lot of things that could have been improved instead.
I think that the same applies to space combat games. It's not that X4 is a worse game relative to X3 by including the space station stuff. It's just that...there doesn't feel like there's a lot of work going into improving actual space combat in video games these days, and I wish that there could be more of that.