this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Space games really aren’t that much fun. They seem fun when I read about them, but they’re not.
NMS is the least worst analogue to Starfield, and I can’t play that anymore because it’s the same thing over and over.
I feel like it's not impossible for them to be fun, for example the Everspace series does focus on action gameplay, but yeah, tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerds, but quite contrary to actual fun.
As one of those space nerds, I'm glad we have games like Elite: Dangerous, Starfield, X series, Independence War etc. Choice is good and I, along with many others, love 1:1 scale sandboxes to fly a virtual spaceship in, fight , trade and explore. There are plenty of fast action games including space shooters like Star Wars Squadrons for those who don't appreciate the emptiness and loneliness of space and don't want the travel-and-life-in-space part in a space game.
Starfield is the only new game from past 5 years I'm excited about and going to buy once I upgrade my GPU. It's a life-in-space sandbox that complements E:D well by doing things the latter does not.
I'd reccomend trying it out on gamepass, or via piracy, before buying. It's not a bad game by any means, and as you said it does a lot of things, but most of the things feel half baked.
The ship combat in particular takes influence from E:D, but is nowhere near as good.
This is good advice.
I'm an Elder Scrolls veteran (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), I know quite well what Bethesda games do well and what not. And they have always clicked for me, even though all of them are flawed in different ways.
As for ship combat, as long as it's comparable to X3, it's fine. I'm not expecting Children of a Dead Earth or Independence War🙂
There will be no Freelancer slander!
Freelancer rocked so hard, and no other game has come close to how much I enjoyed space combat in it.
Star Citizen is the 'spiritual successor' but I wish we had a quick and dirty standalone game that wasn't in development hell.
To be honest, Freelancer was kind of "meh". Graphics and character animation were very nice, but ship and station design was weird and the combat felt shallow and one-dimensional. In short, too arcade-y. No joystick support was the real downer, space ship combat never feels good with mouse.
For the perspective, though, before Freelancer I played and modded the absolute crap out of Independence War 2 and that is still the pinnacle of space combat that doesn't feel like WWII dogfight arcade in space while still being rather accessible and intuitive.
Elite is one of those ungodly good games, but it appeals to a very specific type of person. It's like a bottle of a very good alcohol with a very acquired taste. And something that requires thought, not something you get stuck into at 3pm for a handful of minutes.
It's how I met the love of my life, haha. I've put well over a thousand hours into it, but remembering the controls and wondering what happened to my carrier gives me anxiety xD
Still...it's one of those games I still dream about sometimes. It gives me a deep longing to see Sirus, or Canis Majoris, or the core once again, with all the stars overhead. Sometimes, we still talk about it between talks about getting engaged soon. :)
God, maybe I should give it a go again. I fucking love that game.
Space games are one of my favorite genres and they can absolutely be fun. But space is really really vast and mostly empty and most space games are too shallow and/or constrain the player too much. Starfield does have some good polish and stories but is so frustratingly restrictive and non-immersive with traveling.
I think you'll find that what's actually not fun is boring games. There are plenty of fun space games but the requirement is that they are fun, and have things to do rather than just being big.
As a general rule if it tells you how many star systems there are, it's going to be a boring space game because it means that they all are procedurally generated which means they're all boring.