Exactly. I started that game like 15 months ago, and trading, exploration/discovery, bulletin board quests and some world PvP kept me busy for 111 hours...and there was literally barely a game there on top of the sandbox and being in your ships. Since I played, they've added all sorts of gameplay additions - the whole Horizons thing with landing + rover, factions + wars, this alien shit, and I have no idea what else, I just expect it will feel like a completely new game next time I go back.
I had zero disappointment because iteratively it never promised to be SPORE 3.0 like NMS did, or "the last game you will ever buy" like Star Citizen is touting. I've bought shit for that game like a year ago that I haven't even checked out yet just because I liked initially playing it and wanted to support them continuing development. I was mostly waiting for better VR headsets to come out...it's fucking unplayable on the Vive (text unreadable), and the Oculus is pretty good with it, but fuck supporting Facebook.
All of these space games seem to be trying to get to the same end result. Basically an exploration, trading, mining, shooting and RPG space sim. Do you think that is actually viable with current technology?
There are several games that have done very well within one of the space genres, but none have managed to pull it all together yet. Rodina was the first exploration based space game that made me truly appreciate the scale these kinds of games could have, but there is nothing in there outside of space exploration. Astroneers looks like it will end up being a really good mining/resource gathering game once they sort out all of the alpha bugs, but again, there is nothing in there except the mining.
All of these space games seem to be trying to get to the same end result. Basically an exploration, trading, mining, shooting and RPG space sim. Do you think that is actually viable with current technology?
Seriously loaded question...maybe I can do an AMA on it some day if people are curious about my thoughts. I'll summarize a bit here.
1) WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE NEW GOD DAMNED CAMPAIGN-BASED SPACE SIMS? We used to have X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Wing Commander/Descent(in a way)/etc, and now all we have are a few very small budget indie campaign games that will doubtfully have anything approaching the story/campaign/love that those older games of the genre did. I hate that we have 3 sandboxes in dev/released and no real campaign games.
2) There is a lot more to it than the specified basics that will determine if either of the 3 games (Elite Dangers, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen) can achieve the real imagined goal. Is it viable? Sure, absolutely; however, as will all game developemnt trade-offs must be made to sacrifice game concept/game design for performance/simplicity/viability. Each game as it exists today has some fundamental fucking flaws that either make the game not viable, too expensive to develop or too open to RNG affecting the RPG aspect.
You should be able to "land your ship in the docking bay of a 3 square kilometer capital ship, which is actively moving and orbiting around a planetary body, then immediately disembark and join into the FPS like you would dropping out of a Galaxy Carrier in Planetside." People who are inside of the capital ship would be able to look out of windows on the ship and see space battles going on outside of the ship, and vice-versa, ship pilots could see inside and see the FPS battle going on inside. Also, note that there would be no loading screens when going between piloting your ship, docking in the moving capital ship and disembarking into the capital ship to engage in FPS combat.
That sounds fucking cool, right? This game design idea may be a serious goal of at least one of the listed games. To someone who has not made large-scale games, that sounds perfectly reasonable. As someone who has done game engine development professionally for over a decade, that's a fucking horror story.
Ugh I'm getting a bit tired...maybe I will just do a gamedev AMA this weekend. I wrote some shit then that led to more shit..so yeah.
TLDR; VIABLE, Star Citizen took the wrong starting approach will fail IMHO, NMS wanted to base 100% of their gameplay on a mixture of SPORE + sandbox and hope that the game worked, Elite Dangers is doing it right, and fuck everything where is my updated campaign-based space sim?!?!?!??!?!?!??!
I think the Elite Dangerous model is the best way to make one of those NMS kind of games. Release something that is barely playable, and slowly improve it again and again until you have something that feels less sandboxy.