The Hunt for the Perfect Space Sim Game…

My first love in video games was Elite, a simple game from 1984 that allowed me to live the Han Solo/Malcom Reynolds/James Holden/Lone Star lifestyle (huh… we need some women in that list… fortunately my next Get Lost novel takes care of that!)

There used to be a lot of space sim games… and then for a long time there were none.

Then, about ten years ago, they started peeking their head out again, finding their audience in different ways. So let’s have a brief look at the big names, and which just took the lead for #1 in my books.

Elite Dangerous

The granddaddy of them all, and one that was inspired at least a little by a roleplaying game (Traveller).

Not gonna lie, for a long time this was the GOAT for me. No plot, just and open sandbox with you, a ship, a handful of credits, and a good luck pat on the back.

The original inspired my pre-teen mind line no other, and the revival, Elite Dangerous, brought it to life in a whole new way. The flight mechanics in ED are still the best in the field, the graphics are great, and they did add a lot of great features over time…

But it also felt like they half-assed it later on. People wanted to be able to walk around inside their ships, and go EVA outside their ship. And at first that was on the agenda… until it wasn’t. Some people said it just wasn’t possible with their game engine.

They also supported VR… until they didn’t. The VR experience in Elite Dangerous was easily the best I’ve ever had. But they couldn’t continue that support once they added Space Legs (that is, walking around on planets, bases, and stations… but still no ships. Which meant in VR you went from fully immersed to a flat screen. Not fun.

And though I’m glad we now have on foot exploration and combat… ED has never given enough for explorers to do, in my opinion. The focus has always been on the pew pew, and I get that. But I feel like they just never appreciated what exploration could properly be. I think they felt that because they were aiming for “realism,” exploration wouldn’t be very interesting.

I think they’re wrong. Gameplay is all about how you approach a goal. Fallout 3, for example, showed how a simple minigame for lockpicking or hacking a computer can add to the immersion, and not feel like busy work. Mass Effect 2 and 3 had similar mini-games that didn’t detract from the game.

But I still owe the game a lot. It’s because of that game that the Get Lost Saga exists. It started life as an Elite Dangerous novel and was going to be published as such, until Frontier decided to stop publishing books (“Missed it by that much.” – Maxwell Smart). But that gave me a chance to retool it and set it in a universe I helped create with romance author Laruen Smith (yes I co-wrote a steamy SF romance).

X4

The X series of games started with X:Beyond the Frontier back in 1999. It was kind of like an upgraded version of Elite, but in its present form has become a lot more than that.

Now you can fly any kind of ship, build up a fleet, build space stations, and take over the galaxy.

But the key word here is can. You don’t have to. The beauty of X4 is that it’s pretty much perfectly scaleable to whatever you want to do. If you want to stay in a single ship, take jobs, and make your way in the galaxy, you can. If you want to sit back and manage fleets in epic naval battles you can. If you want to simply create an economic empire with spacestations and traders, you can. There are storylines to play through, but they are optional, and most don’t require fleets of any kind to accomplish.

X4 introduces some features long before Elite Dangerous, such as walking around space stations. They also had limited ship interiors to walk around in, which until recently was pretty much limited to the cockpit of smaller ships and bridge of larger ones. But some new updates have added larger ship interiors to interact with.

It also included EVA as a part of gameplay, allowing you to repair your ship from the outside if necessary, or collect salvage, navigate wrecks, and a lot of other little tasks.

Before Elite Dangerous came out, I spent a lot of time playing X3, the predecessor to this one. That’s when I first started writing SF fanfiction, which I kept around for sentimental reasons: Guilty Writing Pleasures

I spent hundreds of hours playing X3 and X4… but it never quite had the same appeal as Elite Dangerous. Still, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in these kind of games.

Star Citizen and Starfield

Why am I grouping these together? Because I’ve never played them and most likely never will… but they’re out there.

Star Citizen can go suck a bag of donkey shlongs, given how they monetize the game and still don’t have a full game release yet. It’s got some nice features yes, and a lot of technical elements I’d like to see in, say, Elite Dangerous… but I still won’t play it.

Starfield, on the other hand, is by all accounts a dissapointment. It was attempting to be the SF equivilent of Skyrim in terms of potential longevity, but whether that will be the case is in question. Both of these games features heavy first person elements, walkable ship interiors, and EVA capability.

However, Starfield included a feature not seen elsewhere: such as building your own ship from the ground up. That was intriguing. It’s just a shame the rest of the gameplay didn’t live up to the hype.

And speaking of hype….

No Man’s Sky

The ultimate redemption story.

Back when it was released in 2016, No Man’s Sky promised us the moon, and barely got us into Earth orbit. If you’re not already familiar with the unbelievable hype surrounding it before launch and the universal disappointment after launch, well, there are plenty of YouTube videos covering that whole debacle.

However, rather than collapsing, Hello Games, buckled down and got to work. And over the last nine years, they not only achieved what they initially promised but failed to deliver at launch… they exceeded it on every single level. And that isn’t even the most amazing part of their story.

They have had six overhauls of the game (now v6.0) and over 35 major named updates. And not a single one has been paid DLC. There is no in-game monitization. If you bought the game in 2016, you have not had to pay a single cent more since. This is unheard of in the gaming industry. And yet Hello Games manages to thrive. We need more companies to follow Hello Games lead.

It is mind boggling just how many features have been added to the game since launch. And this can be a bit daunting to new players.

Fortunately, the game’s main storyline acts as a tutorial, guiding you through the mechanics of basic and later more advanced gameplay. In addition pretty much every major feature added has a storyline attached. And the guide is very good at holding your hand if you need it to, by pointing out exactly what you need to do next.

Sandboxes are great. But without any guidance you’re going to feel overwhelmed. So if you’re ever in doubt about what to do next, you just check your log, find an objective on the list, select it, and it will tell you what to do next.

I’ve played No Man’s Sky more than X3/X4, but less than Elite Dangerous. However, given recent updates, that might very well change.

What it brings to the table is a breadth of exploration that ED simply hasn’t been able to achieve. In ED’s explorations, you visit almost airless worlds looking for fungus and lichen.

In NMS, you visit countless crazy worlds with different biomes ranging from realistic to reality-warping, each with unique flora and fauna, which you can make into a pet if you want.

But that brings me to the two shortcomings of No Man’s Sky, at least in my opinion.

The first is that, the space sim part is, well, not as good as any of the others. While they have improved the flight mechanics over the years, space flight still feels more like a game and less like a sim. And ED’s greatest strength is making the ship flight and combat feel real.

This “gaminess” of NMS comes through in other ways too. ED prides itself on having a 1:1 scale representation of our galaxy. Planets, stars, distances, everything is at the correct scale.

By comparison, NMS planets are not full sized planets and do not actually rotate around a star. You can see every planet in the system when you arrive, instead of them being millions and millions of miles apart. NMS uses comic book logic with a cartoony aesthetic that at times feels like it’s from 1970s science fiction.

So, if you’re looking for verisimilitude, ED’s approach is still going to feel better.

But if you’re looking for fun and can look past that? NMS has so much more to do, and absolutely no pressure to do any of it unless you want to. Fly, fight, explore, mine, trade, fish (yes, fish), build, and more.

It is, in many ways the ultimate sandbox.

And it only became more so with it’s latest release, the Voyager update. Because it looked at what Starfield brought to table and decided to do it better.

So now, after nine years, you can not only build ships from scratch, you have ship interiors you can walk around in, plan missions in, even cook and refine. You can get out of the cockpit while on autopilot and do stuff in the back if you want. You can get out of your ship and go full EVA. Best of all, you can have friends fly in your ship with you.

It’s these kind of things that put a game over the top in my book. You don’t want a game like this to feel like a second job you have to slog. You want it to feel like a second life that you can escape to from time to time.

God knows we all need some of that right now.

I suspect the only way I will ever go back to Elite Dangerous now is if they suck it up and give us something similar.

In the meantime… I’m going to see if I can build the Viaticus Rex II.I and go on some adventures with Gillian!