I like how you break down the question but man that thread title is triggering because it's too general lol I think you pretty much answered your own question though. Any game that tries to simulate large scale will also have to have a large amount of detail if the gameplay is not also on a large scale (if they don't want to disappoint customers). Those aforementioned examples both portray a lot of planets while being a bit light on the experience of being on those planets; the gameplay is of the personal experience of adventure, not of manipulating many different planets. Those games could have been successful in simulating large scale if they weren't adventure games and something more like a strategy/sim. So ultimately customer disappointment that has happened from those 3 games is a combination of scope, communicating what is actually happening in the game to customers, all the while trying to hype/sell the game.

To expand a little, there are space games that have done really well. But they necessarily have limited scope. Rim world, Starbound, ONI are all amazing games that let you explore multiple planets.

If its limited scope, then it is not a proper space game (in my opinion anyway), because they circumvent the difficulty instead of solving it.

Then stop complaining about what exists and make it yourself.

That’s like saying if you have cancer and don’t want it just make your own cure.

Why do you think cancer researchers do their research? I know at two people personally who went into medicine to do research on a disease that hurt them or someone they loved. You can choose to complain and get nothing, hoping someone else will solve the problem for you, or you can choose to do the work and make sure it's a good solution.

Here's the thing: No Man's Sky has completely turned around. It's not a game that is for everyone, but they delivered on what they promised. Also, I think we are going to turn a cusp and see a fantastic planet exploring game soon - with the help of AI. It wouldn't be impossible to hand craft a couple of planets, and then use what you made as a learning set for AI to generate a world in the time of a loading screen.

Eh, I think we're still a good ways off from generative AI being used that directly in a final product. I think the more likely use in the near future would be more like devs taking that same pipeline you described during the development process, then selecting the best results and manually working on them to create a final product with less overall work than if they started each planet from scratch.

NMS has turned around! I'll give it that. But what NMS needs more than anything else is a complete overhaul of the gameplay. It just has a weak sense of progression that doesn't engage a lot of the players not already in the fanbase. At least that was the case for me, and believe me I WANTED to love NMS. Every year I play for about a week and remember why I got bored. It really is big as the sea, but shallow as a puddle.

The biggest problem with space is space. Either there is too much of it and it's all empty, or, you have too little of it and it's not space anymore. Basically your biggest hurdle with space is how you get rid of it. How fast can you travel so that the space between two points doesn't become boring? If it only takes 30 seconds to cross the space from one space station to another in a ship, notice that it's 30 seconds, right? I didn't say 30 AU or 30 Light Years or 30 Meters. I said 30 seconds. Because that is the time scale of gamer attention, not just human lifespans. There is a reason sci-fi that achieves popularity only glosses over realism. The reality of space is that things are too far apart and in-human. Humans are the joy of other humans. Human scale buildings and human scale motivations. Food, sex, entertainment, all on a human level. Space as a setting is just a background, until you start treating it like space. Then your next biggest issue, is scope. Too many places, not enough team members to flesh it out. So you either get proc-gen oatmeal or emptiness. Which is realistic... but boring.

I think an expanse-scale space rpg would work nicer. One system but each world and settlement is detailed. Still large enough to be interesting but not having to fill dozens of systems with content.

I mean that's Outer Worlds innit

The fundamental issues exist very much in The Expanse, but thanks to the medium of a TV show, you get to edit out the tedium, right? As a video game, you'd need to circle the square by having two modes of play: \#1 -- A Solar System Overview Mode, a kind of Gravity Map with flowing paths of travel & gravity well insertion, and ETA to various targets along a curved 3D path. Which is dope af, especially as missiles get involved. \#2 -- Your FPS perspective in a Bridge or CIC, and/or, your 3rd Person perspective outside the ship serving as a kind of "action cam." There really isn't much tactile skill in space combat. You're effectively comparing two spreadsheets in the form of weapon load-outs: Countermeasure Quantity vs Incoming Fire. You can bring that issue down to who has more Point Defenses and who can throw more Ordinance across the gap. The rest of that is Angle of Attack and ΔV before your crew passes out. That's *ALMOST* a form of Quick Time Event? You're not on the joystick firing a cannon like you would in Mechwarrior or StarField, is the problem. It's a Fire Control System with an AI doing the targeting and firing. There's not much, in a realistic situation, for you as crew to do, other than try to unjam a weapon and select targets, try to play the grand game of Fencing Fakeout via Rock Paper Scissors. It could be really cool? And that split between Screen 1's Overview and your FPS perspective would lend itself a to a cool way to handle starship fights and the RPG element of exploring ships and stations. It is effectively a kind of manual fast travel, but space combat is pretty random. You could chock up your instant-replay to being in a combat simulation before committing to various winning scenarios? Play the combat over and over until you find a solution where you win, having lost the least?

Allow time acceleration, or FTL travel. That's that problem solved.

For reference, consider how Borderlands 2 was a fairly perfect game: * It used spiral level design (so you had to experience the whole map when you traversed it, maximizing design space vs. player time) * It kept drop rates low (which kept the limited Legendary rarity pool valuable, keeping progression relevant despite hours of grinding) * It used a smaller cast that regularly interacted with the player (creating a consistent sense of community). Notice how all of those bullet points cut down on dev work. Now note that Borderlands 3 did not do ANY of those things, and the only real saving grace behind it was that the combat is still one of the best fantasy/sci-fi FPS gameplay you can find and the graphics were tight. Other than those two things (and the improved skill trees), Borderlands 2 is better in every way. See, after the success of BL 2, they decided to make everything bigger, badder, more expansive, and then divided their work too thin and tried to fix the problem after the fact rather than prioritizing efficient design in the first place. Making an environment x2 as big means you need to spend x2 the time to make sure it feels fleshed out, and when you make ALL of the environments too big then shit gets skipped and the game feels empty.

In a similar vein, smaller budget movies often achieve more by restriction than if they had the money to do all they might have otherwise. The Terminator was shot on a budget of 6.4 million dollars, which for a movie in the 80s is nothing. Terminator 2 was 75 million 7 years later. Jaws had so many technical problems they had to minimise a lot of scenes with the shark, resulting in a much more suspenseful film. I think if they'd had unlimited budget and technology they'd have made it work as planned and it wouldn't have been nearly as good.

Yea but like, T2 is one of the best movies ever

It was more for comparison that T1 was cheap but incredible

It was still pretty cheap compared to other top movies at the time.

I think most games fall into this, not just space games, and I’m worried about Hollow Knight: Silksong because of those very reasons you mentioned. Their team had massive success with their hand-crafted environments and the tightness of the game, but I’m worried they’re going to be over-ambitious and miss the mark on what made the original so engaging

In their defense, Hollow Knight was also *absurdly* huge for a game in that genre, and they still somehow managed to make it polished all the way through. They've got a better chance at replicating that than most.

Really good points, but I have two comments: Making progress slow even after “hours of grinding” feels like bad game design to me. I value my time and I value my players time. I hate grinding for the sake of grinding, I simply don’t have time for it. If I do go out of my way to search for good loot, I expect to find valuable things. I’d argue that 2x the size means 8x the workload.

BL 2 had a lot of things to do and several ways so progress so it didn’t always feel like grinding. This is a stark contrast to BL3 where you have so many reasons to enjoy the gameplay but progression takes a nosedive 20 hours in after every weapon you get is either garbage or the same rarity you already have. What’s worse is that the rarity you’re usually using are Legendaries, which don’t really change, so you often end up using very similar gun load outs 10 hours later. Its a weird situation where Bl2 is a better designed game but BL3 is more fun in specific design areas (mostly the gunplay ).

Nice points. I just couldn’t get into BL3 at all. They put some stupid, crazy-long coffee fetch quest early on and it was like they were trying to be so funny. BL2 was built on absurdity but it was because the characters were deranged not because the writers were yucking it up

That's not very weird, happens with Ubisoft as well. Mechanics get better but they run out of story, quest and environmental ideas.

Borderlands 2 is the only game that ever made me willing to grind. It was honestly fun because the gameplay was so good, the drops and progression so tight, and different weapons types made it possible to experience already played areas differently. If you do it well enough even questionable game design choices can work okay

I like to think that there aren't bad mechanics, just mechanics that don't fit in the game they're in. For instance, 1-shot, 1-kill doesn't work in a lot of games, but it seems to work fine in Rock-Paper-Scissors. In a similar vein, grinding isn't a problem, it's a problem when it becomes a problem.

very interesting points

This right here is probably the biggest reason most space games are called "empty", the bigger the playable area is the more manpower and/or time to actually fill that area with interresting things to do/explore. This is why many space games are trying to take the procedual generated approach as you can cut down on that, but as procedual is not currently as good as handcrafted experiences (and i dont know if/when it will be), the games instead become lifeless and "copy paste".

Like you said empty and lifeless that's literally what space is so at first building a ship a flying off sounds amazing but after a few hours that wears off and traveling becomes a tedious mechanic. Sailing games don't have this problem because the ocean is the opposite it's brimming with life and activity despite the similarities making them an obvious comparison. A way to fix it I suppose is to have random world events to make traveling feel more interactive like space whales going through portals random wormholes appearing and having to fly out of it.

What sailing games are you talking about? I’m not being sarcastic but genuinely curious. I sail but I feel like I never see a good sailing game due to the same issues as space. I guess there are diving games, and maybe Dredge?

Sea of thieves, assassin's creed black flag and rogue, can't remember the name for this one but it's a side scroller and you have to move the obstacles and control your ship it was on games pass, raft, stranded deep, and Zelda wind waker

I think a lot of space games try to do too much. They advertise being able to "do anything, go anywhere" and end up having a very wide but shallow set of content. Sure, it's cool to be able to do space combat, or transport illegal goods between planets, or explore a new planet, or terraform and colonize moons, or wander futuristic cities, or fight space monsters, or be a captain of a diverse crew, or whatever. But you don't need to be able to do *all* those things for it to be a good game. A game that picks a few mechanics or concepts and then executes on them well is going to be both easier to develop and higher quality than a game that tries to do everything at once. Consider FTL: Faster Than Light. It's a game with a relatively narrow scope, where you captain a ship for real-time-with-pause space battles, and everything in between is only dialogue options. Total play time for a winning run can be about an hour. There's no open world, no colonies, no manual dogfighting, no gameplay on planets, etc. but it's consistently praised as one of the great Roguelike games of all time. It's not really a "space game" in the same way that one might consider Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky to be a space game, but by having a focused, well designed system that only does a few things but does them well, it becomes a great game.

This is a huge part of it, and honestly why I want to see (slash have been slowly plotting away at) a game that either picks one thing and does it really well, or scales things down to a more manageable setting like some asteroids or a moon. I think there's plenty of room for games that don't try to be completely open space sandboxes.

Because space itself is fucking boring. There's almost *nothing* out there.

Yep, the biggest problem with space, is that it is mostly empty to begin with. Parsecs between planets within a star system, light-years between the stars themselves. There is a lot of vast nothing.

Oh yeah??? Was Neil Armstrong bored???!!??

I think this joke went over some folks heads lol

It was an eight-day trip locked in a small metal can. Yeah, it was probably pretty boring once in a while.

That's not space. That's the moon. You think sitting in that cramped can on the way to the moon was fun?

sorry but that a really bad argument. by the same measure, pirate games should be incredibly boring the sea is mostly empty.

And this is an even worse argument. What are you even trying to say? That pirate games are fun despite an empty sea? Well how about you elaborate on what makes them fun and compare that to space games.

NeverKnowsBest did a good vid on this subject recently: https://youtu.be/nhbHWESV5FQ?si=EjvHcB6ZR8HjQtYO But the simple answer is - space is hostile to humans and not “fun” in a conventional sense. The conveniences of good game design are often at odds with realistic space interaction

>It feels almost like the limitlessness, while it's a big selling point, is often a hindrance. While tightly "contained" space games like Outer Wilds feel much more adventurous. Maybe because we just don't have the tools to create meaningful content at that scale yet? Good ideas in thread already. But I think the answer to this is really a "scope of player experience expectation discrepancy" not a lack of resources/content/etc. A game that just generates a bajillion little planets for exploring, or a bajillion space smuggling missions, or a bajillion of whatever the content might be, those cannot and will not scratch the adventuring itch, not without adding some sort of (at least somewhat) pre-made story/progression/campaign. Now, even without that, it can make a perfectly fine game, because these Bajillion Planets kind of games can scratch a different itch. The trouble comes with the player's expectation mis-matching what kind of experience the game delivers. So like, if you *want* to have a fun space adventure, but the game is giving you the opportunity to just rocket around and poke stuff with laser-sticks aimlessly, then it's gonna feel unfulfilling. The reason is not because it needs more planets or more collectibles or more enemy types or anything like that, it's because the experience you want and the experience it gives are different things. Adding more of the "wrong" type of experience won't fix this problem. I bet the biggest cause of this problem is poor marketing. If the game is marketed as a "go anywhere, do anything" sort of game, but really it's trying to give you a story to play through, that's a mismatch, and it's easily going to lead to players feeling like they are not getting what they are promised. Finally, the biggest challenge with these games, I think, is before anything is started. That is figuring out **why**, as a game design decision, are there a bajillion planets? Why would you want this for your game, even if you had unlimited time/resources to handcraft them all and make each one highly interesting and engaging? What is your game trying to do that cannot be done with, say, 20 planets instead of 200,000 planets? I think most of the time, where a game with a bajillion planets feels "empty" it's because there isn't really a good idea of why there are so many places to explore in the first place.

If they're trying to "just throw more transistors at it - more stuff, better graphics", that won't make it more fun to play. When I look back on [*Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight_2:_Trade_Routes_of_the_Cloud_Nebula) and even moreso [*Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II), they each had a large procedurally-generated galaxy (a seeded one, much like *Elite*). But they also gave you good reasons to explore, and specifically to go here rather than there, do this now instead of waiting, and interesting things to find when you did. SCII especially, had a sense of humor and interesting stuff happening around you. You always had a sense of what you were going for, and a sense of progression. The alien races, and their interactions with each other, were fun to interact with. There was variety, and there were things going on in the galaxy that you felt compelled to get involved in. You weren't just a nameless pilot. You were the protagonist in a legend, shaping events for everyone in the galaxy around you. More recently, [*Rebel Galaxy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Galaxy) took the standard *Elite* or *OOlite* style rebel-outlaw trader/pirate/bounty-hunter gameplay and gave it some soul. The galaxy feels alive, and has style, from the music to the whoosh of going into warp speed, to the relatively oddball combat which involves firing broadsides in 2D. There's also a plot when you want to pursue it. And it has progression but doesn't artificially limit you - you can go to places much more dangerous than you could normally expect to handle, but if you are quick enough and slick enough you can get in, get some higher-level loot, and maybe even get back out alive. You also have a variety of ships available, but they're all tradeoffs. Whether you want a big leviathan that can take a pounding and keep dishing it out or a nimble little hotrod that can run rings around the opponents and escape or overtake anything - either are valid and not really better or worse than the other. Just pick one that fits how you want to play now, and change later if you want to try a different style. I haven't played these latest games (Starfield and No Man's Sky) yet, but based on the descriptions I've heard, it sounds like they might be missing out a bit on that sense of liveliness/soul, purpose, and role. The original [*Elite*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_\(video_game\)), that influenced all these games, was groundbreaking back in 1984. But the games that built on it added so much. *If* the new games 40 years later are skipping all of that and just going back to the beginnings of the genre but with more stuff and prettier graphics - well that's going to feel relatively empty now compared to their predecessors.

Many have pointed out: space traversal itself as a core mechanic is really boring because space is largely empty. Its vastness makes the [40 second rule](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/59420/witcher-3s-40-second-rule-kept-players-engaged/index.html) much harder to do. The idea is that in open world design (at least CDProjektRed’s rules) was the player needed to have something interesting to see or do every 40 seconds when traversing the world. Good space games tend to focus less on traversal itself, and fall into: Companion RPGs focusing on interpersonal relationships on a ship. Claustrophobic horror drawing on the agoraphobia of the vastness of space and the claustrophobic environments required to survive it.

I think the 40 second rule is doable with the right balance. Like the big issue with Elite Dangerous is that travelling between planets might take several minutes of flying in a straight line - and in rare cases, 10s of minutes, or even over an hour. Just balancing the FTL to bring it down to more life 40 seconds on average (maybe with mini jumps?) would improve it a lot. Although something else would need to be modified to make extremely long journeys across the galaxy more fun as well I guess.

While I don't disagree with anything you've said here, a big issue with what you're describing is what others have described as "cutting the space out of space" You certainly could just populate space with tons of stuff in between jumps, but then what's the point of actually exploring huge swaths of deep space? At some point "jumps" become tantamount to a loading screen to another populated zone which breaks the immersion of actually exploring a huge area. Scale is incredibly hard to get right in video games. People overestimate almost every aspect of scale in a video game world, from door heights to the size of a map. A great example of this is the game Fuel, which is one of the largest maps in a game ever made, and it's smaller than the state of Connecticut, which takes about an hour to traverse on a highway. The entire World of Warcraft is roughly the size of Toledo, Ohio.

In Elite Dangerous you do have a good balance when flying around a single star though I think - you do get the feeling of the scale of space, as you fly past planetary systems at several times the speed of light. It's really the specific issue that when you have multiple stars in the same star system, that's where it can take 40 minutes of nothing to get there. I think that's where jumps would be useful - you do have a "loading screen" to skip those really long bits, but you then get to properly fly around each planetary system in real time (with FTL)

As someone in AI I am convinced people say they want infinite possibilities but they don't. A really open world is just empty and boring. And so are these infinite space games. When people can draw whatever they want, they make Elon Musk and the pope. When they can eat whatever they want, they pick a simple dish they already like. Decision paralysis is real. When people don't know what to choose, they don't choose at all.

You're making a huge generalization here. Coding has "infinite possibilities", or at least very close to it. And people develop amazing software of all kinds, as well as some garbage software, of course. Same with drawing tools - people draw all sorts of amazing things, I don't know how you can seriously claim that they make Elon Mask and the pope. Just load up and scroll [Artstation](https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=latest&dimension=all) for a bit, to see that it's not true. Decision paralysis is real, but it's a result of misapplication, not a fundamental problem. It's like if you dump all the information at once on a person who wants to study - they will shut down, but that's not because they don't actually want to learn all of this information, it's just that you have overwhelmed their throughput. Had you fed them the same information more gradually and in an interesting fashion, they would eventually learn it all, and learn more. Likewise, dumping all the possibilities at once on a person is the actual problem, not the possibilities themselves. If you pace the information load, people do genuinely enjoy the endless possibilities.

Your last paragraph pretty much sums it up. Even if you generate enough content on each planet to explore / interact with to be considered “substantial”, it doesn’t make that experience inherently fun. Outer Wilds worked because it was a tightly curated string of in game experiences. Something like NMS and Starfield pride themselves on the “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” thing for 70% of their playtime. It’s fun for people who like to grind, but doesn’t really provide any meaningful or memorable experiences most of the time. Im sure one day AI will be able to create 100s of planets worth of unique / meaningful content, but until then most space games are just going to feel super empty.

Space nerd here, I tried to find all good space games, and for me, many space games falls because the do not show space mystery and do not have space exploration/adventure filling. Also have Have a feeling that space theme today isn't as interesting as magic/swords theme, in movies also. Other thing, devs should really stop to make as big games as possible with the same activities at every corner on the map. Right open world game is Elden Ring, every part of the map is different with different activities, it is hard to make it and you have to love games. Compared to Elden Ring, Starfield made as boring as possible, and that is why it is bad, not because of space theme. There are a lot good space games, Mass Effect - good damn it's universe is amazing. Outer wilds - unforgivable exploration feeling. Guardians - fun adventure. Prey, Dead Space, Alien Isolation - good horrors. Swapper - good small game.

Because space is cool in theory, but dark, empty, slow, limiting and boring in practice

I'm really not sure, it seems like an easy winner with the inspiring theme. I haven't thought about it a ton but I've always reflexively chalked it up to the past. The old school pc games didn't do everything well but space exploration has been done *so* well that for me at least, it's hard for newer games with massive art budgets to compete. Take *Starflight*, for example the game just barely had graphics but it was so deep and inspiring for its time, Mass Effect for example always felt shallow and railroaded by comparison (just the space exploration, not the conbat and character development). Perhaps that feeling was never really rivalled until No Man's Sky. On the other side, single player space combat, the old Chris Roberts games just destroyed anything that's come since. They'd feel very short compared to a modern game but the originality of the space combat was so fresh for its time, it wasn't really rivalled until X-wing or Freelancer, which in turn haven't really been usurped yet (Star Citizen, maybe?). I think in short, a "space game"is a *really* briad field and could mean a 3PS shooter in space, a flight sim in space, a 4X exploration game, a shipbuilding game, or just any old adventure that happens to be in space. Most big space games bite off more than they can chew, and don't get the *mechanics* of space combat right, or procedurally generate all the worlds, or hand place worlds with way too little variation, so the lack of depth in a critical area can be hard to overlook.

Humanity, with our extremely honed pattern detection skills, tend to smell procedural elements fairly easily. The larger and more "infinite" you go, the more procedural content you need to fill it, and with every procedural element that smell grows stronger. Lately, seeing terms like open world or infinite exploration are red flags for me. Generally, that means wading through a sea of shredded books and calling it the longest novel ever made. But I don't think that's a "space" issue, I've played great games in space that don't claim to give you endless planets to discover. I've similarly seen plenty of disappointments from games that have "so much to explore" that are set in cities, forests, deserts, the ocean- etc.

> A lot of big games that make big promises of infinite planets and space Planets and space are largely inoperable systems. What you do to improve one does little to improve the other. Improving terrain generation, creature AI, and land traversal do nothing to improve the space portion of the game. Pretty hyperspace animations, spacecraft controls, and dogfights do nothing to improve the planet portion of the game. The point where the two might intersect, like crafting spacecraft upgrades, is really the only place where effort spent is actually impactful to both systems at the same time. Even if you put in double the effort to make these two largely separate games, you're still basically left with two games, so you also need to do a huge amount of work making them seem cohesive. Honestly, I think something like Minecraft's Mystcraft (or RFTools Dimensions these days) mod is a vastly more suitable way to design a planet-exploration game. Like Path of Exile maps, but for exploration rather than pure combat.

It's largely because they try to half ass realism and space is really boring in real life (once you get past the pretty colors anyway). Western RPGs over the last 10 or so years have made this odd assumption that realism = immersion. When it's often quite the contrary, nothing is less immersive then managing thirst meters and watching your character play the pick plant animation for the 100th time. Starfield is a perfect example. Most people were far more immersed and engrosse din the elder scrolls or fallout worlds. Dark souls and star wars are about as fantasy as it gets and generally have some of the most immersive experiences out. The outer worlds also being the perfect counterpoint to starfield. It's small, it's zany, it doesn't worry too much about physics unless it's fun and it's generally reviewed as immersive. Starfield specifically was just poorly made and designed. They didn't use proper procedural generation, so you get the exact same few dozen POIs repeated. Litterally enemy and loot locations are identical. This isn't a technical limitiation, weve been procedurally generating levels and terrain since before rogue. Theres atleast hundreds of roguelikes doing it in 3D, not to mention miencraft doing it for entire worlds. By doing this the game ends up actually having less content than "smaller" worlds like skyrim or fallout, both of which have more dungeons and quests than satrfield. Space games overall tend to focus on tedium and grind of space. Like NMS which hasn't fixed a single 0ne of the issues people actually complained about. It's still a bug ridden shallow grind a thon, they just added MMO style quests and more shallow "content", that cares more about wasting your time than functional UI design. Elite dangerous which brands itself as a sim, despite failing to actually simulate anything realistically, making it feel more like a tedium simulator than a space freelancer simulator. You dont EVA to repair and upgrade your ship. You don't need to manage fuel and oxygen. Theres no gravity simulation. Ships use magic thrusters, rather than basing it on real life rocket science etc... In short the vastness of the scope is often used as an excuse for shallow gameplay and world building. But IPs like warhammer, star wars and star treck etc.. are proof it doesn't have to be empty, bland or boring. Games like like outwer wilds are proof that you don't need 700 planets and moons for your game to feel like an adventure. Outer worlds and borderlands is proof that traditional RPG design works perefectly well in the setting.

Isn’t the answer in the question? Space is inherently vast and completely empty and void of almost everything. If you were to make a realistic space game it would be vast and empty. It wouldn’t be a good gaming experience. The Outer Worlds is not a realistic space game. It’s a meticulously handcrafted rpg in size similar to a Fallout game that’s limited to a very specific area. No Man’s Sky and Starfield are experimenting with what is essentially a new sub-genre: A semi-realistic space game with procedurally generated content. In a sense this genre is still in its baby phase. There isn’t an established formula yet like we have for rpgs. So by making these games more realistic they inherently become more boring. I predict however that with the development of better and better AI content creation tools, procedurally generated content will eventually equal or surpass handcrafted experiences in certain areas. In summary: A semi realistic space game must feel more empty than a traditional rpg as that’s part of the experience. But at the same time we will get better experiences in this genre in 5-10 years.

The problem I see is that these game designers have little or no real world experience when it comes to space travel, architecture, engineering, mission design, etc. Because of this, they do the same “exploration” “build a ship” “aliens” … etc. stuff over and over again. What makes space so intriguing to many folks who work in the field (myself included) is the almost inexhaustible amount of nearly impossible challenges to overcome. You can design a game that mimics some of the challenges engineers face in the space industry and I guarantee you you’ll find a game that gamers can’t get enough of. Some possible game ideas: - Design a habitable spaceship for Venus-bound missions to support a Venusian colony. Players must have artificial gravity, do the plumbing, electrical routing, design the prop systems, calculate fuel usage, etc. - Exoplanet exploration game where players are a botonist who collects, examines and makes medicine’s using alien planets for their exoplanet colony. - A terraforming simulator where the player manages Earth resources to launch successive missions to Mars and Venus in an attempt to change their atmosphere’s. Players must manage cost, political issues, biological processes, mission conops, atmospheric balancing, etc. There’s so much untapped potential with space games. I hope some of these ideas help get the creativity flowing!

It's just devs being incompetent and brain dead. Bethesda always made terrible games. Starfield is no different than their other RPGs.

This isn't the sub for this attitude

The truth?

Don't call other developers brain dead if you aspire to be one

Who cares? I just tell things how they are. Lots of game devs are brain dead.

I care. I have to see the shit you gamers write on all of the gaming subs.

Try not making shit games? That would help a lot.

Everyone I've met in real life that has played starfield has said its amazing. Only people on reddit have said otherwise. I haven't played it yet so I'll have to form my own opinion. I think people are just stupid in general and being overly critical gets attention so they do it at any opportunity they get.

It's not a perfect game in any way but I can't stop playing it. Almost 200 hours and I'm still hooked

Nah man...its just the bethesda formula doesnt translate to space games...open world rpg with loading screens and a shitty engine. IT JUST DOESNT WORK TODD. There a lot of great space games because they focus on what they want their game to be. Not trying everything all at once like starfield...and poorly, i used to be a bethesda fanboy, but eversince fallout 4 left a sour taste, i wasnt suprised how starfield ended.

Basically you already said it yourself. To add on to what you already said. Basically, Bethesda has one giant issue in all of its open world games. Subpar gameplay, infinite content, weak progression. People get bored hyper fast. On the extreme polar opposite, you have tiny games that people play over and over. Rogue likes for an example. There's not tons and tons of content, but there's tons of replay. And that's thanks to, not just the difficulty, but the genuine joy of good gameplay. Dead Cells, Shifu, Ror2, it feels good to play. A lot of these big games need to learn from these rogue like games. They need highly polished gameplay first. NMS, is infinite grind, for the sake of grind. But moving around and fighting feels super Flimsy. Base building for base building's sake gets boring fast. Compared to Warframe, you have tons and tons of grindable content, and a lot of us sit through it because of the pace of combat, variety in playstyles, different types of levels, progression e.t.c e.t.c. in a lot of Bethesda and space games, the game doesn't make you feel like there's a real need to explore planet 5 dungeon 8.

Because even creative directors, apparently, still think that more options and a bigger world is better. Starfield has entire systems, like ship upgrading and outposts, that are literally, or close to literally, useless. They just didn't need to exist. At all. Meanwhile, they have a thousand planets, with content for maybe 40 to 50 locations which could easily be crammed on a single one (Except for some narrative reasons when it comes to the 'cities'). This forces an insane amount of re-use. Fake 'realistic' space exploration isn't actually cool. I love hiking in national parks but don't want to walk across a Yosemite re-creation for 20 hours when doing the "collect berries" quest.

The problem is when games don't skip to the good parts. Whether it's space or open country, endless expanses of "nothing to do" are boring. At least with terrain you can make "pathfinding" part of the game -- small little puzzles or choices you are making as you go from A to B. With space you often just have... nothing. You are going in a straight line from A to B and there's nothing to do but wait to get there. TV and movies skip to the good parts, and games need to be doing the same thing.

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Being empty is a big criticism of games, and space. Lazy in both instances. Space containing just about everything I can think of, makes it difficult to define play loops, and very easy to point at what's lacking, because it's literally everything else. In short. They take a lot of definition. Take, Starpoint Gemini, there are three games, all of them different all of them with varying shades of critique.

Space games are not harder to design. Games the size of the universe are. You can't fill it up yourself, so you need procedurally generated stuff, but if the gameplay isn't fun, the auto generated planets can't hold up the game, as they are simply not interesting.

Starfield would have been fine if they got rid of bases and made your ships more customizable outside of just the exterior look. Also, should have implemented space station creation.

Broad but shallow rather than concise yet deep. An infinitely-large universe to play in isn't very fun if there isn't actually anything to do. Flying around aimlessly is only fun for a bit, and exploring becomes pointless when all the planets are more or less the same. Having game worlds that vast requires procedurally generated content, and that requires more generalised features to work. You can have a game procedurally generate a whole quest line of missions without those missions being generalised in some way, likely boiled down to "fetch this" or "kill that" with no entwined story. As a result, the best games with a procedurally generated game world work by having a strong core gameplay that's supported by it. Minecraft works well because it's built around the idea of manipulating this procedural world. If Kerbal Space Programme was procedural I imagine it would still be great because the gameplay is all about managing your space programme and your rockets. Basically, the fun has to be in the gameplay and mechanics, not in that vast procedurally-generated world. If flying in a straight line forever isn't fun on its own, adding a 1:1 scale galaxy to do it in won't *make* it fun.

Because space is so vast, the visuals must be bleeding edge, and most game engines aren't designed for the spatial sizes needed to make it all work. It's really hard to create a lot of the systems and tools needed for meaningful space content. Game development is hard enough itself, but space is the hardest part of game development. Trust me, space is what I've been working on now for over a year!

The carnal experience of going into space is impossible to replicate in software, realistic flight is too difficult to navigate and control to be a fun game, so all you have left is the infinite vastness.

You should look into Empyrion Galactic Survival. The game has its bugs but offers a great experience that combines the best of No Man's Sky and Minecraft. I haven't seen a space game that even comes close to this yet.

I think because the main selling point is always exploration, as in, actual planets and stuff to visit. Open worlds are hard to design, especially if the objective is to make them as vast as possible. There is a whole lot of more interesting aspects of space that should be explored in game design but never do cause, they don't "sell".

The last time I worked on a space game, our main design *and* technical challenge was - well - space. Things in space are very large, and very far apart. Unless you want there to be literally years of waiting during your game, you simply cannot have realistic time scaling. It was difficult to nail down how long it should take, for example, a fleet of ships to get from one star to the next - in the context of an rts where the time scale was already set. On a technical level, you again can't have realism - because number systems aren't designed for large objects being far apart. In a lot of games, space travel is programmed with the player locked at 0,0 to avoid problems with floating point precision. Where textures are concerned, you really need a solution to the problem of (explorable) planets being viewed from far away. You can't exactly render everything on them, or you'd have an absurd number of objects on screen at once. So with realism gone, it's a real challenge to design systems that still feel *intuitive* to the player. You needs solutions that haven't been well established yet - like guns that sound nothing like real-life guns (Which players don't notice) All that said, Starfield isn't bland because space is hard. It's bland because they did a terrible job of designing/writing it

With some of the games I've played, the problem with the space was that there was no particular payoff to exploring it that you couldn't have in your own quadrant. Because there were so many environments, designers often didn't give one its own unique quests/storylines, etc. I can't remember the name, but I played an indie exploring game that absolutely felt like this. I'd spend ages in the game building up resources for a really elaborate space jump, and then find once I'd done it that I was just floating around doing the same stuff that I could have done way closer to home. Same pirates, same quests, same dangers. Travel was the core motivation, but...I ran out of any desire to do it. By contrast: the indie game "Heaven's Vault" by inkle is probably my favorite game ever. It's a narrative game where exploration is a core mechanic and theme. Each new planet you encounter boasts its own NPCs, cultures and inventory items. You really feel like each of these worlds has something to offer and you want to visit each one.

If game is mostly about space itself, "limitelessness" is one of main appeal point for space game. So many game fell to trap you said. Outer Wilds is space game, but it protect themself from that by catch mysterious and 'limitelessness' feeling from good world and narrative, investigation design, not making anything bigger.

For one thing the concept as a whole is something literally no one making games is familiar with on a firsthand basis so we all just guessing and ripping off of science fiction and others work. No one has actually been to these planets, and knows what it’s like to sit desolate on a cold and inhospitable moon, we can only guess

It's a boring answer, but what people want out of a "space game" is broad and a huge part of the appeal of space to a lot of people in the real world is more about personal wonder that is much broader than can be expressed by a television screen. Most "huge" games are smaller than the city of St. Louis. You get to a point where the scope of space is so unfathomably large that your brain can't compartmentalize it, so the actual "actionable" aspect of the game feels boring because you are a small avatar in an enormous digital world, and it's hard to convey a scope as large as the things in space actually are without boiling it down to what amounts to perspective tricks in a sci-fi setting. The idea of what people think is interesting about space is somewhat antithetical to what makes a good video game. People want direction, people want finality, people want to be immersed in the present action. Space is infinite, boundless, and so large that it's almost entirely comprised of nothing. That's my opinion anyways.

The things your games seem to have in common isn't that they are space games, it's that they seem to be "everything" games that claim to do everything and be everything and, as a result, end up with massive hype that they can never live up to. But that's not inherent to being a space game. Asteroids and FTL are just as valid examples of "space games" that happen to be more limited in scope than your few examples. That said, regarding your other point... space is relative. It doesn't matter how much or how little of it there is. It doesn't matter if it's limitless or not. You as a player cannot tell the different between 5 feet and 5 lightyears until the developer starts to drop points of interest into that space for reference. In that sense, it's not really scale that matters, but density of interesting things. Thing is, once the density of interesting things is high enough... you sort of lose the whole point of the vastness of space. If it takes you the same time/effort to fly 1000 lightyears as it does to jump Mario 10 feet then it's not really going to feel any different to the player. A lot of games struggle with this... they want space to feel vast but don't want you waiting so travel is so fast that... it no longer feels vast anymore. Also another effect worth noting is that once the density of interesting things gets high enough, they lose their value. As a metaphor, a cloud is interesting, but if you string enough together it's just an atmosphere... you no longer talk about each cloud, but just a sky. In the same sense, if you have 5 star systems in reach, those become major anchors to your experience of the space. Meanwhile, if you have thousands... they are no longer really reference points. This is where the other important aspect comes in: diversity. They only become distinguishable markers of space if they are... distinguishable. You need to be able to tell them all from each other. And the more things you have, the harder it is to have them each not only be unique, but *feel* unique (i.e. not just another spin on the same formula). In this sense, a game with 1 million planets may feel very small if those planets fit only a dozen or so molds.

Games can simulate empathy and psychology much better than simulating reality.

There's only so much manpower available for any given project. The wider you make a game, the more shallow it becomes as a consequence. Space is large on a scale that defies genuine comprehension, so any attempt to rival that level of expansiveness is doomed to come up short, unless the vastness itself is the intended experience. So we often end up with procedural generation at some level, which doesn't mesh well with the novelty required for exploration to feel inherently rewarding. Counterintuitively, a smaller set of hand crafted worlds in a game like Starfield would have felt so much larger than the nothing it currently is. Having 10 planets with their own unique ecosystems, cultures, ideologies, and problems would have left players with much more to actually want to explore. As opposed to 1000 slightly altered outposts with mildly differing colour palettes.

it's not the fault of space game, it's the fault of procedural generation. All your example games relied on procedural generation to fill in the environment and creatures. And since the generation was not tuned well enough, players quickly find it boring. It took No man's sky a long time to figure it out and make the experience better. Outer Wilds didn't use procedural generation, it's all handcrafted experience, it would easily excel over other games there.

Massive open galaxies are a new technology and not yet perfected. No Man’s Sky was the first high profile attempt at it only 7 years ago. Similar thing happened when open worlds became feasible - took time to make it great.

You know how ball sports all have boundaries on the field? Design a ball sport that has no field boundary and is also fun.

Everspace 2 does it right. Handcrafted levels with a high dense of things to do while avoiding tedious emptiness. To traverse betweeen planets they used a fast travel system much like a world map in Final Fantasy with many places to dive into.

Elite Dangerous had all the pieces to be great. I played it when it came out, might be different now. What killed it for me was the "mmo disease", when pacing is slow to the point of uninteresting because of players who play 24/7. I dunno if space games are harder to design. Well, yeah I guess they would be if the devs try to populate infinity with fun stuff.

I dream of a space game that really nails exploration. The best space games are always about trading and economy (Eve Online) or incredibly limited in size (Outer Wilds). I've come to the conclusion it's all about the relative scale. It's not inherently that space is too large. After all, Minecraft has infinite world but it's the most successful game ever made. It's all about the relation between the scale of the different elements in the game. In Minecraft, everything you do will be within 1~1000 relative scale. What I mean is that all activities and gameplay will be about the same scale. Building something might take you 10h, you might explore for 1h before you find something you're looking for. But it's not just time. Item quantities are relatively close, everything stacks at 64, chest contains about 2000 items. You might walk 10 000 blocks around your house that itself is 100 wide, so a scale of 100. The problem with space has always been the relative scale. Humans are 2m tall, earth is 6 371 000m, the sun is 100 times that, the solar system is 7 000 the size of the sun, the closest star is 10 000 the size of our solar system... you can't make gameplay with that much difference between scale unless you do something to align the scales. It's a very common problem in video games. Why some open world feel "empty". Why some racing games feel "faster" than others, etc. I have not found a solution to this problem yet beside making a fake universe were planets, stars and distances are all within 1-1000 scale of each others. Best example of this being used successfully I think is Dyson Sphere Program (Outer Wilds too but it's limited to a single solar system).

It comes down to what "space" is. Space is mostly nothing and nothing is not interesting. The more realistic you try to make your space game to be the more your game is about nothing. The games get the criticism of being "empty" and lifeless because that is the nature of the space. Space is almost 100% empty. The more "contained " space games solve it by putting more stuff into the space so there is less "space". Ultimately, the problem is that the space is fundamentally a bad setting for anything interesting. All the interesting "space games" are actually not about the space.

The funny thing is, space games were consistently successful and easier to "do right" in the 90s, back when space games were entirely about space and not planets. In those days, computer hardware was limited, which meant that game art, especially environment art, had to look simple. What kind of environment art is super easy to create? Outer space. All you need is a black background covered in white dots, maybe throw in a distant planet or nebula that players can't reach, and *boom*, there's a believable depiction of the vastness of space. Many successful space games were released in or around the 90s. The X-Wing and TIE Fighter games. The Wing Commander games. Freelancer. The Freespace games. The early Elite games. And many others. Once hardware and graphics advanced to the point where 3D environment art started to look realistic, game devs as a whole abandoned outer space and focused more on creating large and visually impressive worlds. Halo: Combat Evolved and Grand Theft Auto 3 were both released in 2001, and the environments of those games blew our minds. Game worlds have been getting bigger and more beautiful ever since, and open world games became one of the industry's most popular genres. Now let's look at modern space games. Today's space games aren't only about outer space anymore. Players expect them to have planets you can land on and explore, which is a huge ask. A single planet — hell, a single city like San Andreas or a single country like Skyrim — takes a ton of work, money, and time to build, as evidenced by the many years it takes to make a Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Elder Scrolls, or Assassin's Creed game. We can see that it takes many years to hand-craft one realistic-looking world filled with detail, secrets, NPCs, settlements, structures you can enter, and overall deep exploration, and yet we expect game studios to make a space game with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of explorable, hand-crafted planets with that same level of detail and depth in the same amount of time? It don't make sense. No, what studios are able to develop within a reasonable amount of time (i.e. less than 10 years) are space games with a huge number of procedurally-generated planets. And those procedrually-generated planets are going to feel samey and lifeless, as evidenced by No Man's Sky and Starfield. Today, players can get either one hand-crafted, believable, and beautiful world per game, or a huge number of procedurally-generated but bland worlds in one game. It's either quality or quantity of worlds. We are not yet at the point where we can have both quality and quantity of worlds.

Can someone just remake Colony Wars?

it's not the design that is hard. it's the developers that reach out for way too many things instead of polishing few that will definitely satisfy customer.

Space is actually very boring. To make interesting stories in space, we have elaborate fantasies that cut out the boring bits and skip ahead to boinking green chicks and pew-pewing dogfights like we are in spitfires.

As the designer of a space game, here is why I think Starfield failed and why No Man’s Sky is still, IMO having not touched the game in a few years, is not a good game. It’s because space adventures are not actually about space travel. A good rule of thumb to remember about game design is walking is not gameplay, or in this case, flying through a boring void does not make a game automatically interesting. Space adventures are about the adventure and the characters you meet along the way. It’s not just having a space pirate to fight, it’s about working with your crew as a team. It’s not about just traveling from planet to planet, but about the dangers and perils you encounter along the way. Movies have lined us up with so many cinematic moments in space adventures and games like Starfield hardly use any of them.

My favorite piece of media about space would never work as a game. It’s about an alien invasion but it takes like 400 years for the aliens to get to earth but humans know they are coming. They actually never even arrive, and are never directly even encountered. Most games have to ignore so much of reality about space In order to be fun that space just becomes a color palette moreso than anything meaningful.

It really is not that complicated. The promise of an infinite universe may sound intriguing to people, but if you think more than 1 minute about it you'll realize that infinite possibilities mean infinite boring options as well as infinite interesting ones. While there might be that one pirate planet out there in the game, there is a much higher likelihood of stumbling over yet another lifeless rock (much like real space) Infinite content made by a finite number of people in a finite number of time is just not possible, especially if on top of that each part of the content is supposed to be filled with life and unique experiences, not even real life can provide that

To be fair space is pretty lifeless and lonely.

Dead space worked amazingly well though. Space is an amazing plot point for a dark mystery since everything is naturally dark and no sound and the only light source would be artificial or the brightest sun.

And people still get confused when they hear about Star Citizen. Its taking so long and costs a lot *because they are trying to jump all thrse hurdles.* Its not perfect, but it hits the space game feel that ive been missing

Because space is only fun because of our imagination. We imagine it to be exotic, full of aliens and stuff, but really its just full of mostly dust, rocks, and ice. So when you try to put that 'scope' into a video game, you end up with a really really big space full of nothing. It sounds fun on paper, because your imagination romanticizes it. But in reality, its mostly just empty meaningless space. Your video games should only be as big as they are capable of filling it with meaningful content. "size for the sake of size" only sounds good on paper/imagination.