Well I am a bit dissapointed. I thought from reading up on this game that the solar systems and star layouts would be somewhat realistic. I can say that its a bit better than some games but overall lacking.
Why are FPS games so popular? Because the recreate environments with painstaking detail. A city block has all the things youd expect to find on a city block. A mailbox, a storm drain, stores, litter, pedestrians, shops, apartment buildings, the sounds, a wind kicks up some litter, etc. All of these things make the suspension of disbelief easier and immerses you into the game.
What are space games lacking? Why have the fallen out of popularity? Because no designer thinks about immersing the player in space! I mean we all know what the basic layout of a solar system looks like. Planets, moons, stars, binary star systems, trinary star systems, asteroid belts, comets and magnificient things like black holes feeding off a companion binary star, can you imagine what that would like like from a close by planet? With recent dicoveries we also know that gas giants can be right next to stars! Not all solar systems follow the layout of our own in terms of planet order from the sun. This is not to mention Orbital and ecliptic behavior. And what do we get in our space games? Skyboxes, planetary layout done at a whim making no sense whatsoever to how solar systems work (I am not just talking about sins here), and uninspired nebulae on the skboxes (not even attempts at some of the really fascinating stuff out there. Typically no moons, no orbits, no trajectories, no asteroid belts, no ringed planets, no SPACE!
The days are long gone, except for a brand new gamer, where we could have a skybox and feel immersed, its like we still playing doom where all we get are flat 3d polygons and some textures.
Now for sins I am not expecting them to rewrite the game or to add all the stuff that would make it like space but you can do some things with the current engine to help us suspend our disbelief and get immersed in the game.
1) Layout the planets in solar systems like one would expect if looking at a solar system, planets lying on the ecliptic and sometimes with vast distances between one another. Add some Gas giants! Would be great destinations for miner ships. Put the asteroids in belts! Dont put terran worlds all over the place there is only a certain area where a terran world could possible evolve in any given solar system. Ice planets should be far out volcanic close in, desert should be near the terran, etc, etc. Just have it make a little bit of sense.
2) More stars, more solar systems, less objects in each solar system. I really was wondering if the solar systems in the game where meant to feel like solar systems or galaxies! Only the presence of a single star confirmed they were solar systems. You barely even move the map around cause there are so many objects in your own solar system that you just kind of focus there. Travel intra solar and extra solar should be markedly different. The travel times in phase space take FOREVER extra solar.
It should also be fairly rare that 2 empires start in the same solar system, let alone 5 or 6, the chance of having two worlds capable of supporting sentient life in a single solar system is infintescimal.
3) Space is black unless your in a gas cloud. There should be enough ways to do lighting on ships and lighting from the primary star in a system and reflection of that light from planetary bodies to light up the view so we can see whats going on. Not to mention the skybox having some nebulae, gas clouds, stars of course, and maybe some other interesting stellar phenomena. Could the game get anymore orange?
4) Zoom out. The max zoom out is just kind of weird, if you add more solar systems the view should zoom out further to a point where you can see a labeled view of all the star systems. It should really cool at this view like your looking at a sector of a galaxy.
I am not asking for orbiter, I am not asking for perfect scales or for them to try and put in real orbits and trajectories, nor include every type of asrtnomical body that we know about. I am just asking that they try and make space feel like space as we know it and at least give that a better shot than pretty much every single other space game that ever made it to market. Will a developer please just once actually give this shot?
