It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
There’s a reliable way to combat scalping in general. Start selling the item at a high price or in larger quantity and then cut the price whenever sales drop off.
Scalpers can only make money by scalping something when it is being sold below what the market is willing to pay for it in the quantity in which it is available.
On a non-economic note, I’d add that I don’t think I’d want to buy an easily-modified Linux computer system from some random person unless I planned to wipe it. How do you know that the thing hasn’t been rootkitted?
As a piece of hardware and platform, I like it. I think that the OLED screen is definitely a win too.
But I carry a laptop and tablet (EDIT: and smartphone) with me already, and I rarely game much when out and about. Just not enough additional utility provided by the thing.
You start out a bit fragile in the game. Qud tends to, IME, get easier over time (though one needs to learn how to deal with the goatfolk when one runs into them).
Giant centipedes are generally harder than crocodiles and snapjaws. Giant beetles too.
Start in Joppa, which is the default.
Can you kill a single crocodile in the nearby salt marshes in surrounding maps?
If so, you’re good. Just don’t get aggressive. Don’t fight more than one at once. Back off if you’re low on health and heal up – important for the game in general. You can run if things start to go badly (especially if you take starting perks perks that let you move more quickly).
You can start with some kind of “burst” ability. Like, a marauder has the ability to lop a limb off, which will not only gimp the enemy in various ways but cause bleeding for a while. Espers can start with damage-causing abilities like Freezing Ray or Light Manipulation. Using that to kill the first few monsters and letting the ability recharge after each is desirable.
If you want to try to get a starting level of two, go to talk to Argyve in the southwest corner of the starting map. Get his “find an artifact” quest. You can loot chests in houses in Joppa without angering the citizens if you close the doors first ((o)pen them again) so that nobody can see you. You’ll likely get an artifact or two, which lets you complete his first and second artifact quest.
IIRC, you can also get some experience from examining the statue in the northeast of the map and another on the map immediately to the north of the starting map.
In the north-western corner of the Joppa map, there’s a secret passage in the water that you’ll find if you walk in the water. That will take you to a tunnel that leads to the bottom level of Red Rock, gives you a reliable early way to get underground. I think that the enemies there are generally harder than the ones on the surface, but there are snapjaws, and they’re easier (and they also are a good source of dropped equipment for a starting player). Don’t go below the first level underground at first.
Don’t try to rush to the rust wells for Argyve. And you might want to gain a few levels before you do Red Rock for the warden of Joppa. Same, but more so for trying to cross the salt desert to the Six Day Stilt for the zealot who is also on the starting map.
I like Qud – didn’t at first – but I feel like it kinda plays out similarly each time, at least with the chimera-marauder build that I like. Like, I’m not really forced to deal with drastically-different situations each run, which is kind of a core element of roguelikes.
Given how much time they’ve had to think about branding, I’m not sure that this is necessarily the name that they’ll stick with. But I think that it’s probably – while this is in the news – a good move to get people looking at some channel that they do control, so that if they come up with something else, they can tell people about it.
I guess you could potentially make a device that appears to be a controller and translates keyboard/mouse with a couple USB inputs
They control the console, the OS, the controller hardware, and can require the console to connect to them. They already have the ability to push out controller firmware updates. They can have the controller cryptographically authenticate to the console and push blacklists to the console of keys that get leaked (like if someone somehow extracts a key from a legit controller and uses it to make a knockoff).
TLDR: It’s really really underbaked, should’ve delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.
You could also just put it on a list to keep an eye on and look at it in six months or a year later.
I think that a number of times, publishers put out a half-baked release but do ultimately see the issues at release fixed. Fallout 76 was horrendous at release, and while it’s still not Fallout 5, I think that the updates have made it a decent game. Cyberpunk 2077 also wasn’t ready at release, and while I haven’t looked at it recently, my understanding is that with updates and DLC, it’s also pretty decent. Paradox does have a history of titles that see a lot of post-release work.
I think that in many cases, the patientgamers crowd – wait at minimum a year after release before looking at a game – has the right idea. They may not get the absolute latest, blingiest stuff. But:
Many bugs are often fixed by then. You aren’t the guinea pig.
The hardware it runs on is cheaper and/or performance is better.
People will have done up wikis to refer to.
The game itself may cost less.
DLC is out. For many games – Paradox games in particular – a lot of the content is in the DLC, and the base game is kind of dwarfed by the DLC. For a number of these, a new title in a series isn’t going to be as good as the last before a lot of DLC has come out.
Mods are out. For some games, particularly on the PC, mods make the game vastly better.
I’m not saying that everyone should do that. But in this case, we knew going into the release – and the developer announced – that the performance wasn’t where they wanted it to be at release. So I think that this is a good candidate to wait on. Either they improve performance post-release or they won’t. Either way, you’ll know prior to purchase. Plus, hardware keeps getting faster, so to a certain degree, performance problems solve themselves.
We just had a discussion about the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there’s been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it’s kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn’t add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it’s a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman – an indie fighter combat game (not space – atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat – did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I’m thinking that maybe there’s room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of “Hollywood space” – fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around – were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don’t have that around any more.
There’s a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it’s that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn’t handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you’ve got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it’s just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we’re past that point.
I’d guess that the idea here is that a “whale” is someone who will spend a lot of money on something. Historically, catching an (actual) whale meant that you’d caught something that was very valuable; my guess is that this is where the phrase came from. Whales were valuable because at the time, they were an economically-reasonable place to get oil. Fracking (or hydraulic fracturing) is a way to extract oil from the ground.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see where they’re coming from. A “whale fracking operation” is not a standard term that I’ve ever heard before, though I get what the guy probably meant.
But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond “if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything”.
Ah, okay. I was just trying to figure out how it differed from some of the other things you listed, and fleet combat was one. But the economic side is another, and, yeah, I can see the economic side of the X series being appealing if building a big space empire is a goal.
If you’re looking for a space economic sim, that’s entirely-absent from NEBULOUS, and in fact they even mention that up-front on the product page – they’re going for combat simulation. So it won’t fill that slot.
played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job
Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn’t like the “faux online” aspect either. I bet that it’s probably pretty in VR, though.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It’s definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Ah, okay, I didn’t think that that’d be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn’t too elaborate – like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn’t all that great at predicting where you’ll be. There isn’t, I don’t know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there’s a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn’t played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.
Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There’s a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff – I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.
They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.
So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn’t their goal – they’re trying to do a combat environment in space.
I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.
I’m not big on the multplayer aspect
Yeah, ditto.
Starfield was a huge disappointment
I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn’t much more than a pretty minigame.