What are the good space games to be had?
Posted: 2010-06-27 11:16am
I'm sure there's more people with my tastes out there - we want vast science fiction, we want to kick ass in the black. We want to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. We want to fly a tiny, undershielded, unhulled mosquito strapped to a rocket and armed with a deathgun against the biggest battleships ever to try and lock onto us with a point-defense radar. We want to command a floatilla of frigates, cruisers and battleships in the midst of over-the-top, incredible story and drama. We want to helm a renegade fleet of ships with nothing to lose and everything to gain in a desperate fight against the evil empire that scorched our world for our unknowing violation of an ages old Versaille-style treaty.
In short, we bemoan the fact that space has taken a back-seat to fantasy and science-fiction corridor-shooters. We want to see Wing Commander again, with the best graphics today's computers can run, blowing apart Kilrathi and Bugs and even other humans. We want to see the days of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident return; the likes of Homeworld and Space Empires V as well.
But the problem is that, as a genre, it's gone largely by the wayside. Speculation exists that this is because good space games are found to be lacking as technical challenges; after all, "I masterfully rendered a huge cube of bugger-all and then threw some objects into it" doesn't look very good on an art director's resume.
So, what good space-based games are there to be had out there today? I've already mentioned most of my favorites:
Space Empires V is, while technically dated, vastly deep and immersive as far as the breadth and depth of the tech tree goes. In most games, the tech tree is limited to "make your ships go farther and put out more dakka whilst absorbing more dakka," but in SE V you can do things like manipulate the wormholes, make planets and stuff; this gives rise to fun tactics, especially when you've out-teched your enemy. His horde of invasion ships is in the sector chokepoint leading up to your homeworld? Cut the gate! Use your other wormhole manipulator to slide in behind him and cut off his forces from support, then start carving holes in his empire. By the time you're ready to conquer him, he'll be virtuall defenseless. Unfortunately your ships will always look more or less the same; and while there is a certain satisfaction to arranging your hardpoints to your liking, it wouldn't matter if you just crammed them all into the first available slot of a given type.
In the vein of the 4X games there's Galactic Civilizations II and it's many expansion packs. While more visually appealing in that you get the visceral joy of lego-set constructing your ships (and there is something to be said for making an absolute leviathan of a vessel out of fluff parts,) the tech tree is basically same-old, same-old. At the end of the technology tree, you'll be doing the same things as at the beginning, just farther from home and with larger numbers being thrown around.
The diplomacy was probably this game's strong suit. If you're a tech race, you can fastly research the highest diplomacy tech and talk rings around other races, trading them barely-above-their-own-level technologies for vast concessions or amounts of money. At the peak of diplomacy (full diplomacy with a diplomatic race talking to an undiplomatic race) you can sometimes even manage to talk them out of house and homeworld; in fact this can be so strong and powerful that the game's designated bad-guy race, the Drengin, have a special trigger to have a violent faction take over in a revoloution if you diplomatize the original emperor into being too friendly with everyone; an impressive feat, I should add, and one that probably means you'll be essentially bribing and berating him to refrain from starting any wars.
Sword of the Stars had an interesting concept in positing four different races, all of which had unique methods of FTL travel; wormhole-network bound jump-ships, warp drive, reactionless drives that get faster the farther they are from gravity, and teleport networks that have to cross interstellar space at STL travel but can bring in reinforcements immediately. But the game itself was a huge let-down in many was. The randomized technology tree was a pain in the ass as you could never be sure of getting what you wanted or needed, only a bare minimum of what the designers deigned to concede that everyone had a minimum right to. Worse, the gameplay quickly became horrible, horrible micromanagement, and in the overall... It was dull - an unforgivable sin if ever there was one. The early game could be interesting, but later on it stopped being so. Plus, it's only barely a 4X.
Wing Commander. Oh, wing commander. The latest one out was Wing Commander: Prophecy, which astoundingly came out in 1997. Despite being over a decade old, if you can make it work today, you'll find a game with an intelligent, mature plot featuring an acting cast of phenomenal stars and brilliant unknowns, depth of choice, and unlike many modern games, the ability to screw the pooch but survive and have the game still go on instead of getting a Nonstandard Game Over, with your failures (and successes,) having consequences.
The problem is, what's out there now that's as good as Wing Commander? X3: The Reunion is a joke. It's got a lot of depth, true, but much of it is out of the player's leauge without either cheating or getting a lot of mods and setting up a network of AI traders, then flying to a safe sector and setting your ship to time compression overnight. Darkstar One is just as bad in different ways; dogfighting is a joke due to the prevalance of turrets, and there are game-breakingly hard missions later on wherein the player is forced to defend a space station from scalable enemies which scale to the level of the player's own ship (but the space station's gun does not.) Additionally, though it tries to have you set up as if you're capable of doing any kind of thing you want, in reality everything you do is simply a thin veneer of leaving where you are, going somewhere else to get paid, and getting into a fight along the way. Then there's Freelancer, which so many people laud as the answer.
I didn't like Freelancer. I find the mouse-only controls to be a heinous miscarriage of justice, but more to the point I found it to be very much like a combination of Darkstar One's "you're just following a plot and taking side-missions for cash which inevitably wind up getting you into a dogfight anyway" gameplay with X3's "buy a marginally better ship for +a boat load of cash" upgrade paradigm that very quickly led to me realizing "I'm just going to be grinding this for the next hour... Or I can cheat." In the end, I think it's a game worthy of being damned with faint praise: it was allright, but I never finished it.
Homeworld. The original Homeworld and it's expansion, Cataclysm, are some of the games I remember most fondly to this day. The sequal, HW2, made a ridiculous hash of the storyline and spot-welded the difficulty setting to "Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Hard" what with the scaling difficulty that punished you for doing too well as badly as it punished you for sucking (And ultimately which I overcame through liberal amounts of editing my own unit files,) but it was still pretty fun, if it felt a bit lacking somewhat compared to the original. Again, we find mature storylines involving characters who are at least a bit deeper than a shower. Not quite as good as WC:P in that regard, but then the movie wasn't as good as WC:P in that regard.
The only space-RTS I've played that's come as close to as fun as Homeworld is, oddly enough, not really a true space-RTS, being Star Wars: Empire at War. An expansive game incorporating elements of RTS and 4X gameplay, it takes place across the breadth and depth of the Star Wars universe, literally from the surface of the planets we all know to the heavens above. It kind of defies classification, but it's fun. The expansion wasn't as good, in my opinion, because the Zann Consortium are a broken bunch of imbalanced Fandalorian wankers; but it's oh-so-sweet to take them down as the Rebellion, or drop the hammer of the Empire on them. Suffers a bit from the lack of an ability to say "fuck it, Base Delta Zero the shit out of these assholes and let's move on." The Empire can produce the Death Star with predictable results, but in the Galactic Conquest games I played I never saw the AI pull it off, and I never played as them or the campaign modes.
Then there's you-command-a-ship game. Not a dogfighter like Wing Commander because you're personally commanding a larger ship, and not a 4X or an RTS as you're not commanding a massive army (though if you get command of enough ships it can start to verge on RTS territory.) The best example I've ever found of this kind of game is also the only example I've found of this kind of game; Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. It's an amazing game, even six years later. Though you can tell that it was developed by non-English natives, it's only barely so, and only evident in some of the hardware descriptions. The voice acting is generally-speaking good to great; it's evident that they hired people who at least had a full grasp of the English language, even if some of them were not the greatest voice talent. The graphics are okay, and the fluff writing, if one digs into the personal logs of the captain, is top-notch. The gameplay is spectacular and nuanced, but it does suffer somewhat in that you really do need a guide and to read ahead to know what equipment you'll need to take along on your next mission (and sometimes you need to think two or three missions ahead), or you can face horrible rape. Once you get several ships, the amount of micromanagement involved goes very much; fortunately you can always pause the game, survey your situation, and issue orders. It's not a perfect game, the graphics are a bit dated but still beautiful, largely thanks to brilliant art design and direction. The worst is probably the facial animations of speaking characters, which is obviously just a generic animation loop and not even motion-captured, but it doesn't really detract much from the game. The difficulty curve can be punishing even on easy mode; personally I solved this by upping the HP of all friendly ships and reducing by 1 the amount of emplacement resource required to purchase and equip the equipment on my ship (except for a few certain key pieces of equipment that are vital and can come up unexpectedly, like the datascanner and e-skeeter, which I just dropped to 0.)
On the MMORPG front, there are only three that I know of that had space as a central theme or large element: Earth & Beyond which (sadly) is no longer in existance, EvE Online, and Star Wars Galaxies. EvE is as much experiment as it is a space game, being a more or less unregulated libertarian paradise which has turned out pretty much exactly how we'd expect; the lawless areas are inhabited by heavily-armed paranoid maniacs and all the people who don't care to interact with heavily-armed paranoid maniacs huddle in the high-security areas. SWG, on the other hand, seems to be largely standard MMORPG stuff, but they recently rolled out that novel system wherein players can design and throw out new missions. It's got all of the important "fluff" that's missing in most other games: fully-customizable housing, spaceships, fully-customizable spaceships, as well as having your standard "pick a class, level it up, run high-end missions with large numbers of your pals" fare. Of these, I've played all three; E&B I sadly missed mostly out on because the computer I had at the time wasn't powerful enough to hack more than the tutorial area, but it had the wonderful idea of letting you play pick-and-match with your spaceship's visual appearance.
EvE Online has zero fluff and is entirely a numbers game, to the point that the most vastly inhabited planets in the game have a barebones description of their atmospheric type, size and mass.
SWG doesn't quite have the customization you'd like, but this is understandable in that you're using ship-types that have been defined in prior canon; I can forgive trading away the ability to not design my own ship when the payoff is that I'm flying a frigging X-Wing. The good part about SWG is that the space game is only half-RPG. The numbers don't factor into whether you hit or miss, only your own skill with the joystick. You do still need to level your space stats up and all, but to a large degree it's possible for a very skilled player to achieve victory against foes that a statistical comparison would not have said he could have beaten.
So, I was wondering: what other kind of space games are there to be had? There don't seem to be very many, and many of those that are out there seem to be utter crap. Surely someone has to have an inkling of what's wheat and what's chaff.
In short, we bemoan the fact that space has taken a back-seat to fantasy and science-fiction corridor-shooters. We want to see Wing Commander again, with the best graphics today's computers can run, blowing apart Kilrathi and Bugs and even other humans. We want to see the days of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident return; the likes of Homeworld and Space Empires V as well.
But the problem is that, as a genre, it's gone largely by the wayside. Speculation exists that this is because good space games are found to be lacking as technical challenges; after all, "I masterfully rendered a huge cube of bugger-all and then threw some objects into it" doesn't look very good on an art director's resume.
So, what good space-based games are there to be had out there today? I've already mentioned most of my favorites:
Space Empires V is, while technically dated, vastly deep and immersive as far as the breadth and depth of the tech tree goes. In most games, the tech tree is limited to "make your ships go farther and put out more dakka whilst absorbing more dakka," but in SE V you can do things like manipulate the wormholes, make planets and stuff; this gives rise to fun tactics, especially when you've out-teched your enemy. His horde of invasion ships is in the sector chokepoint leading up to your homeworld? Cut the gate! Use your other wormhole manipulator to slide in behind him and cut off his forces from support, then start carving holes in his empire. By the time you're ready to conquer him, he'll be virtuall defenseless. Unfortunately your ships will always look more or less the same; and while there is a certain satisfaction to arranging your hardpoints to your liking, it wouldn't matter if you just crammed them all into the first available slot of a given type.
In the vein of the 4X games there's Galactic Civilizations II and it's many expansion packs. While more visually appealing in that you get the visceral joy of lego-set constructing your ships (and there is something to be said for making an absolute leviathan of a vessel out of fluff parts,) the tech tree is basically same-old, same-old. At the end of the technology tree, you'll be doing the same things as at the beginning, just farther from home and with larger numbers being thrown around.
The diplomacy was probably this game's strong suit. If you're a tech race, you can fastly research the highest diplomacy tech and talk rings around other races, trading them barely-above-their-own-level technologies for vast concessions or amounts of money. At the peak of diplomacy (full diplomacy with a diplomatic race talking to an undiplomatic race) you can sometimes even manage to talk them out of house and homeworld; in fact this can be so strong and powerful that the game's designated bad-guy race, the Drengin, have a special trigger to have a violent faction take over in a revoloution if you diplomatize the original emperor into being too friendly with everyone; an impressive feat, I should add, and one that probably means you'll be essentially bribing and berating him to refrain from starting any wars.
Sword of the Stars had an interesting concept in positing four different races, all of which had unique methods of FTL travel; wormhole-network bound jump-ships, warp drive, reactionless drives that get faster the farther they are from gravity, and teleport networks that have to cross interstellar space at STL travel but can bring in reinforcements immediately. But the game itself was a huge let-down in many was. The randomized technology tree was a pain in the ass as you could never be sure of getting what you wanted or needed, only a bare minimum of what the designers deigned to concede that everyone had a minimum right to. Worse, the gameplay quickly became horrible, horrible micromanagement, and in the overall... It was dull - an unforgivable sin if ever there was one. The early game could be interesting, but later on it stopped being so. Plus, it's only barely a 4X.
Wing Commander. Oh, wing commander. The latest one out was Wing Commander: Prophecy, which astoundingly came out in 1997. Despite being over a decade old, if you can make it work today, you'll find a game with an intelligent, mature plot featuring an acting cast of phenomenal stars and brilliant unknowns, depth of choice, and unlike many modern games, the ability to screw the pooch but survive and have the game still go on instead of getting a Nonstandard Game Over, with your failures (and successes,) having consequences.
The problem is, what's out there now that's as good as Wing Commander? X3: The Reunion is a joke. It's got a lot of depth, true, but much of it is out of the player's leauge without either cheating or getting a lot of mods and setting up a network of AI traders, then flying to a safe sector and setting your ship to time compression overnight. Darkstar One is just as bad in different ways; dogfighting is a joke due to the prevalance of turrets, and there are game-breakingly hard missions later on wherein the player is forced to defend a space station from scalable enemies which scale to the level of the player's own ship (but the space station's gun does not.) Additionally, though it tries to have you set up as if you're capable of doing any kind of thing you want, in reality everything you do is simply a thin veneer of leaving where you are, going somewhere else to get paid, and getting into a fight along the way. Then there's Freelancer, which so many people laud as the answer.
I didn't like Freelancer. I find the mouse-only controls to be a heinous miscarriage of justice, but more to the point I found it to be very much like a combination of Darkstar One's "you're just following a plot and taking side-missions for cash which inevitably wind up getting you into a dogfight anyway" gameplay with X3's "buy a marginally better ship for +a boat load of cash" upgrade paradigm that very quickly led to me realizing "I'm just going to be grinding this for the next hour... Or I can cheat." In the end, I think it's a game worthy of being damned with faint praise: it was allright, but I never finished it.
Homeworld. The original Homeworld and it's expansion, Cataclysm, are some of the games I remember most fondly to this day. The sequal, HW2, made a ridiculous hash of the storyline and spot-welded the difficulty setting to "Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Hard" what with the scaling difficulty that punished you for doing too well as badly as it punished you for sucking (And ultimately which I overcame through liberal amounts of editing my own unit files,) but it was still pretty fun, if it felt a bit lacking somewhat compared to the original. Again, we find mature storylines involving characters who are at least a bit deeper than a shower. Not quite as good as WC:P in that regard, but then the movie wasn't as good as WC:P in that regard.
The only space-RTS I've played that's come as close to as fun as Homeworld is, oddly enough, not really a true space-RTS, being Star Wars: Empire at War. An expansive game incorporating elements of RTS and 4X gameplay, it takes place across the breadth and depth of the Star Wars universe, literally from the surface of the planets we all know to the heavens above. It kind of defies classification, but it's fun. The expansion wasn't as good, in my opinion, because the Zann Consortium are a broken bunch of imbalanced Fandalorian wankers; but it's oh-so-sweet to take them down as the Rebellion, or drop the hammer of the Empire on them. Suffers a bit from the lack of an ability to say "fuck it, Base Delta Zero the shit out of these assholes and let's move on." The Empire can produce the Death Star with predictable results, but in the Galactic Conquest games I played I never saw the AI pull it off, and I never played as them or the campaign modes.
Then there's you-command-a-ship game. Not a dogfighter like Wing Commander because you're personally commanding a larger ship, and not a 4X or an RTS as you're not commanding a massive army (though if you get command of enough ships it can start to verge on RTS territory.) The best example I've ever found of this kind of game is also the only example I've found of this kind of game; Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. It's an amazing game, even six years later. Though you can tell that it was developed by non-English natives, it's only barely so, and only evident in some of the hardware descriptions. The voice acting is generally-speaking good to great; it's evident that they hired people who at least had a full grasp of the English language, even if some of them were not the greatest voice talent. The graphics are okay, and the fluff writing, if one digs into the personal logs of the captain, is top-notch. The gameplay is spectacular and nuanced, but it does suffer somewhat in that you really do need a guide and to read ahead to know what equipment you'll need to take along on your next mission (and sometimes you need to think two or three missions ahead), or you can face horrible rape. Once you get several ships, the amount of micromanagement involved goes very much; fortunately you can always pause the game, survey your situation, and issue orders. It's not a perfect game, the graphics are a bit dated but still beautiful, largely thanks to brilliant art design and direction. The worst is probably the facial animations of speaking characters, which is obviously just a generic animation loop and not even motion-captured, but it doesn't really detract much from the game. The difficulty curve can be punishing even on easy mode; personally I solved this by upping the HP of all friendly ships and reducing by 1 the amount of emplacement resource required to purchase and equip the equipment on my ship (except for a few certain key pieces of equipment that are vital and can come up unexpectedly, like the datascanner and e-skeeter, which I just dropped to 0.)
On the MMORPG front, there are only three that I know of that had space as a central theme or large element: Earth & Beyond which (sadly) is no longer in existance, EvE Online, and Star Wars Galaxies. EvE is as much experiment as it is a space game, being a more or less unregulated libertarian paradise which has turned out pretty much exactly how we'd expect; the lawless areas are inhabited by heavily-armed paranoid maniacs and all the people who don't care to interact with heavily-armed paranoid maniacs huddle in the high-security areas. SWG, on the other hand, seems to be largely standard MMORPG stuff, but they recently rolled out that novel system wherein players can design and throw out new missions. It's got all of the important "fluff" that's missing in most other games: fully-customizable housing, spaceships, fully-customizable spaceships, as well as having your standard "pick a class, level it up, run high-end missions with large numbers of your pals" fare. Of these, I've played all three; E&B I sadly missed mostly out on because the computer I had at the time wasn't powerful enough to hack more than the tutorial area, but it had the wonderful idea of letting you play pick-and-match with your spaceship's visual appearance.
EvE Online has zero fluff and is entirely a numbers game, to the point that the most vastly inhabited planets in the game have a barebones description of their atmospheric type, size and mass.
SWG doesn't quite have the customization you'd like, but this is understandable in that you're using ship-types that have been defined in prior canon; I can forgive trading away the ability to not design my own ship when the payoff is that I'm flying a frigging X-Wing. The good part about SWG is that the space game is only half-RPG. The numbers don't factor into whether you hit or miss, only your own skill with the joystick. You do still need to level your space stats up and all, but to a large degree it's possible for a very skilled player to achieve victory against foes that a statistical comparison would not have said he could have beaten.
So, I was wondering: what other kind of space games are there to be had? There don't seem to be very many, and many of those that are out there seem to be utter crap. Surely someone has to have an inkling of what's wheat and what's chaff.
What would constitute a story easy to follow for you? The graphics are understandably quite dated, considering that the game is more than 10 years old. The gameplay was quite good for its time and the UI was specifically designed so that people familiar with the X-Wing and Tie Fighter could easily pick it up. There is no question that a much better game could be made today, but unfortunately the space combat (sim my ass!) genre is practically dead. It's still not nearly as badly dated as the Wing Commander series or X-Wing/Tie Fighter. Even X-Wing Alliance is more primitive graphically.
Loved it! 