A million years ago, on some African rock, our hominid ancestors gathered around a perfectly smooth black rectangle, and gazed upon it in awe. Beneath the surface of that strange artefact, lights and colours moved. The hominids looked on, stricken by wonder, and witnessed the perfect space sim. We can be sure this happened because, as a species, we seem to have an instinctual idea of the standard to which all space sims should be held, without any such game having been released in living memory. Indeed, there’s perhaps no other genre of game more prone to accusations of over-promising and mutterings of disappointment - whether they’re justified or not - than this one.
If your game is experienced primarily through a spaceship cockpit, than you'd better have made a 1:1 scale galaxy teeming with habitable planets, each with environments that are somehow both procedurally generated, and as characterful as Skyrim, Liberty City or Lemoyne. Us players will demand a functioning, responsive economy, and conflicts between galactic-scale factions that can be influenced on a macro-political scale. We will want to get out of our pilot’s seats and wander around inside our ships. We will want the toilets to flush. We want to escape into an actual, literal universe, and woe betide any game that merely lets us fly a pretend spaceship.
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