The Return of Space To The Gaming World

It all began in 1984 with David Braben and Elite, the first 3D game for home computers.
Programmed all in Basic and Assembly it featured in only 22kb, 8 galaxies with trading, combat and a very cool radar.

Man... I CAN SEE POLYGONS!

Almost 10 years later the Frontier: Elite II for Amiga and PC with a 1:1 planets, 1:1 stars systems and a recreation of our Galaxy. It's was amazing to have a 900kb PC game to recreate an entire GALAXY.

Space... the final frontier!

Then later came Elite Frontier First Encounter and... everything just stopped.

David Braben and Frontier Developments started working with Tycoon games, kinect games, disney games... and money spoke louder.

You know, I always wanted to see a game seamless like Elite 2, with amazing graphics, you going in and out of a planet, looking at the immense universe and dreaming about life.

Years and years passed, 31 years after Elite, now we have 3 great games to be hyped out!

Elite: Dangerous

I'll start talking about Elite: Dangerous, yes, David Braben is back and now we have a extremely beautiful and realistic Space Sim with again, a full galaxy to explore.

If you get near the rings of saturn, that is a similar image that you'll see there.

The game is out, released in april 2 of 2015, it's well received by the midia, but a lot of people is criticizing because the game is NOT ready. They say the game needs to be sold as early access, because David Braben have a LOT to updates.

The most important thing is the landing in planets. For me is the most important thing. But maybe, just maybe, the wait will be worthy.

To understand why just watch the video below.

As you can see, with procedural system with the right seeds and layers you can make not only planets, but everything in the planets, only using procedural calculations and layers, terrain, then water, the atmosphere, then plants, life, clouds, wind and everything, layer by layer.
In the end you'll have an unique planet very faithful to the reality.

The game is very well received, with 400 billion stars you have a lot to discover and it's endless.
But be careful, the game is complex and very realistic.

David Braben was not willing to put hyperjump in the game, that would be awful. Because if you realize that any travel, even to land in a planet, would take hours. So in the game the most unrealistic thing is traveling faster than light. This measure was taken for better gameplay and I find that very good.

I think the only problem in the Elite Dangerous is that will take a while to receive the landing in planet addon and the veeery realistic things to the game, taking so much time and not user friendly things.
But if you want more reality, that's the best simulator out there, grab it!

2014 Trailer:

No Man's Sky

Sean Murray worked with Criterion Games and did some games like Burnout. In the interviews he said that in that time he lied to the question "Do you like cars". Because what he really likes is Sci-fi, not cars. He never mentioned the name of David Braben, but said that he grow up playing Elite, so... he always wanted a more immersive game. And now with a little team, that he insists is the key to make a game like that, he's achieve his dreams. No Man's Sky:

Oh! So beautiful!

Sean says that a small team is better to work with and you don't need to justify every single thing and have more freedom. Even with a team with 20 people he split it in half and started this project in secrecy.
He says you need to be a little dumb to start it and no bigger developer would take this project because is just "too much".
Let's talk about the cool things, NUMBERS.
This game is huge, he says that started with a seed of 2^32, the team thought that will be enough, because if you discover 1 planet each second, to discover all the universe of the game will take 2 thousand years!

I have seem this dinosaur before, we need more planets :(

Seems enough, but the team realize that the game would be online, so millions of peoples would be playing so that number of planets don't seem so amazing anymore. So they decide to use the power of 64bit processors! Now they have a number 2^64. And you know what that means? That means 18 quintillion possible planets!
If each second you discover a planet, that will take a hundred of billions of years! In other words, practically INFINITE.

If only they knew about the insane grinding in the Koreans MMORPG, the 2 ^ 32 would be enough :P

The game is not like a normal MMO, will be just like a Dark Souls game, but with even less interaction, just some messages but, because of the insane size of the universe, rarely you gonna see another human, or not gonna see at all!
The game will have some enemies, or police like robots that will make some balance in the universe if you try to destroy anything.
If you have time, watch this amazing interview and meet this cool guy called Sean Murray:

In this interview he shows the procedural technique to create not only the world, but the animals, all the layers, even the ships are procedural. So the game will be always different. But not random, the game will make a seed and will be uploaded in the server. So when the game is released the players will be responsible to discover the universe. That's very cool.

This world is mine! I find it first! :(

The game will be released exclusively first in the PS4 and later for the PC. What makes me worried, because I'm a bit of a PC Master Race type, but no problem, making a enhanced version for PC later will make me happy :)
I still don't have a PS4 game, but if this game take much more to be released to PC, I'll buy one!

Other thing, the game don't seem realistic at all, you can enter and exits the planets very fast, the planets are very close... in fact the developers decided that to make the horizon in the planets seems more like covers of old sci-fi books.
That's a cool thing, a lot of people would enjoy to travel and discover more than waste a lot of time trying to maneuver a ship.
If you don't like so realistic game, that is your choice.

Trailer:

Star Citizen

Chris Roberts create the Wing Commander Series. One day he decided to make a new Space Sim called Star Citizen... so he asked some founding by the kickstarter and then... it become the most well founded game of all time.

Millions I said! MILLIONS!

In fact 83 millions of dollars of crowdfunding. Yeah.
The game is not ready yet, but it's beautiful. The game use the Crytek engine CryEngine 3, so expect the best quality of it.
All the details, first person view, you can see your character going into a cockpit, putting the helmet and starting the starship, all with a lot of details.

Hey, I do that everyday... but not with a ship ;D

This game will be different, will not be all procedural, but the universe of the game will have a considerably smaller universe, with like 100 , 200 solar systems but all hand crafted. Complex systems made by humans and some huge ships to assault too.
The game will have a lot of action, different of the other two games of this article, so you can walk through huge space ships, shooting people, with amazing details and detailed graphics.

Missing some FPS action? No worry!

So the game will be much more complete in a way of battle in space and inside of the ships, with a lot of details owing nothing to pure fps games.
Take a look to the FPS gameplay:

So, this game is very different, will have the exploration thing, you can call your friends to assault some ships together, so this game is much more "user friendly" and "COOL BRO" than the others, you can play with your friends, have a nice action, but you loose some exploration with none or little procedural world.
As some people say, maybe you can find more stuff in your backward than in a procedural universe, you never know!
That'll be a hell of an interesting game, just like the others, for me will appeal more for the masses.

Trailer:

That's it, 3 amazing games!
Elite Dangerous is amazing, but for me, it's not ready until it have a planet landing!

So I'm waiting with a lot of hype for them!

Stay tuned!

LiloPLAYS!