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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Explore a 1:1 scale Milky Way in a meticulously designed Starship alone or with friends. Try the tech demo on Steam, run through the cold and dark startup tutorial then find cool things in space. It’s already a lot of fun in its barebones state.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332100/Starship_Simulator/
Whats the actual gameplay though? They say different roles and such but what do you actually do in the game?
Can you land on planets, is there any combat, do you interact with other ships?
First impression is like the width of an ocean but the depth of a paddle pool
There’s lots of info on the Kickstarter page, but yes, each role will have lots to do. In the tech demo, there’s a tutorial where you start the ship up from a cold start to give you a taste of the engineering role. It takes a long time, you gotta start up the main reactor and distribute power. The ship has kilometers of pipes and wires that deliver power and resources around the ship, all of which need maintenance and repairs over time. When they go down, the components they supply go with them. Every role will have tasks, except passengers. Every role will be fillable by NPCs. If you want to be the lone head chef player on a ship of NPCs, go for it! Just pick the job that has the right amount of task time and type for you.
Landing on planets will be achieved by using shuttles, the big starship doesn’t land. I’m very excited about flying shuttles.
Combat is definitely going to be a thing, ship to ship as well as small arms, repelling boarders or boarding something else yourself. Ship to ship combat is lasers and railguns, nothing that requires storing explosive chemicals for munitions.
Other races will be procedurally generated, as will their attitudes. They might want to hug you and give you cool technology to use or they might shoot strangers on sight, or something in between. If LLMs get their training sources sorted, costs down, and are able to run locally within the game client, then alien races might have lots to say. But those are big ifs.
Essentially, the story is we’re humanity’s first long range exploration vessel. We’ve only ever been to alpha centauri, and that took a long time. Now we need to go out and explore. Players will have the option to share game databases, so while we are in our own games and locally hosted servers, we can explore the galaxy together like it was an MMO.
This game isn’t intended to be wall to wall excitement, this is going for a simulation, which means immersion, roleplaying, believability, and atmosphere are more important than constantly engaging in gameloops. It’s going to be more exciting than flying a jet liner in flight simulator, but this isn’t a very arcady experience. There is downtime, so I prefer bigger multiplayer servers to fill that time with hanging out or making our own emergent fun. That makes it more niche, not for everyone. But it is for me :).
Sounds like a lot of lofty promises, similar to another space game thats been in development for like 10 years.
Its easy to be cynical but its also easy to make promises and Im worried they wont be able to achieve much of what they want. Time will tell though and I wish them the best!
They’re already almost half funded on day 1, so they’ll at least get their shot, which is always nice.
I don’t think they plan the same level of fidelity as other games, the character models and rigs are pretty basic, the bulk of it just building content like art for planets. Going from ship to planet in a shuttle, for example, will have a loading screen and it will load you into to a flat word that uses trickery to appear to have a curved horizon. Procedural generation of terrain and stuff is actually pretty easy these days, engines have it all ready to go.
So I’m fairly optimistic! We may not get every feature, but I do think we’ll see a 1.0 in a few years if funding keeps going this well.
Sounds like its going for kind of a Pulsar: Lost Colony vibe to the gameplay. Not sure the Project Cars aspect of it really adds to the fun, though. Will keep an eye on it.