Just Cause 2 and why it brings us one step closer to the Holy Grail of space sims.

Y'know, this fills me with hope. Too bad the space-sim loving market is too small for most developers to give a shit.

Tell you what, though; if I could have a game in the Freelancer universe, in the Sirius sector, with atmospheric flight and more stuff to do, my pants wouldn't be clean for a year.

I really agree with this post Joseph, this game is a huge step forward as far as scale goes for an open world gaming. It's not just the massive skybox either, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out there was underwater swimming and even more so at how much detail they put into the ocean floor.

The big problem with putting this into a game is the shear amount of content.

Think about it, for this to work, they would have yo design entire PLANETS. Let that sink in for a bit, entire planets. Plural. Planets aren't small, and if they aren't sufficiently big enough then it won't look right... In my opinion I guess.

But, terrain isn't so bad if you can randomly generate it. But that won't necessarily produce coherent planets with multiple biomes and such.

Then there's how detailed do you want to go from there? A rudimentary day/night cycle? Clouds? Weather? To what end? Even if they pull this off, if the planets themselves aren't interesting enough then it's a lot of work for very little pay off. Thus more effort than a 'random planet algorithm' needs to be put in, I.E. human touches... For entire planets.

ENTIRE PLANETS! D= Believe you me, I'd love to have seamless atmospheric flight in ANY game. But unless it's just a skybox that goes to 11 in a squared off section of a planet ala Just Cause 2 it's a mighty big pipe dream. At least, I hope not.

I always thought something like this would be fantastic for star wars battlefront 3, if it ever sees the light of day.

I never played the first, but the thing that kept me playing was the second was the sheer openness of options in a fight. starting off in your base, jumping in a spacecraft, having a quick space dogfight, then hurtling into the enemy base ship, jumping out and destroying their generator.

If this could be applied between the surface of a planet and a mothership it would provide some pretty epic battles.

@ZCaliber
"Then there’s how detailed do you want to go from there? A rudimentary day/night cycle? Clouds? Weather? To what end?" Speaking in the sense of planets, consider things on a smaller scale first. When you're pushing forward with things like this, you want to go in babysteps rather than large strides otherwise you'd trip up.

Rather than asking for all of that at once, think small. They could use narrative to explain limitations in the game itself. Like how you asked for massive, engrossing planets with multiple biomes. Most planets could probably be restricted to one biome, hell look at most of the ones in the Milky Way and for ones that do encompass multiple terrain types they could say "okay, only x amount of this planet has been terraformed, and the outside this zone is uninhabitable". Or use environmental hazards as a way to limit surface area availability to the player. (i.e. like Mass Effect, how extreme temperatures could hamper exploration outside of the Mako)

I do, however, agree with you that all of this is of course undermined by the sheer amount of space this kind of content could potentially take up on a system or disc(s). I'm just saying rather than expecting everything at once, wait for the tech to get there and then worry about such details as dynamic weather/clouds/gravity & terrain.

Btw, I'd almost expect a bigger complaint of generic night and day cycles to be that when you fly off a planet, so you may be at a marginally different point in space and may or not need to be angled at the sun depending on the time of cycle that you left said planet. So if you had no load time and could go from ground to space, the planet would need at least some alignment with the sun and may need an actual rotation? Idk, just thought I'd bring that up before I forgot. aha

But for now, maybe we'll luck out and at least get a mission where you take flight to a Bond-villain themed spacestation in the exosphere for Just Cause 3. Sorry for grammar mistakes/typos btw, I'm tired.

The whole time I was reading that Joseph I was screaming "Infinity! Infinity!" (here's a few vids of Infinity: quest for earth gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCp6Dr3meX8) The guy creating it has already revealed auto-generated planets and stars. And.... stars. And more stars. Billions.

He's trying to create the entie milky way, to scale.

The thing is the gameplay needs to be engaging or IMO it'll all be for nothing. I'd much rather have a true space combat sim centred around choosing character/ship classes than something closer to EVE where combat takes a backseat. Essentially, Freelancer gameplay in this universe.

Can't believe there wasn't even a mention of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVKasNTrzWs

The second game was going in the right direction when it came to space battles and boarding enemy cruisers, but it kind of lost its novelty when you realised the most important and vital areas of the ship (Life support, engine room, shield generator) were 20 ft away from each other. The fact that there were only two main ships for every map was kind of dissapointing as well. The leaked footage of Battlefront III looked like a significant step in the right direction. More cruisers, seemingly more in depth interiors, and most importantly, seemless planet-to-space travel. But, well...

Goddamn it, has there been any work on the status of BF3? Why pull the plug on a game that looks like it was only in its Beta phase? Hell its not like it wouldn't even sell. Shit, considering that the last two were the best selling Star Wars games of all time, why WOULDN'T they get it out?

Just Cause 2: 87 hours
around 40%

(Got it on Release date)

Article Note: That would be awesome though, with ground artillery firing on some moon at a bad guys ship, then take hold of the ship and fly it anywhere!