What are you playing?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It's still dead on PC because none of the popular engines have been made with space sim stuff in mind. Most of that shit just doesn't work if you try anything fancier than a FPS.

Though I guess there's always Children of a Dead Earth if you want sci-fi as hard as my dick, though that one's also about fleet engagements.
Or I guess there's also Rebel Galaxy, but that's mostly an action RPG with spaceships instead of dudes in armor.

[Kugelfisch]

There's a reason Scam Citizen got so much money and people still cling onto the hope with it.

The engines are also the same reason that "game" is a mess and will never deliver.
Did you know that the Critech Engine can't by default have flying vehicles operated by a player entity?
Did you know that it can't even handle the player being in any kind of vehicle, instead having the player effectively become the vehicle?
Did you know it doesn't come with netcode?
Did you know the collision detection can't handle speeds over the equivalent of 80 kph?
Did you know that it especially can't handle movable objects with collision attached to other moving objects exactly because of that?

Now guess which engine SC is using.


The seemingly simple task of having a spaceship with independent thrusters is not something foreseen in any of the current engines. You would have to code that shit and make it work all on your own or just make your own engine from scratch.
Too much effort for a genre with fairly little interest.

[rabidtictac]

You'd think one of these companies could make the fucking effort, considering games on the ps1 could manage it. Hell, modern-day mobile game devs who shovel out nothing but garbage still manage to code collision physics in their shitty 3d mobile space shooter pay2win games.

As for the genre being dead, that shitty Starlink game sold pretty well IIRC. Elite Dangerous sold units too. People are starved for these kinds of games. Unlike legit roguelikes and tactics rpgs, space action shooting IS still a fairly mainstream concept. Especially so when it's a product the entire family can enjoy. You can sell space action to the same crowd you'd sell copies of Call of Doot Doot, but you can also sell space action to Grandma and the kids, since the games typically aren't super bloody. The larger the scale, the less you notice the carnage.

[Kugelfisch]

What's starved is something more intricate than a super arcadey space shooter. Those usually don't really sell well.

As for the more sim ones, see above. The state of the industry is fucking dire. Barely any of the coders today could make a 3D engine and the big companies mostly don't bother or use an in-house one like Frostbyte that is even more difficult to work with because you need to make tools for fucking everything that isn't cookie cutter.

[rabidtictac]

I feel like the market needs a Forza Horizon for space sims. Something that's as arcadey as you want it to be, or as sim-heavy as you might desire. It would have to be done largely with controls though, so mission structure would end up weighted more heavily on one side than the other. There's a middle ground as well, between total arcade 3d shmup vs Elite Dangerous levels of "sit and watch nothing for 10 minutes while you drive to the next space station."

Basically I just want more Ace Combat, but in spaaaace and with some sim elements. Ass Combat is nice and all, but the older games were limited by ps2 architecture and the game lacks some depth. Colony Wars basically is Ass Combat in space, but on ps1.

It's funny because there were comparatively more space and fighter sim games on older systems like ps2, ps1 and old-ass computers. Y'know, back when all of those games were heavily limited by the technology. Rogue Squadron 1 looks like ass when you go back to it today, because it has n64 fog everywhere and you can't see shit. Ace Combat 4 couldn't really draw buildings on ps2, so you see a lot of really low-rez map paintings of ground and a few lego block structures once in a while. Wing Commander and TIE Fighter have aged hard.

But now we have all the technology in the world and nobody wants to make the games that would really take advantage of it! Instead, we get gay cod that plays and looks the same as when Modern Borefare came out, and shit like Fortnight that runs on tablets.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Don't forget you almost always need a proper joystick for full enjoyment. People don't like buying extra hardware to play their games (at least according to Steam forums where you always have people whine about poor poor keyboard support for a console port instead of just getting a gamepad).

Unlike legit roguelikes and tactics rpgs, space action shooting IS still a fairly mainstream concept.

Didn't stop tactics rpgs from still being a thing.

[Complicity]

The vidyagayme industry is in such a state that this is the only gayme i'm looking forward to:



And i know it's going to be a janky, bugged mess.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I mean, it's from the creators of Gothic. They have yet to figure out how to make a real-time combat system.

EDIT: Going back to space stuff, I think another problem is that professional scam artists have fed consumers with unrealistic expectations that current engines can't really deliver without half-assing it every step of the way.
It's never enough to just have a space combat sim like FreeSpace or X-Wing anymore. It has to be an open world sandbox like everything else, preferably with procedurally-created planets.
And while we're at it, hype it up that you can totally move out of the cockpit mid-flight and walk around your ship.
Naturally, you will be able to land anywhere on any planet - without any loading screens, of course.

[rabidtictac]

But really, all anybody wants is more Freespace/ Rogue Leader/ X-Wing. It doesn't even have to be particularly sim-heavy, so long as it's not toys2ass like that fucking Starlink.

(Starlink got a bunch of good reviews too, proving the market is starved.)

Look at how much positive press Scam Citizen has gotten over the years, when they can't even deliver a working product. That's the appeal of the genre to autists. And before you say there aren't enough autists in the world to make space sims profitable, a) that's obviously not true based on Elite and Scam Citizen and b) it doesn't have to be a full sim. Freespace 2 levels of arcade would be fine. Rogue Leader was one of the top-selling gamecube games across the entire life of the console, and it was a launch game. People liked the 3rd game in the series a lot less because it had lame walking sections and nobody wants to walk! We want to shoot pew pew from our spaceships!

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

(Starlink got a bunch of good reviews too, proving the market is starved.)

But Ubisoft has startet to pull the plug because the toys aren't selling enough.