![]() It's still an early alpha, but I'd love some feedback, especially from people in love with the old EV ) A more dynamic universe, which the player affects in both small and large ways Strong writing, or at least more cohesive ![]() A focus on exploration, with a mostly randomly-generated Galaxy that rewards roaming new areas More cohesive universe, with a clearer general arch (originally inspired by the Dominic Flandry series, if you know it) ![]() It suffers for some of its weakness - lack of decent artwork being the biggest - but I've otherwise tried to take it into a somewhat different direction: I've been working on an attempt myself, a fork of Naev. I came across this while researching successors to the beloved EV. *original idea* How about the ability to create alter ego space ships, gain a terrifying pirate reputation, blow them up with your main ship and claim the reward.Īnyway good luck with whatever your next game after Airships will be *wink wink* They way you describe how the factions interact and don't necessarily rely on the player is seems exactly like what the developers of SPAZ2 are doing! There's plenty of places to go: a worthy successor to Escape Velocity may yet arrive, whether it comes from an open-source project or from some new imagining yet to come. Or instead, the game could go into more detail, giving you way more options to modify and fine-tune your ship and hire and interact with crew and passengers. War going badly for a faction? They start posting high-risk high-reward mercenary missions.Īnother related direction would be to transition the game from a RPG to a strategy game over time: allow players to build space stations, explore and colonize planets, and carve out their own empire. Pirates out of control? Governments post more bounties, and goods prices go up as trade routes are interrupted. Planetary governments and other organizations would also be simulated at some level, keeping track of their state and generating missions to be fulfilled. Goods prices could be derived from actual trade, and you could technically have a relationship with each ship in the game. A modern CPU could probably just do this all in real-time without needing any shortcuts or simplifications, running all 50 star systems in parallel even as it only shows the player one of them. With a modest star map of maybe 50 systems, this would amount to a few hundred ships in flight at any time, plus a few hundred more currently landed on planets. Instead, the game could keep track of each ship in-universe as it flies around, jumps between systems, trades, and fights. In current implementations, planets are pretty static unless changed through missions, and ships are ephemeral, randomly generated for a star system and discarded when you jump out. Another interesting way of extending the game would be to make it much more of a simulation. MMOs generally get away with "realtime" combat by making weapons and abilities auto-aim, which wouldn't work for EV. The space combat is high-paced and precise, and even a modest amount of lag would quite ruin it. The obvious and oft-discussed next step would be to make the game multiplayer, but as I understand it, there's some fundamental problems with that. This gets us another instalment in the series, but doesn't really advance anything in terms of gameplay. ES is open-source, so this is absolutely doable. (Which is what Sunless Sea has in spades.) You could perhaps build this game on top of Endless Sky, retaining the engine but completely replacing the content. What would a worthy successor to EV look like? Beyond the engine itself, the game would need a strong setting and graphical direction. Just look at the success of Sunless Sea, which is basically a slowed-down steampunk Escape Velocity. You might think that 3D space games would be obviously superior, but straightforward top-down flight and combat is its own enjoyable genre. Still, there is something to the basic gameplay of Escape Velocity. Another modern EV clone, Naev, suffers from similar problems: the game is a collection of cool features rather than a game with an actual design. It's a generic EV-like that ticks all the technical boxes but fails to leave a strong impression. The ships look the same, the user interface is just a bit awkward, and there's very little to do. ![]() Sadly, Endless Sky is a bit of a disappointment: it does a good job of recreating the basic gameplay but even after several hours of play, I have no idea what the factions or conflicts in the game might be.
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