I like Astroneer because their haptic inventory system is an industry first. Everything in that world maintains it’s physical form from picking it up, to being placed on your backpack. It never get’s turned into an icon or a …database entry. Instead of “playing the UI” the physical world itself is your UI. Each structure you build is a UI element upon which you can store a physical object on… kind of like Ultima Online’s inventory system. It’s extremely intuitive and refreshing. Feels real.
The gameplay of Astroneer is base building…but then you start unlocking thesr rovers which act as bases on wheels… I love strategic mobility ever since Star Trek… These Starships that are floating autonomous cities with their own ecology.
Which brings me to Empyrion: Galactic Survival. Imagine your base on CE could fly to another planet. That is Empyrion. I kid you not. It’s the most feature rich and well designed game I have ever played. It’s feature set even outperforms star citizen and all survival game I have ever played. It is like the culmination of the last 2 decades of video game history and technology. Farming, building, exploring, shooting, mining, trading, purge defence, levelling up, you name it. It has it, at a fidelity never before seen in such a combination, across a dozen star systems each with unique planets and moons.
X4: Foundation is also unique in that you are the sole Proprietor of an entire faction.
The best way to describe this game is to describe my favorite scenario:
I stand on the bridge of a space carrier which I help build (economically through my freighters) and bought, surrounded by my crew, whome I personally hired and trained, while witnessing the coming and going of trade ships in and out of my space station complex in front of my carrier.
I teleport down to my space station “halcyon prime” and take a walk along the promenade of the docking bay, overlooking the many modules of halcyon prime… Farms, factories, tech labs, defence platforms, loading docks. I hear the bustle and busy chatter of comm. I experience traffic overhead, and am humbled by the sheer size of one of the “tiny” starships I saw from my carrier docking on the landing pad next to me, at the dock i am standing on.
I open my galactic map, and direct my freighters, capital ships, fighters. Several worlds at my fingertips. Then I bring my favorite star fighter to the equipment dock and pimp it out with some upgrades. Then I take it out for a spin, and teleport to another starship’s cockpit when i’m bored. I have yet to go to war with anyone… but when I do, it’d be Battlestar Galactica.
These games offer experiences that are beyond our lifetimes at a fidelity as close to reality as technically possible while remaining fun.
I am a fan of exotic experiences that take themselves seriously.
An example of this is also the pregnancy mod for Skyrim, which gives your female character the ability to menstruate and become pregnant, have children or have a miscarriage when she get’s beaten up in combat. Something that legitimizes the existence of gender to begin with. With that mod, your character is more than just a visual mod from the male counterpart.
Frankly the experience that sold me on CE was it’s sense of agency. Looking down to see a pair of boobs, your feat leaving foot prints in the sand. How cool is that? I usually hate pitch black nights and have for a long time hated this feature… but I cannot deny that nighttime is an experience in and of itself. Suddenly the graphical fidelity of a torch becomes a feature that is important to you.
It’s things like these that has true value. Something you can’t say “Been there, done that” on.
These are nuances no cheat can be leveraged upon, because these are experiences, not points.
When then standard mechanics of a game is so fun that you don’t feel compelled to cheat, it succeeded in being a game.
But then… You need to have a certain state of mind to be receptive of sandbox experiences:
- Existence doesn’t need to justify itself.
- You are not in competition with anything. Just make the best of everything and never look back.
- You savor life by tasting the nuances.
- There is no you. There is only what you do, for mere thought is an action. (Laymen’s Terms: There is no soul.) You only think you have a soul, so you don’t feel like you are born just to die. But if your existence doesn’t need justification, you are thankful for it. You carry yourself differently in life. You suddenly realize that you are a 1 in a whole order magnitude of a chance of even existing and being aware of it, that you savor each moment as a cosmic miracle.
Gamers live a thousand lives. They might be illusions, but they are all experiences no other can savor.
“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” - Conan, Queen of the Black Coast
Maybe I’m hardcore on the escapism, and I’m actually catatonicly depressed, or maybe I’ve unlocked the secret to eternal happiness. All I know is that I’m having a sustainable blast, so I must be doing things right.
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