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Spaceflight Sim Dark Horizon Set for Release
Paradox Interactive has just announced the release date(s) of their latest game, Dark Horizon as September 23rd in North America and September 26th in Europe. Offering flight-sim style space combat (with joystick support, even) and many RPG elements like ship customization and weapon creation, this is the first serious attempt at the genre I have seen in a while. Hopefully game studios will realize that there are still many loyal flight-sim fans out there just drooling for a chance to dust off their joysticks and accelerate to attack speed.
I know I don't have much to go on at the moment, but the game looks more like the X series than the Wing Commander and Privateer series. While X was cool, it simply didn't manage to impress the same... aliveness? of the Wing Commander universe.
Case in point: WCNews did a first look piece on the game, but it didn't get much enthusiasm from the crowd. While one can HOPE that the game revives the Wing Commander genre, I think too many space sim developers focus too much on realism and/or pretty graphics to truly understand why the simplistic Wing Commander engine was so popular.
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Realistic space sims would be good.
Waiting 17 years to reach the next destination will be exciting.
liqbase
First serious, recent attempt my ass. This sounds like Vendetta Online in so many ways... that game kicks ass.
And yes, it runs on linux. Quite nicely, in fact.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Don't get your hopes up guys, this is being made by the same Russian developers that produced the positively awful Tarr Chronicles back in September of 2007, Akella and Quazar Studio. Furthermore if you watch the Dark Horizon trailer and look at the dialog text, you'll find the name "De'khete" in there, that was one of the enemy factions from Tarr Chronicles.
It looks like this is the sequel to Tarr Chronicles under a different name to hide the fact that it's related to that flop. I hate to judge developers before they even get their work out, but when their last title was an abomination and their next title is a sequel coming out a mere year later, I wouldn't put much faith in the game being anything more than a hunk of junk even more rushed than their last game. Go read the reviews for Tarr Chronicles, Dark Horizon is probably just going to be the same thing all over again.
Man, talk about one of my all time favorite games along with Tie Fighter. Great story and overall game play. It's too bad that X-Wing vs Tie Fighter just didn't work out as well as the originals. Now, the game that I really wanted to play was the Babylon 5 space sim that was canceled waaay back in early 2000. That baby looked great!
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Just about the only mission based space combat game I enjoyed was TIE Fighter; I'm still waiting for a decent Elite style game. I know there's X3 but it's just so dull.
The technology is pretty much here now. They nixed true flying in EVE Online because lag would have made it impossible to play. But with a more modest set of goals, a 3D flight sim version of Elite would be great. Provide a single-player game where you can trade, explore, etc, without having the MMO problem of keeping up with the Jonses. Multiplayer element would be for general combat. Just look at the way they did it in GTAIV, multiplay and singleplay are two entirely different experiences but both are tremendous fun.
The thing I remember wanting as a kid was what I always considered to be the impossible game. The way I put it at the time, "I want a space game you can fly around in like TIE Fighter but where you can land and get out of the ship like Doom." The technology is pretty much here now. The engines can handle taking off from a planetary surface and flying out into space. Games from Flashpoint to Halo to Oblivion have shown that frickin' massive worlds can be created on the current hardware and it's only going to get more impressive in time. The only drawback I can think of is that too much detail can clutter the game. The original Master of Orion was a great space empire game. The sequel threw in more detail but those details didn't really add to the game, it just made each turn take longer. There's a huge difference between adding depth versus annoying extraneous crap but it often isn't clear which is which until after it's been added.
I hear Mass Effect was along the lines of "imagine if they took Starflight and made it also more of an RPG and stuff" but there were some holes in the concept that made the game that were hard to overlook. I dunno, did anyone else like it?
I still want a game where I can get in my fighter, take a trip to a space station, explore it, take a jaunt to an alien world, take a stroll on the surface, and have all sorts of fun. The development costs would be huge, of course.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There's a game named Darkstar One that might work for you, the hyperspace mechanism is a lot like Elite's (though fuel doesn't need to be restored, the drive recharges automatically over time). What might or might not be an issue is that your wanted status works kinda like in GTA, you build up wanted stars but they decline over time again (though maybe that's a good thing as you can afford doing some piracy without near-permanently fucking your savegame over). The combat controls much like Freelancer IIRC and you don't get to buy a ship (you get alien artifacts to upgrade your one-of-a-kind alien-like ship or something) but since it's very cheap now (10€) it might be worth a look.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Falcon 3/4 was similar. A real-time simulator where you taxied, flew through way points, completed your engagement, and then flew home. Often times without incident.
While you could set-up the mission to start closer to your goal, I always liked flying the whole thing. It gave me time to plan, think about my strategies, take in what was going in around me, and if I was running a mission deep in enemy territory, I would have to dodge SAMs and CAPs.
You have to be *really* into the SIM to like real-time, though.
Well, who says space crafts have to look like either airplanes or ships? An interesting take on the whole idea is Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn Trilogy" is the need for any interstellar travel to be done in spheres.
Besides, if we go with the idea that space crafts should look like air craft, then why don't we have air craft shaped like sea vessels? I mean, wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense if you had massively huge floating tankers, hundreds of yards long, dozen of yards across instead of those puny tanker planes?
No? Gee, I wonder why? Maybe ... because they are entirely different realms.
Why would you want to make a space craft that cannot turn equally fast around all axes. If you need to change direction, wouldn't it be a whole lot simpler if you simply pointed your craft in the right direction and applied thrust, instead of spinning a bit around one axis, then a bit around another axis and THEN applying thrust? This is especially true if you need to point at something directly to the left/right of your position. If you can simply turn your craft to 90 deg around one axis vs turning the craft 90 deg around one axis and then 90 around another, why would you settle for the latter? The ONLY reason turning around two axes instead of one would be faster is crappy engineering.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.