Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by OZ

Space sims are a dying genre, which is particularly sad when you think of how popular they were just a few years back. Wing Commander still commands a lot of respect from gamers, and so many of the Star Wars games were spent behind the controls of an X-Wing or a TIE fighter, laser streaks whizzing by your cockpit dazzling bright against the inky black of space. Today though, there’s almost nothing out there for the fans who still want to get out in space.

The last major game of the genre I played was Digital Anvil’s Freelancer, which traces its pedigree back to the original Wing Commander gamers. It had its failings, but for all that it was a good game, and I can’t even remember how much time was lost upgrading ships and upping my weaponry. It didn’t do too badly either, with a reasonable, if not great, critical response and decent sales, but after that the genre has pretty much ended.

So why isn’t space cool enough anymore?

Is it that gamers are just bored of the genre? That’s definitely not it, going by the number of independent projects started by ambitious gamers who are trying to recreate the glory days of Wing Commander. The most exciting one out there is a project known as the Wing Commander Saga which is building a 35 mission game set within the world of Wing Commander. They’ve got plenty of the old ships that we all loved and drooled over, and several more too, and it certainly looks good.

One thing that they are planning on doing though, is making the control schema simpler. Is this a good thing then? One of the reasons, after all, that the genre has been dying out, could be the complexity of the controls. For the most part, the old space games used to have elaborate controls on the keyboard, with keys in every corner being put to important uses, making it that much harder for people to get into. In fact, one thing which got Freelancer praise was the keyboard and mouse combo it implemented for controls, making it more like a first person shooter than a space fighter, letting people point and click to blow stuff up.

It was simple. It was stupid. And of all the problems with Freelancer, this was the biggest one.

So how does one fix the controls then? I’m not sure how it’d work for the PC without the old-style schemes, but surely the consoles of now have a good setup, with enough sticks to boggle the mind, and buttons for everything and then some? Of course, even if someone figures out how to deal with the controls, there’s the problem of the look of the thing.

Space is big. Really big.

And of course, the whole point of space is that you should be able to go anywhere. At first it sounds so simple. Just paint the background a uniform black, and then slap on a spackling of stars. But it’s not that easy, is it? Because then you’re putting in planets and moons, and then you’re realising that you can keep getting closer to them and even smash into them and then you realise that the world you’ve created is really big, and then you’re wondering how to paint all of it in.

There’s workarounds, and Wing Commander was really the best at keeping the arena to a size where things still made sense, but even so, there’s a lot to do when you’re making a space sim. So when you’re sitting in a big publisher’s office, and you’re not sure that anyone even wants a space sim out there, are you going to okay all that money?

And that’s the whole problem, and that’s why we’ve got to look hopefully towards indie developers who are proving themselves to be real players in today’s industry, and we’ve got to hope that one of them can pull the next Wing Commander out of their hats, and restart the genre. So that we can fly into space, to infinity and beyond.