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I had a conversation with someone about scifi game classifications, can we maybe find some good concise phrases here? I mean:
- No Man’s Sky is for chill dreamers and creative builders who ride on butterflies
- Elite Dangerous is for chill long distance space truckers who ride triangles into octahedrons next to spheres
- Kerbal Space Program is for people who want to optimise the use of time/acceleration/mass?
- Star Citizen is for rich people who like status symbols
- EVE online is for hobby economists (of course, it offers Excel integration, why are you even asking?)
- Starfield is Skyrim… in… Spaaaace!
- Space Engineers is for creative builders and greeblers who are equally entertained when their spaceships explode at launch because then they get to build a tug to return the wreck and a cool crane to realign the pieces but first we need an asteroid eater to gather more materials so we need to get to space first so we need to build a spaceship and–ooh, an unknown signal!
PS: The goal is to find a phrase that attracts the right target group of new players who are choosing among these options.
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It’s a cuboctahedron, actually. NMS has quite a few octahedral stations, but elite doesn’t.
I would say KSP is for people that are interested in aerospace engineering, logistics and trajectory planning. As opposed to space engineers, which is mostly for the “Lego in spaaaaace”-crowd. There’s a similarly creative element to both games, but with a very different focus.
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In English we have a long tradition of colourful and poetic collective nouns. A pride of lions, a murder of crows, or a murmuration of starlings, for instance.
Perhaps it would go some way to fulfil your goal if we could think of appropriate collective nouns for the various groups you mention. An expanse of No Man’s Sky players? A conspiracy of Eve Online players? An introversion of Kerbal Space Program players? A gullibility of Star Citizen players?
You get the idea.
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They’re all humans, so it would be a crowd of blank game players
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Using an “introversion” as a collective noun seems contradictory… 
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Somehow this doesn’t go out of my head, the idea is just too good…
Here’d be some of my suggestions:
- An explosion of KSP players (alternatively, a strut)
- A wealth of StarCitizen players
- A company of eve online players
- A scan of NMS players (or maybe “an expedition”?)
- A repetition of Elite players
- A collection of starfield players (becaue collecting stuff seems kind of major in that game?.. dunno)
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I go with a scan of NMS players 'cause if we could earn Units from scanning each other, we would totally do it
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Just got The Invincible signature edition delivered, which for PC, turns out to NOT be a physical edition. There is no disc included, just a Steam activation code instead, just so you are all aware (yay for DRM…). I am somewhat disappointed for that matter, but I still find it a neat package altogether and am looking forward to playing it!
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It’s a lot longer and more well made than I was expecting, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed
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In Starfield there are areas of known, fixed POIs - fixed because they are part of the game’s story.
Since the release of the beta, I have have revisited several of these fixed POIs. I thought I had thoroughly explored them, but I am now finding new, unexplored, installations - some of which are of types I haven’t seen before.
I don’t know if they have been added by the beta, or if their appearence is a normal function of the game’s procedural generation.
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#Myst Online URU Live again (MOULa)
20th Anniversary today! New latest fan update s well, woot 
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This can only be a good thing. The trouble is, if they’re successful, they will then be bought up by one of the giant corporations - who will then dumb them down and homogenise them to the point where they’re indistinguishable from any other mediocre games producer.
It’s a double bind. The big boys desperately want the spark and innovation that the indies can give - but they’re governed by their shareholders, and terrified of risk.
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re Skyrim in Unreal 5:
It looks pretty, but it’s an empty stage set. The lighting, the models, even the colours used, have been carefully chosen to use the minimum resources.
It’s one thing to create a static model. It’s quite another to include 30 or 40 animated characters, with all their associated polygons, ray tracing, and logic.
I would be a lot more impressed if there were a variety of houses, of different styles and colours, in sunlight, the dappled shades of waving trees and grass, sky with clouds, and a variety of people and animals moving and interacting.
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I think the purpose was to render a lore-accurate environment centered around Winterhold. But yes. You are correct. I lost what article I pulled that from.
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