Oh, yeah, I agree that it doesn’t add non-zero value. It’s just that I look at these and think that it takes the developer resources to put into all these – like, implementing anything is ultimately a tradeoff. If you model and add functionality related to walking around space station interiors, then you can’t be using those same resources on same combat. I mean, you can play X4 like X3, sure, but I’m not trying to compare X4 to X3, but rather X4 to what X4 could have been.

The real question is whether the tradeoff is worthwhile. Like, the question isn’t “does this feature have value”, but rather “does this feature have more value than anything else that the developer could have done with the same resources”. And…in general, my gut reaction is that it probably isn’t. That is, there’s something of a dearth of space combat games coming out these days, and I can think of a lot of neat things that one could legitimately implement in space combat. More-complex interactions with wingmen; “air-to-air” refueling, covering to counter various tactics (e.g. there’s no Thatch Weave) in space combat games). More-sophisticated damage models. More-sophisticated representation of those (like, actually letting one blow a hole in the side of a modeled capital ship). Incorporation of other forces, like tractor beams, or manipulation of time or gravity into combat. More sophisticated sensor models, limiting situational awareness (e.g. only partially-identifying potential unknown targets), sensor countermeasures, sensor interference with other objects (remember the Millennium Falcon escaping while hiding in a cloud of garbage), jamming. Context-sensitive music models – like, music that ramps up to be more-exciting as combat begins. Incorporating morale; most real-life conflicts don’t have people fanatically fighting to the death, but rather retreating once a conflict looks like it’s going south, and covering retreats is a significant real-world problem; Prey described ships using tactics to cover the retreat of others, and I think that one could legitimately incorporate that into gameplay. There’s probably a lot that one could do with stuff like teleportation or wormholes. The New Hotness in 2023 air combat military theory is shifting to having unmanned drones support manned aircraft; there isn’t a lot of unmanned drone stuff going on in space combat games, but I’d imagine that there could be. It was a big deal when FPSes stuffed the ability to make use of cover into NPC AI – space combat games still don’t, that I’m aware of, have ships attempting to get solid objects between oneself and something dangerous, even though combat in an astroid field is a staple of the genre, and even though ships have recharging shields and the ability to get out of the line of fire for short periods of time in such a ship would be really useful.

I saw people on the sub who wanted more space combat games complaining that Starfield wasn’t that. That is, they were hoping that they could get a new, AAA space combat game, and instead what they got was a Fallout or Skyrim with light ship-to-ship combat elements. The ship-to-ship combat game is…not really very sophisticated. So, for Starfield, let me reverse the question: let’s say that Bethesda had, instead of trying to make the game more-sprawling, instead of adding light ship-to-ship combat elements, just focused on the first person environment, which is really what they’re good at and what the core of the gameplay is. Like, I think that there’s a lot you could do with squad-based combat in FPSes that hasn’t been done, or interesting interactions with your companion. Balance perks more-effectively, so that every perk-related decision is a hard tradeoff to make. I think that it’d be neat to have ambushes and people tracking you…and for that matter, Doppler effects from gunfire, to help guess where an ambush is coming from.

Or even the base-building aspect – that’s something that they’ve put into two games now, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, but it was always more of a tech demo for the engine, wasn’t really that important to gameplay. Say they’d made outpost-building more-sophisticated, put something more like a Sim City aspect into the thing, so that there are interesting problems around laying a base out, or more things that one might want to spend time around a base doing. But instead, they chose to expand away from what was already not-all-that-core of an element. I’m not sure that that was a good tradeoff. Sure, I don’t dislike the space combat in Starfield, but nobody is going to buy Starfield in the hopes of getting a great space combat game. It’s not clear to me that, had the game been done without the space combat, it would have been much worse, and I can think of a lot of things that could have been improved instead.

I think that the same applies to space combat games. It’s not that X4 is a worse game relative to X3 by including the space station stuff. It’s just that…there doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of work going into improving actual space combat in video games these days, and I wish that there could be more of that.