Real Characters in Space

Kotaku had a recent article that I quite liked: Space Games Don’t Have to be Cold and Lifeless. This article really got me thinking about why there is so much to like in games like EVE, and even STO – yet I have never really clicked with them. As much as I love the endless possibility that exists in New Eden, I just can’t find immersion in being a capsuleer. I need to be a real person, in a real environment.

Humans wouldn’t just exist in space, floating alone in some endless black starry void. They would live in human environments. Even if you were restricted to a ship or space station, it would still be a human environment. From a gleaming capitol station with shops and gardens, to floating rust buckets held together with wire and duct tape – you would still have  a place to work together, a bunk where you laid your head (probably decorated with pictures of family and pets and the odd religious symbol for luck), and a commissary where you ate together, got drunk, and bitched about your job. The sleeping quarters would smell of farts and the ghosts of food would haunt the mess hall. It would be real, not always pretty, and very human.

Give me a game where I can feel like a real person as well as a spacefarer or galactic warrior or whatever.

That is part of the reason why I loved Battlestar Galactica: the ongoing poker game in the common room, the ratty bar, the boxing ring where the aggressive would burn some testosterone. Yes, you would go out in your fighter, hopefully to return to life and friends and normal life. You didn’t exist only in a small box of instrumentation and endless vistas of stars. I would think that you’d go mad quite quickly if you were.

Give me this game, and I will be such a fan…it would be the game that I have been waiting for for a very long time.