Why the hell aren't there more "space opera" / futuristic CRPGs?

[rusty_shackleford]

(1) Magic really improves RPGs. It creates all sorts of zany strategic possibilities, new character classes, and a different resource for economy/attrition. Yes, I've read a bazillion space operas so I know they often have magic, sometimes described as psionics/psychic powers, sometimes called the Force, sometimes called mass effect or whatever it was called in Mass Effect. Don't care. I can't think of any space opera setting where ~magic was remotely as satisfying from a gameplay standpoint as magic in a high fantasy setting.

(2) Planetary romance is basically just fantasy only elves are called something alien and orcs are called something alien and magic is less fun. There is hardly any meaningful distinction to be drawn between Planet of Adventure (Vance) or John Carter of Mars (Burroughs) and Conan or other pulpy S&S. I like planetary romance to read, but I'm not really sure why you would distinguish between them. Dark Sun strikes me as being as much a "planetary romance" as a fantasy setting (reduced magic, thrikreen, renaming fantasy classes, alien landscape, etc.).

(3) Space opera is typically at a very different scale than RPGs, so when you say you want a space opera RPG and then scoff that Starflight isn't really an RPG, it's hard to know what you want. Space opera battles are often ship-to-ship or fleet-to-fleet, much of the action consists of politicking, etc. For this to work requires a whole different set of features, which yields a game more like Starflight. Mass Effect did pretty well, I suppose, but its approach required a large budget, and even then many feel it's not a legit RPG.

Anyway, I'm a fan of the genre and I wouldn't object to more of it out there, but I do feel like it's a hard thing to make.

There's absolutely no reason that scifi games can't have magic.
of course, it should be more tastefully done than copypasting a D&D spell list.

 

[DraQ]

There's absolutely no reason that scifi games can't have magic.

There is also absolutely no reason why magic must be magic.

For example:

• A hacky character can subvert environmental systems making it a rough equivalent of weather control magic (albeit one working only indoors for a change), in addition to subverting security systems and accessing stuff.
  
• A heavily augmented post-human warrior type can have plethora of abilities that would normally seem magical and be limited by, say, waste heat.
• Your generic sci-fi weaponry is already a good substitute of magic missiles (homing bullets!), lightning bolts and fireballs.
• If the party has an armed spaceship in orbit, a character with communication link to it can call fire from the sky (ship provides fire support) or use it's sensor array to enhance situational awareness.

Yes, it spins the archetypes around, but it's all sound and should be helluva fun.

Clarke's law, people!

Any spell you couldn't easily replicate with sufficiently advanced tech that is also implementable in a cRPG (so no wish or shit like that)? Any worthwhile one?

 

[DraQ]

This I feel is the main reason. Making the scale/feel work between a cRPG and "space opera", that's a toughy.

Most space operas still deal with individual characters and thus must operate (heh) at this scale.

 

[Life of the Party]

Combining 'technology' with 'magic' in the form of souls, reincarnation, clairvoyance, telepathy – as well as stuff like the Master-Word, the Earth-Current, the Diskos – is one of the things that make the Night Land such a great setting.

Abhumans

The term "Abhuman" was used by Hodgson in The Night Land to name (apparently) several different species of intelligent beings evolved from humans who interbred with alien species or adapted to changed environmental conditions and were seen as decayed or malign by those living inside the Last Redoubt, who preserved artificially (to an unspecified extent) their human characteristics, though they were not fit for the new environmental conditions.

Telepathy

While the entire human population seems to have some capacity for telepathic communication (in the book called "The Night Hearing"), the main character has unusually strong abilities and is capable of communicating with his lost love using his "brain-elements." This seems to indicate a specialised organ in the brain, perhaps evolved or genetically engineered, or perhaps some kind of implant. Hodgson also introduces a kind of authentication known as the "master word." This is reminiscent of a modern public-key cryptography; humans can apparently generate a correct response, while the non-human monsters who attempt to lead them astray by intercepting and forging telepathic communications can't do so.

Powdered Water and Food Tablets

Hodgson's hero sets out into the Night Land carrying lightweight food tablets and a sealed tube full of "water-powder." When a small quantity of this powder is exposed to air, it rapidly condenses moisture and produces drinkable water. While lightweight dehydrated foods exist, water-powder is scientifically implausible (though see deliquescence), but together these serve to explain how the hero can carry enough food and drink to survive his journey in the inhospitable Night Land.

The Diskos

The Diskos is a weapon featuring a razor-sharp spinning disk on a retractable handle. When activated the disk glows and shoots out sparks. This invention may have been inspired by a hand-held children's toy that shoots sparks when a button is pressed to start a small spinning disk. It is also indicated that the Diskos develops a special affinity for its owner during training and should not be handled by anyone else. Each Diskos is powered from an initial charge taken from the Earth Current. When its owner dies, the Diskos and its charge are returned to the Earth Current.

The Last Redoubt

The Last Redoubt is a mountain-sized building described to contain millions of people and feature vast farmlands underground, powered by the mysterious "earth-current." The upper levels of the redoubt are at so high an altitude that they must be pressurized, and the residents have developed enlarged lung capacity. Each level of the Pyramid contains a great city so that there are, in total, "one thousand, three hundred and twenty cities of the Pyramid."

Hodgson's hero describes the Redoubt in Chapter 2:

And when the humans had built the great Pyramid, it had one thousand three hundred and twenty floors; and the thickness of each floor was according to the strength of its need. And the whole height of this pyramid exceeded seven miles, by near a mile, and above it was a tower from which the Watchmen looked (these being called the Monstruwacans). But where the Redoubt was built, I know not; save that I believe in a mighty valley, of which I may tell more in due time.

Additionally Hodgson's narrator describes the base of the Redoubt stretching "five and one-quarter miles every way."

Directly beneath the Redoubt, "an hundred miles deep in the earth below the Redoubt" lay the Underground Fields:

And of the Underground Fields (though in that age we called them no more than "The Fields") I should set down a little; for they were the mightiest work of this world; so that even the Last Redoubt was but a small thing beside them. An hundred miles deep lay the lowest of the Underground Fields, and was an hundred miles from side to side, every way; and above it there were three hundred and six fields, each one less in area than that beneath; and in this wise they tapered, until the topmost field which lay direct beneath the lowermost floor of the Great Redoubt, was but four miles every way.

The fields are "sheathed-in at the sides with the grey metal of which the Redoubt was built", the grey metal may also lie beneath the soil of each field, acting as a subfloor through which "the monsters could not dig into that mighty garden from without". Each field is upheld by pillars and lit by the Earth-Current. The Earth-Current also runs through the soil of the fields supplying the plants and trees with the nutrition necessary to support life far beneath the Pyramid.

The dirt and rock excavated during the making of the Fields was dumped into the bottomless "Crack" from which the Pyramid draws the Earth-Current. The narrator supposes that the Fields have their own air system that is not connected with the "monster air-shafts of the Pyramid", but cannot verify this due to the immensity of the Redoubt and the knowledge lost during the years since its construction. The narrator recounts fields of corn, grain and poppies growing in the vast chambers beneath the Redoubt.

Near the end of the novel (chapter XIV), after talking about the Underground Fields, Hodgson wrote about hidden conduits bringing water from distant seas. Those conduits "did be mighty underground pipes that went across the Night Land, and did be, mayhap, oft so much as twenty great miles deep in the world, and did come upward into the seas of the Land; and all to have been made secret and hid from the monsters of the Land, as I to know from much reading of the Histories."

I must explain how I held a weapon from a world, and a solar system, and a galaxy, long ago dissolved.

Four sleeps ago (and our sleeps were of no even length: the hours were unknown; no sun shined, no churchbell rang, in this coffin of black steel larger than worlds), another member of our dwindling company, a matter-wizard named Abraxander-the-Threshold, had somehow materialized this weapon from my past. “Fleshed it from Dreaming” so he said: that I had known and loved it in life allowed him (somehow) to find it or recreate it from out of the abyss of years.

At first, the firearm had been a thing of gossamer, a ripple that I could only see from the corner of my eye. When I was nodding into restless sleep in a hidden closet of steel where we cowered, only then could I feel the weight in my hand.

Three sleeps ago, I woke from a dream about my rifle to find its shadow in my hand. At that time, the stock was a mere line of cigarette smoke, with a translucent smudge for a lock, a blurred cloud for a barrel. We fled from trolls who came from the darkness toward us, and I did not attempt to shoot.

When I slept and woke again, the weapon was made of colored glass that faded in and out of view. The Sound we think heralds the coming of the Thing-That-Spins passed near us, and half the company did not answer when we counted off in the pitch dark. There was no target then, nor later when hissing, chuckling shapes made of luminous vapor overtook the slower runners.

I think the raid on the pantry was that evening. Or had that been earlier? We needed water, and we found creatures enough like humans to have a supply. The near-humans seemed to be made of flesh, and time passed for them as it did for us. They bowed before a Shape like a pale mask that hung in the midst of a gray cloud above the deck, and when tendrils of cloud plucked up two of the near-humans, they screamed in voices like ours, and the blood they shed was red. We waited in silence, hidden, till the manifestation of the Pallid Mask had withdrawn, leaving only mortal and three-dimensional enemies in the chamber.

We rushed against them: Crooked-armed near-humans who wielded glassy knives, giants armed with maces and flails, and dripping monsters who looked like disease-crusted boars were our foes. Here also was one iron-faced Hag the size of an open-air butcher’s shop I saw once in Ivory Coast, and a smell not less putrid.

The Giants panted and hooted and grinned at us, and we lost ten men for every one of them we toppled with grapnel and line. The Hag crouched behind the Giants and snatched any of our fallen she could reach with her ever-lengthening worm-arms, and tossed them lightly into her stew-pot: it was Ydmos who cleaved her in two, though her left half, which lived on, swatted him with her claw-foot, and sent him tumbling with a blow that would have killed a smaller man. Others of our band held her hopping foot at bay with spears and lengths of pipe until Ydmos found his feet again, and ran back with this weapon held high in both hands, its blade blazing like a St. Catherine’s wheel. My rifle still was too soft and dreamlike to be of any use: I fought with a machete.

Today, as I woke, my rifle had been like a colored painting, very authentic to the eye, but oddly slick and buoyant in my grip. It cast no shadow on the ground. It had no odor to it, and when I flicked a fingernail against the barrel, or worked the bolt, there was no noise. But when the time came to fire it, it fired

 

[Cael]

That has to do with expectation. When people see sci-fi, they expect a modicum of logic and science behind it. The problem with that is that there is no way a single guy will be able to catch all of the logical inconsistencies in a setting of his own making, especially if it was to be expanded to an epic scale.

That's why you get other people to check your stuff - you bounce ideas off people - preferably working in the field involved, you get beta readers, you get consultants, you don't retreat to your hugbox when those people point out that you suck and your ideas don't make the slightest modicum of sense*, etc. That's what actual sci-fi writers, at least the good ones, do**.

What you don't do is invent a three-eyed human derper moulded from corpse jelly (or RGB starbrat) and then complain about spiked cricket bats when you should be relieved they are not applied to you personally, only your work.

*

See Niven's reaction when he was told that Ringworld would crash into its sun - he didn't whine, didn't moan, but sat down and wrote a sequel addressing the issues, even though he didn't plan to.

Because that's what a man, possessing a pair of literal balls (or a woman in possession of a pair of figurative ones - though it's a bit fuzzy these days) ought to do.

**

And then you have people like Egan, who can actually single-handedly tear most of the physics down, fuck around with universe's spacetime metric, derive completely different physics fromn that, build a new universe on top of that and set a story in it that completely relies on this new, completely alien physics, then fill it up with plethora of tiny, inconsequential details that are all direct consequence of altered laws of physics.
And I see no reason why I shouldn't hold other media up to this standard just because most of their creators are sordid losers.

Not when you are in a studio full of yes-men and people fawning over you because you are a female or protected species or

 

[Louis_Cypher]

To answer the OP: it has a lot to do with buy-in.

Today, any sort of fantasy (be that p&pRPG, CRPG, film, literature, whatever) requires very little buy-in. If the average person has read seen Lord of the Rings and has a general awareness of Conan the Barbarian, he’ll be able to get most fantasy settings with minimal effort. „Oh, it’s just like LotR, but the technology level is up to flintlocks and elves are conniving Nazis. Got it.” „Oh, it’s like Conan, but there are a lot more sorcerers and not all of them are evil. Got it.” The average Joe can pick up the fantasy game/film/whatever and already has a mental framework to place it in.

In contrast, sci-fi has a much higher buy-in. The average person knows Star Wars, Star Trek (if American)… and that’s it. The average person doesn’t know Dune, nor Heinlein, nor Warhammer 40k: in the grand scheme of things, all sci-fi except Star Wars and Star Trek is niche as fuck.

And that’s a problem because sci-fi is wide and varied. Old corny Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers space opera is sci-fi. Wagnerian space opera (Star Wars) is sci-fi. Trek is sci-fi. Dune, Clarke, Heinlein, Blade Runner, your favourite post-apocalyptic stuff, WH40k – all sci-fi, and all very, very different from each other in style, underlying assumptions, genre traditions and themes.

Which means that if you create a new sci-fi setting, then it’s either a Star Wars-ripoff, or the average Joe (a.k.a. the customer) won’t understand it. He won’t say „Okay, it’s kinda like Dune, now I can intellectually and emotionally relate to it”, because he doesn’t know Dune. And you can’t just put enough information in the game to make them get it, because they’re too lazy to read that much information.

And consequently, people don’t make sci-fi stuff, because it won’t reach enough paying customers.

For me, part of the fun though, is learning a new setting, not being asked to suffer through another bad distillation of High Fantasy.

Buy in is overemphasized. It's the job of the writer to circumvent this problem in some way, through sheer understanding of the deeper thematic pull of their genre, and their skill with words/imagary. To translate ideas on the emotional level. To have concepts interesting enough that people want to learn more. Video game writers should be highly literate people. At some point in the past, Star Trek and Star Wars didn't have much exposure, but the audiences learned their ideas well enough. Star Trek wanted to tell a tale that would make science fiction as real for a general audience as the police procedurals of the time. It set out to popularise an idea that nobody in TV had been exposed to; the idea of a professional military/exploration force in space, and translated it emotionally by hitting the same emotional points as Royal Navy fiction such as Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. It succeeded unimaginably well, yet there is no "space sextants" or anything so trite and on-the-nose, just the emotional equivalent. Like a colonial era captain, Kirk is a patriot, afforded a high degree of latitude to interpret his orders, with a belief he is on a civilizing mission, Star Trek is in fact ridiculously Victorian, unapologetic about it, and it works really damn well. Each planet he visits is like a new island being discovered by Cook. He is bringing futuristic humanism, repect for cultural difference, instead of Anglican protestantism, but the emotional point is the same. He is in competititon with the a rival global empire, the Revolutionary French/Totalitarian Klingons. He can't resist lecturing less civilized natives on their ethical errors, and the show treats every scenario as a chance to compare the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of society; Kirk, Spock and McCoy are a Platoic Trio, with McCoy representing pathos/emotion, Spock logic/empiricism, and Kirk acting as wise decision maker who synthesizes the two.



I truly think that a lot of the problem with the genre being under-utilised, is down to the people in charge of the genre being confused and bereft of a clear understanding, either of science fiction, of literature/entertainment in general, or perhaps of life, due to a philosophical malaise. Modern science fiction television is less literate than it was in the mid-90s to early-2000s golden age when Babylon 5, Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate, etc, were all on TV. Even shows like Dark Matter, a recent one, just lacked the depth of past shows, though I applaud them for at least trying to revive the genre. They don't even make use of simple techniques such as matte background images of fantastical cities or show ordinary civilians across the galaxy reacting to a news report, simple things that would add context and scope for little budget.

They fear using highly effective cost-cutting measures like this for fear of how a few immature people will shit on it and miss the point. Yes, maybe alien civilizations would not build the way we currently imagine, but that does not mean a story is beholden to populate a solar system with nothing but boring O'Neil Cylinders or a Dyson Swarm; if having an alien monestary full of monks serves the story better, then that is all that matters, and you justify it as best as you can with sociology/science. One episode of Babylon 5 such as The Long Twilight Struggle, contains more drama that all seasons of something like Killjoys or Dark Matter. TV writers now make personal soap operas about hidden identities, secret grudges, and all this other soap opera shite. In the past the emotional situations came from the epic events, the two were entwined expertly; a prideful man lived to see his homeworld bombed, his fortunes as ambassador reversed, and his disgrace complete, before finding a new way of looking at life that transcended his previous concerns - that was real fucking drama, not "I want to love you but I can't, we must drag out our unrequited feelings for five seasons", or "behold, it was I all along, misleading you for six seasons!" There is no synthesis between real-world naturalism and literary imagination. Sci-fi has become less imaginative. People are fixated on negatively pre-empting criticism, rather than thinking in terms of possibilities.

It's not anything inherent to the genre, but to me, I'm sorry to say, it seems that many writers these days have lost the capacity.

It's been noted that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is basically a 90s action movie disguised as a superhero film. Well, it works. If Star Trek is Hornblower in Space, and it works, or Doctor Who is a gentleman adventurer/wizard in space, and it works, what does that suggest? Perhaps that taking the emotional points from another genre and translating them into space, then using that as a framework to tell actual science fiction, the literature of big ideas, is a really successful way of presenting something. I don't care what people think of BioWare, but they understood this; Mass Effect (at least the first game) is basically the last setting we have seen that I felt "damn, I wan't to inhabit this world!" the way Trek/Wars/Scape/Fly/Gate did. It hit all the right notes. People in writing circles might even be less objective due to the influence of illogical French post-modernism clouding their objectivity; or sometimes perhaps just too snobbish to admit how profound/entertaining something like space opera can be when done without irony or self-consciousness. Okay, some poorer TV science ficiton writers don't even feel they need a scientific education, but on the complete opposite end, some take themselves too seriously to consider doing a wacky "western on the holodeck" episode here and there.

I don't want to put people off trying, but cmon, if you are going to be a writer, wouldn't you want to make the erudition and quality of your work better and better? To constantly learn and refine? Inject real nuance, psychology, ethics, symbolism and science? To be well-learned across a variety of subjects? Make every new effort a shot at the best damn game ever, shouldn't that be the goal of any artist? I know the pressures of the industry, but this is why we have one Planescape: Torment in three decades. What the hell is up with all these bland fantasies, don't people have any pride? Arn't they fed up of making poor simulacrum?

It's not my fault that vast majority of fantasy creators are terminally lazy, uncreative and, it seems, intellectually crippled.

I agree unfortunatly.

 

[Makabb]

There is one......coming...... the holy grail

 

[DraQ]

Buy in is overemphasized. It's the job of the writer to circumvent this problem in some way, through sheer understanding of the deeper thematic pull of their genre, and their skill with words/imagary.

This. To achieve buy-in you must first succeed at selling your creation.
Refusing to put any effort in that because it's hard or looks like work is contemptible.

I don't care what people think of BioWare, but they understood this; Mass Effect (at least the first game) is basically the last setting we have seen that I felt "damn, I wan't to inhabit this world!" the way Trek/Wars/Scape/Fly/Gate did. It hit all the right notes.

Actually, BioWare managed to lose me before they even got me by putting in blue, tentacle haired, pansexual space lesbians. That's when they lost any credibility pretending they have not made a thinly veiled wankfest.
Then it only got worse.

I have serious trouble comprehending why have any people bought ME3, let alone Andromeda.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

We shall see about Starfield...

Bethesda arn't exactly known for great stories or settings, just making beautiful scenery, but I would still welcome a decent sandbox RPG. The more sci-fi the better as far as I'm concerned. I applaud them for giving it a try.

Magic really improves RPGs.

Is magic really that compelling?

Can't it just be done with technology, i.e. cyphers in Numenera?

Firsrtly, from a belivability perspectice. In some settings, mages can just make matter and energy at will. So why the fuck are they at the technology level of Tudor England? They basically have hundreds of people capable of matter synthesis/EM radiation projection and this has somehow not changed the economy? I'm being facetious but this is just to counter your really biased point.

Secondly, I really do think you are deliberatly over-emphasising the difficulty of replacing magic, or just doing without it all together. The ideas that you can't have guns in RPGs is clearly wrong; we see it work all the time in post-apocalyptic RPGs, I mean anyone would think Fallout wasn't one of the most popular RPG franchises in history. Just have some technological device or something.

Magic can be good, but frequently bores me, usually a copy-paste of D&D spells

Up to the day before Thanksgiving, Turkey scholars also argued that all Turkeykind was progressing in all areas and their future was a bright one.

I know you are joking, but ya know, ther guy does address this in his now famous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

If his thesis (backed up by a lot of evidence) is correct, then basically Star Trek was right (again), in predicting that enlightenment science, reason, empiricism, etc, would drive violence rates down and lead to quality of life improvements, even for the poorest. Of course as with any statistical model, there is always the possibility of a statistically unforseeable event happening, as well as short term reversals, but he does acknowledge this.

There's absolutely no reason that scifi games can't have magic.
of course, it should be more tastefully done than copypasting a D&D spell list.

Agreed. I know Torment: Tides of Numenera wasn't combat heavy, but it used nanotech and one-use energy devices almost like scrolls in a D&D game, without seeming out of place. I'm sure there are other ways you could handle it too.

 

[DraQ]

Bethesda arn't exactly known for great stories or settings

Bethesda might not be known for great stories, but they surely are for great settings.

Is magic really that compelling?

Can't it just be done with technology, i.e. cyphers in Numenera?

Firsrtly, from a belivability perspectice. In some settings, mages can just make matter and energy at will. So why the fuck are they at the technology level of Tudor England? They basically have hundreds of people capable of matter synthesis/EM radiation projection and this has somehow not changed the economy? I'm being facetious but this is just to counter your really biased point.

I really have some beef with magic that allows one to screw conservation laws.
It's really hard to build any sort of workable setting without conservation laws.

Secondly, I really do think you are deliberatly over-emphasising the difficulty of replacing magic, or just doing without it all together. The ideas that you can't have guns in RPGs is clearly wrong; we see it work all the time in post-apocalyptic RPGs, I mean anyone would think Fallout wasn't one of the most popular RPG franchises in history. Just have some technological device or something.

Magic can be good, but frequently bores me, usually a copy-paste of D&D spells

It's quite ironic how people make claims about irreplacibility of magic when it comes to providing interesting gameplay options, yet in 99% of the titles this magic is mostly limited to emulating guns and RPGs.

 

[Cael]

Larry Niven came up with one possible answer in the mid-seventies: a universe with laws of physics which permit global causality violation is only stable when its history contains no instances of GCV — and he invoked the weak anthropic principle as a solution: if you try to switch on your time machine, a freak accident will ensure that something breaks before it works. I found that kind of unsatisfying.

Robert Sawyer went a step further in his book "The End of an Era". In it, time travel works because time travel is required to alter the timeline in order that the current present exists. However, once that alteration is complete, the "new" timeline will create events that will make that particular event impossible to replicate. In the book, the chief scientist involved in creating the time travel device was raped into a shell of her former self before the time travel device was created in the new timeline.The author pretty much went for the nuclear option.

 

[Harry Easter]

He he. You guys remember Mandate?

You monster.

On a serious note:

I think there could be two reasons:

1) Many developers played fantasy-games before they started. So now they are able to fulfill their dream and develop their own "Orcs kill humans" - game.

2) I agree that Aliens are basically orcs and psionics and implants could be any magic, but I think the archetypes of fantasy are easier to recognise for the public. There's nothing original in fiction (there isn't!), but most consumers are not very reflecting on what they play/read/watch/draw smutty porn off. So for them a game with bird-aliens is something new and they have to get used too and learn to understand and many people don't want this. They want to have fun and at least they know what an orc is (or think they know, but like I said: want to play not think).

Fantasy has just won,because there are more of it. Blame Ultima :D.

 

[Cael]

I really have some beef with magic that allows one to screw conservation laws.
It's really hard to build any sort of workable setting without conservation laws.

And there is something preventing you from imagining that there is an unknown field of energy that we are currently incapable of detecting that "mages" tap into when they cast their spells? A field of energy whose conversion equation we do not yet have and might be something orders of magnitude larger than e=mc^2? A field of energy that might be the source of, say, zero-point energy or the solution for the missing mass of the universe?

None of these hypotheticals violate the premise that "mages can make matter and energy at will" in that someone of a medieval mindset would not know field interaction to begin with.

Is magic compelling? About as much as very advanced technology, according to Arthur C Clarke. It is not the magic that is compelling. It is the fact that it creates an effect that we "know" is "impossible". Humans have always dreamt of the impossible and wanting it to be available to them. It is part of the social display that basically states "Look at me! Look at me! I am speh-shual! Fall in love with me, notice me, worship me! I am speh-shual!!" In many ways, wanting to be the big damned hero, a mage, a prophet of God, is really no different to hacking your dick off and growing boobs. Both are cries for attention. The difference is that those who want to be a mage tend to have the self-control to not be too obvious about it. The dick hackers have all the subtlety of a thermonuclear device.

 

[Ocelot]

Why risk making a space opera when medieval/high fantasy sells extremely well no matter what? And what if the average casual customer doesn't like it for some reason?

I'd love playing something akin to mass effect with more focus on RPG mechanics though.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

I think that it's just the way certain genres became married to certain settings for historical and other reasons.
It's like asking "Why aren't there more fantasy space shooters? There's only Magic Carpet and nothing else." And then a discussion starts on whether Crimson Skies should be counted as another Fantasy Space Shooter.

The Space Opera genre became married to Space Shooters, The Fantasy Genre became married to CRPGs. And players are conservative people and that's why it stayed that way.

Many developers played fantasy-games before they started.

In the olden days of pen and paper most settings were Tolkien-inspired or general fantasy, so the early geeks programming things like Wizardry and Ultima went with a largely fantasy setting and D&D style rules. They just adapted the character sheets, dice rolls and shit directly. But since then we have had decades of sci-fi nerds working in the business. Tons of them must be B5 nerds and Trekkies. And even back then, a lot of the early programmers were Star Trek nerds, making things like the legendary EGA Trek. There must be hundreds or thousands of people in the industry that have had thoughts like this before, unless I'm over-estimating people.

If there is something holding people back, I would guess it was: 1). the quality of ideas in indie teams for BBB games (lots of enthusiasm to make a game, perhaps not so much expertise in how broad a range of things can be covered by science fiction and fantasy), and 2). the publishers greed in lack of AAA games. We can fix one of those, by just encouraging more indie stuff that has better ideas. Stellar Tactics and all that is a good start, I'm looking forward to seeing if it's any good, but we need more indies, and more ideas thrown at the wall, for a few to stick. Support htem, demand more, and if you are someone thinking of an indie then do a space opera CRPG.

Why risk making a space opera when medieval/high fantasy sells extremely well no matter what? And what if the average casual customer doesn't like it for some reason?

But juding by your avatar man, wouldn't you want to see a Warhammer 40,000 CRPG done right? It would be epic beyond all reason.

putting in blue, tentacle haired, pansexual space lesbians

You arn't a lesbian if your entire species has one gender lol. I have no objections to sexuality in games; its our nature, it's natural/wholesome, and we should be proud of it. So I'm all for pornographic concepts if they arn't too immersion-breaking, fuck the prudes. The Drell were designed to appeal to women if I remember right. Good on them for not adhering to some quaint fear of sex when the industry quite clearly have no taboos on violence, surely an example of weird priorities.

Combining 'technology' with 'magic' in the form of souls, reincarnation, clairvoyance, telepathy – as well as stuff like the Master-Word, the Earth-Current, the Diskos – is one of the things that make the Night Land such a great setting.

I quite like when science fiction overtly appropriates religious imagery, at least when it's not some trite bullshit about angels and demons. Check out the music in this scene from Farscape:



Choirs and organs in the music track to denote epic moments, or acts of great sacrifice. Babylon 5 was notable; an atheist show that still exudes the kind of spiritualism of Tolkien. Star Wars has a kinda Taoist flavour to it. Religious institutions will always try to convince us otherwise, they have skin in the game, but I believe spirituality is entirely secular anyway. "Soul", or "psyche" in Greek, was originally a potentially secular concept, meaning the personality or essence of a person. Many concepts in Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy are relatively secular but correspond with religious concepts. Each culture employs it's own ideosyncratic vocabulary of buddhas, gods and demons. Babylon 5 embraced Tolkien's language of light and darkness, seeing them as representing natural forces like life and entropy, but never landed in favour of any of the beliefs on the show; they were seen for what they were, ways people have of making sense of the world, with J Michael Straczynski being an atheist. Nerds tend to lie on the more autistic literal-minded end of the human spectrum, so rightly distrust inaccurate language and dogma, but sometimes some corners of geekdom miss out on poetic stuff.

Bethesda might not be known for great stories, but they surely are for great settings.

Dunno, I personally got bored of their in-setting history after Morrowind. Maybe I'm being harsh. They just do what a lot of fantasy does and translate real world cultural tropes into fantasy cultures. British province, Elf province, Viking provice, island full of asian snake people with katanas. Warcraft, Warhammer Fantasy and others did this decades before, and it's now become unfunny how common it is. I disliked Oblvion a great deal, because the capital city of this 500,000 strong legion-fielding empire consisted of like 40 houses, and half of the dungeons were copy-pasted assets. Morrowind at least seemed more organic - had "verisimilitude". Skyrim was very visually beautiful and the dungeons were more organic, but the writing was of course practically like a visible flowchart with no emotion. World building in the Tolkien sense; "mythopoeia", is lacking in most fantasy.

 

[Harry Easter]

In the olden days of pen and paper most settings were Tolkien-inspired or general fantasy, so the early geeks programming things like Wizardry and Ultima went with a largely fantasy setting and D&D style rules. They just adapted the character sheets, dice rolls and shit directly. But since then we have had decades of sci-fi nerds working in the business. Tons of them must be B5 nerds and Trekkies. And even back then, a lot of the early programmers were Star Trek nerds, making things like the legendary EGA Trek. There must be hundreds or thousands of people in the industry that have had thoughts like this before, unless I'm over-estimating people

Fair points, but those nerds are also quite pendantic, when it is about systems and stuff like this. So maybe they are like "I don't want to play, what I watch", because they can't imagine playing at the side of Kirk? Sometimes you are also good at something (making fantasy games), but don't like them personally, but it pays the bills and in your freetime you do something different (it even counts for authors).

 

[Ranarama]

Counterpoint: a lot of scholars like Steven Pinker argue humanity is progressing by a ton of different metrics and that Star Trek style enlightenment optimism was right.

Up to the day before Thanksgiving, Turkey scholars also argued that all Turkeykind was progressing in all areas and their future was a bright one.

Turkeykind is doing great thanks to that holiday. You think they'd be so many of those ugly irritating birds with dry meat if not for Thanksgiving?

 

[Louis_Cypher]

How feasible is it financially for a small indie dev to just adapt a pen-and-paper space opera system? Is it more cost effective to just make your own setting and rules, than to try to trade on the popularity of an existing one like Traveller? I guess a lot of these systems don't have novels and other stuff that drawn people to Faerun, so I'm guessing it's easier to just make a new world.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

There's Infinite Space I guess

 

[Life of the Party]

I quite like when science fiction overtly appropriates religious imagery

The Last of All Suns ends with a chapter titled 'The Master of the Master-Word' which indicates the Master-Word is the Word from Genesis, or at least somehow related to it.

Then there's stuff like this:

Ydmos said: “In the Mighty Home of Man, evolution weeded out those souls vulnerable to aetheric dominion over countless generations: you come from millennia before that evolution began. One of my people could not be possessed unawares, without an act of invitation, corruption, surrender. They know the nerve-energy discipline, they could sense of vibration of alien thought. But you are not of my people: I do not know your strengths.”

His cool and colorless eyes passed across the seven of us. “One here, knowingly or unknowingly, has bowed to the House of Silence, and only thinks he is a man. Will any of us confess?” he used the special word-form to indicate a moral danger to the group.

Odd. Apparently he did not think the traitor (if traitor there was) would physically harm us. Was the moral danger he feared the danger his own words put us in, the danger of suspicion, disunity?

Abraxander-the-Threshold dated from about AD 30,000, and came from the Earth-sized moon of a superjovian-sized world circling a double star in the constellation Cetus.

His people, at one time, had ruled the planet, but their atmosphere-equipment, over the generations, had failed, and the poisonous air native to the planet, the poisonous grasses and sea microbes, had returned. Of the hundreds of cities and domed villages of his world, only nine cities, in his time, remained.

Back when we had first emerged, wet and shaking from the rebirth coffins in the Archive, Abraxander seemed no stranger than any other man there. He had been naked, like us.

Of the million who fled the burning Archive chamber, I knew that only we survived, unless the other groups had had one like Abraxander among them. Our band had fled to what I took to be the Engineering Deck. While we waited, Abraxander said that the giant sarcophagi shapes looming along the back wall were “non-continuity” engines. He “sensed” that the oblongs still had a memory—he called it a “formation-ghost”—of the engine’s original ability to break through the walls of time and space. With that power, he made materials for us: arms, clothing, food.

He reminds me of my old headmaster at Bramingham: the same condescending, dry, infinitely patient tones. Not long ago, he tried very gamely to explain his art to me, which he insists is not magic (“The materialization is accomplished by polydimensional geometry: an axis rotates eidetic forms out of mind and into matter: the formality collects substance along the time-axis, so that to these ones, us, the process appears to take time…”) until I begged him to stop.

His own clothing reminded me of something between a Turk and a storybook wizard: his hat was a fez or a dunce-cap, he wore a puff-shouldered black jacket set with silver clasps, and a pair of pantaloons so balloon-legged that it looked like a lady’s riding habit, or the skirt of a Japanese fencer. His sleeves were so blousy and long that he had to tuck them into his sash. On his nose he wore a silver clasp set with pearls, as if a pair of pince-nez glasses had been shorn of their glass, leaving only the nosepiece.

His civilization had been the last period of three aeons of star-faring. His original home-era was so far in the future as to be unimaginable to me. And yet, even at that, it was less than one eight-hundredth of the time dividing my time from the home-era of Ydmos of the Last Redoubt.

He spoke in a slow and sad tone, as if his words came out against his will: “My people, us, we knew all life in the island-of-stars, the Milky Way, had been wiped out. Our paleo-xenologists sifted through the rubble, first of one world where evidence of life was found, then, centuries later (for the star-voyaging is slow) a second. My people, us, we found strange buildings, beautiful as seashells, on a lightweight world, but the skulls, fifty millions of them, a billion years old, had been placed in orbit around it. On the next world, a layer of radioactive crust, mixed with bone and blood, lay crushed beneath half a million years of sedimentation.

“Radioactivity we found, a burned world. We thought, us, evidence of internal self-destructive wars. Not so. Weapons that split the atom and use the primordial energy of the universe itself did not prevail against the Slayers, but were able to deny them. You grasp?”

I did not, but Ydmos did. He said gravely: “They were Prepared, and they bit down on the Capsule. They burned themselves with Earth-Current, but they were not Destroyed. It has often been debated among us to do the same.”

I said, “I thought Earth-Current was geomagnetic force? Is it radioactivity?”

Ydmos shrugged. “It is the Earth-Current.”

Abraxander said. “It does not occur on all worlds, and human life cannot endure on worlds that do not have it: their children are less of human each generation, and delight in cruelty. It is a strong force on the Mother World: perhaps this is why the Slayers did not tarry during their first pass. But they had been here. Long ago, they burned the galaxy clean of life. And, looking backward into the past, deeper into the sky, we saw, us, that other galaxies were also dead.

“Do you know what a Seyfert galaxy is? The galactic core implodes in such a way as to produce a stream of deadly radiation, hundreds of light years long: a vent, or a jet. As the core collapses, the jet rotates. Any world in the main galactic plane of a spiral galaxy would be sterilized; in dense areas, novas would trigger novas, to burn any planets missed in the first sweep.

“My people, us, we thought Seyfert galaxies were a natural phenomenon. So foolish. Us, we thought the Hubble expansion that is draining the universe of useful energy was a natural phenomenon, too. And the neutron stars called black holes, which eat everything.

“In the sweep, they overlooked us. No one knows why. Mars, and the world that once was between Mars and Jupiter…”

Mneseus said, “We called that world Tartaros. It was haunted, even when broken. The ghosts of the void are dangerous to dream-travelers. No fully human has even returned sane from an astral journey beyond the region of the moon, except, perhaps, the dreamer Snireth-Ko.”

Kitimil muttered, “Kuranes. He goes further. He sees the Abyss.”

Abraxander continued: “The two worlds in Sol were destroyed. But not Earth, except a glancing blow that extinguished the dinosaurs. Uranus was knocked sideways on his axis, and Pluto—but that world was discovered after your time Captain Powell, wasn’t it? A ninth planet. Originally it was a moon ripped from the planet Neptune.

“They overlooked the Earth and departed. Perhaps they overlooked another world in the universe as well: my ancestors, they heard radio signals, a mathematical code, issuing from a spot in the Lesser Cloud of Magellan. Instruments indicated a civilization advanced enough to use—these here, you do not know what a radio-pulsar is, do you? A star crushed and spun to produce a regular vibration. It can be held between two other dead stars, to make neutron waves–little parts of matter. Neutrons are little parts of matter of exceeding fineness, that fly, and can be blocked by nothing. Neutronic waves are an effect that has no counterpart in nature. We heard the signal, our ancestors.

“A ship was dispatched. What a ship! The greatest ever built. She was built at the height of the second aeon of star-farers, one aeon before my time.

“This one, me, I deem that the ship of which our records spoke, the fair, high ship, forgotten, in our day, save in the songs that children sang, is this one, her.

“Provisioned to run a billion years, fueled to last till the last proton decayed, five hundred miles from stem to stern, the brightest engine, the brightest star, greatest ship that flew far beyond far. Do you know the song? And done for a dream. Done, even though those who launched her knew their great-grandchildren would be dead before the destination was reached. This is the Spirit of Man.”

I said, “What happened?”

He shook his head. ”By the time the human race translated the mathematical code the creatures of Doradus S were sending, it was far, far too late to recall the ship.

“Their math told us a terrible secret. Our discovery was that if we turned our souls sideways in the dimensions between the time-flow and the mind-flow, we could bridge the gap between IS and MUST NOT BE. You see? It changed the nature and the dimensions of thought. The radio signals taught us the universal symbol set. It gave us the tools we needed to open the Utter Door.

“No one of my time, no criminal, no wicked tyrant, no mass-convocation, was dire enough to tempt the Utter Door. But the math was there. Once it was known, it could not be forgotten. The non-Euclidean arrangement of time, energy, eternity, mind, space, madness, dream, reality: the shapes had been discovered. The rotations of the nine-dimensional polyomnihedral chiliagons had been mapped out… we… something came backwards through the gap. Something from the far future, after the heat-death period, when time itself reverts to its primordial symmetry: the Eschaton, the point at which time is null. And the creatures that had swept this galaxy clean of life billions of years ago. The creatures of the far future and far past, the creatures of the outer darkness between the stars. They were the same, somehow.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Another reason might be the various game assets and art. For fantasy, you get loads of generic, mechanically simple items. For sci-fi, things tend to be much more complex and difficult to make. Ask an artist to model a sword, you have it in a day. Ask for a machinegun, he takes a week or two.

 

[Cael]

Choirs and organs in the music track to denote epic moments, or acts of great sacrifice. Babylon 5 was notable; an atheist show that still exudes the kind of spiritualism of Tolkien. Star Wars has a kinda Taoist flavour to it. Religious institutions will always try to convince us otherwise, they have skin in the game, but I believe spirituality is entirely secular anyway. "Soul", or "psyche" in Greek, was originally a potentially secular concept, meaning the personality or essence of a person. Many concepts in Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy are relatively secular but correspond with religious concepts. Each culture employs it's own ideosyncratic vocabulary of buddhas, gods and demons. Babylon 5 embraced Tolkien's language of light and darkness, seeing them as representing natural forces like life and entropy, but never landed in favour of any of the beliefs on the show; they were seen for what they were, ways people have of making sense of the world, with J Michael Straczynski being an atheist. Nerds tend to lie on the more autistic literal-minded end of the human spectrum, so rightly distrust inaccurate language and dogma, but sometimes some corners of geekdom miss out on poetic stuff.

This is the kind of shit I was talking about in the earlier post. Overanalysing much? Sometimes, the Force is just that. The. Freaking. Force. OK? It doesn't have to have a real world analog. Would it be similar to something in the real world? Of course! Humans are creatures of habit, and we weave what we know into any narrative. That's why culture and art evolve. But must it be an analog? Fuck no!

The suspension of disbelief is lost. Holes in the logic can no longer just be handwaved away. The notion of just riding with the narrative and enjoying the movie is suborned by anal nitpicking and endless arguing. Jesus Christ, just shut. The fuck. Up! And enjoy the game or movie for what it is: pure escapism.

 

[Roqua]

My point was realism in a game is unattainable and will always be triumphed by gameplay.

Actually the game in question was built under operating assumption of "fuck gameplay, let's try to model how near future space warfare would really look like", with most of what does and doesn't work determined by the players and most of the stuff used *built* by the players.
It's essentially a realistic near future space battle simulation engine (and that's its declared goal - the author essentially stated that he got fed up with pointless green VS purple discussions about missiles and lasers and decided to solve the problem by actually modelling all the well explored techs).

Any departures from realism are result of the limitations of the simulation mechanics - either because the simulation would become too computationally expensive or because - given it is essentially a one man project - the author had to pick and choose what he would rather code and what would benefit the simulation the most.

It's surprisingly fun.

In that game is time reflected accurately? Or can you skip long distance travel?

Yes to both. Since the technology is limited to stuff that has already been built in some capacity you can't just zip back and forth through our solar system - interplanetary transit times tend to be counted in months to years, and when you can't depend on infrastructure, in particular a network of propellant depots - for example when staging an invasion, you need an awful lot of tankers to carry you through.
OTOH the game is mission based (with only some missions dealing with long distance transfers) and out of combat you can just fast forward time (which is a must have when time before anything interesting happens might be measured in months), while the ships follow realistically modelled orbital trajectories (so the end result is realistic).

How fast can ships travel in RT?

Depending on how fast they move and relative to what, duh.

Does high-G maneuvers or from speed incapacitate or kill your crew?

Of course. You can even have crews killed when a ship is spun-up by ruptured propellant tank.

Its not realistic if it has completely invented science not based on any feasible scientific theories. You probably have a game with a bunch of invented stuff coupled with some actual science where it didn't completely ruin the gameplay.

Actually, no. The stuff in game is modelled down to material properties if existing materials used to make up stuff like engine chambers, laser mirrors, coilgun solenoids and, obviously, armour.
You can try to design engine, for example, and have the game tell you that it will rupture from excess pressure or melt.

The most far-fetched thing is the premise - humans actually managing to establish a space based civilization after fucking the Earth up into Venus 2.0.

I will not disagree it is fun. I can't get into non-rpg games so have no interest in playing it, but I am happy a game like it is being made.

Realistic time not being in the game was a good call since the game would have no players if everyone had to wait for their ship to be built or to sit their and watch their screen forever as they travel to mars, etc. Them allowing tons of control over and manipulation of one of the fundamental dimensions of our universe makes this game playable and an actual game, and not a pure simulation.

 

[Harry Easter]

You know, someboy mentioned Andromeda and it made think: it really is surprsing that nobody jumped on the Sci-Fi-RPG train after Mass Effect became a success. Considering that everyone hated the ending of 3, you could have had a big audience hungry for an Sci-Fi-RPG. Or for people who wanted more story after X-Com 1. Hell, even something like Skyrim could have worked, just switch the fantasystuff with temples of alien gods and secret Android-factories.

I mean, I know what I said about fantasystuff being easier, but Mass Effect was such a hit, SOMEBODY could have at least think about it. As a sideproject or something, not a big thing, just big enough to make a quick buck.

 

[Roqua]

You know, someboy mentioned Andromeda and it made think: it really is surprsing that nobody jumped on the Sci-Fi-RPG train after Mass Effect became a success. Considering that everyone hated the ending of 3, you could have had a big audience hungry for an Sci-Fi-RPG. Or for people who wanted more story after X-Com 1. Hell, even something like Skyrim could have worked, just switch the fantasystuff with temples of alien gods and secret Android-factories.

I mean, I know what I said about fantasystuff being easier, but Mass Effect was such a hit, SOMEBODY could have at least think about it. As a sideproject or something, not a big thing, just big enough to make a quick buck.

I don't think the issue is there not being enough sci-fi console games. There are plenty, with a lot of ME spin-offs. This was about crpgs.