Yesterday, Hello Games threw down yet another gauntlet (I think Sean Murray has, what? 16 hands to justify having all of these gauntlets?) with the release of the free Voyagers update.

As is my habit I reinstalled NMS yesterday, and as is my habit I spent about five minutes in the game before exiting and uninstalling.

This morning I watched a video from space-game YTer ObsidianAnt in which he questions why Elite Dangerous is now the only game without walkable ship interiors. He name drops X4, Starfield, Star Citizen and, now, NMS as all having such features, which puts Elite Dangerous in a dark corner of it’s own.

Watching the clips he provided in his video made me want to reinstall Elite Dangerous, but I backed off because I know what’ll happen: the same thing that happened to me with NMS yesterday.

So what’s the deal here? I really enjoy Elite Dangerous, NMS, and X4, but recently I haven’t been able to get my mind into a place where I can enjoy them despite the fact that I believe they are all doing the right things to draw me back in.

The reason is space: there’s too much of it.

I understand that in a “space game” the point is that “you are in space” and space is wide and it is open and there’s not a lot to do in space except move through it and not die, and all of these games check those boxes with ease. For me, the issue is that there’s a lot of moving through space while not dying and despite my professed love of space games, I’m finding it too boring to deal with right now. That’s why I tried (and will be trying again) NMS yesterday, thinking that being able to set up a mobile base or something would somehow alleviate the boredom of travel. I have yet to see if that is so.

On the other hand, we have Star Citizen and Starfield. These two games feature space, of course, but travel time in both is a matter of getting into space, picking a destination on a map, and then arriving there in seconds or a few minutes. Then it’s time to dock or land to do other things. In these games, spending a lot of time in space is optional and offers it’s own gameplay and its own rewards, but despite them being “space-games” they aren’t really about being in space. And yes, I know you can walk around in stations and on planets in both NMS and ED, but we then have to admit that the size of their game universes means that the procedurally generated locations are there to facilitate gameplay and one location isn’t any more memorable than any other, so it’s not really a case of just “getting out of space”. I’m looking for reasons to do so that aren’t just to take advantage of a mechanic.

So I think if there’s one thing that Star Citizen does absolutely right by me it’s that they aren’t leaving the game world design to an algorithm that just Big Bangs a whole lot of stars, planets, and locations for the sake of bragging rights. CIG is keeping it tight, understanding that while a lot of gameplay can happen in space, it doesn’t need to be all of it, or even most of it.