Atmospheric lighting tech and ray traced shadow stuff has gotten really fucking good lately and the consolidation of a lot of tools under things like Unreal Engine 5 have made them a lot cheaper and more accessible to independent studios. So if you want to make a really nice looking, AAA shiny game but with a limited budget and scope then on board spaceships is a pretty good way to go. By their nature they have repeatable assets, enclosed and limited worlds, and lots of opportunity to use that cool lighting tech for atmosphere.
That's not the only reason, but I'd bet heavily that it's one of them.
These are also basically the reasons why Space was such a dominant theme in the early days of gaming. When your screen is black by default, a little triangle is all you need the computer to draw to represent a spaceship.
This seems very plausible.
Remember that era in the mid 2000s when every AAA game was brown and grey? That's because it hid the fact that real-time global illumination wasn't a thing yet.
it hid the fact that real-time global illumination wasn’t a thing yet
I don't see how that follows.
Having more than like 1-2 runtime dynamic lights (usually a flashlight) didn't become somewhat common until like late 2010s, and pre-baking a shitton of light maps to simulate things like lights turning on or moving goes all the way back to HL1 if not quake.
The number of lights isn't the thing, it's the color bleed between adjacent objects. Like if you look at a Cornel Box Model, the way the white wall is a little red near the red side, because it's picking up reflected light from there. That's a subtle thing that'll make your scene look wrong, but it's a lot harder to notice if everything is brown.
Pre-baked light maps have accounted for colored light bouncing and mixing at least as far back as HL1, but I think the compile tools of the time did something weird like averaging out texture colors or ignoring them all together.
The number of lights isn’t the thing
It was a computational issue, dynamic lights are expensive to calculate at runtime, fully prebaking multiple dynamic source requires you store exponentially more data for each source to account for all the ways the sources can interact if you don't want to do any lighting calculations at runtime.
Honestly, your comment here makes me wish there were some mid-tier indie-devs doing a spiritual successor to Doom 3, or the original FEAR game now.
It was, and I am eternally :deeper-sadness: over the fact that some stupid update they made to windows or something recently broke the game & made it have unplayable amounts of stuttering & slowdown that increase the longer that you play it.
It's extremely rare that you can get a "tactical shooter" game that is actually tactically engaging, and in which the guns actually feel impactful & fun to use. In fact most shooters these days, I would say, have a big problem with having weapons that just don't feel good to shoot. It's not a universal issue obviously, but most the games where this isn't a problem are some sort of boomer-shooter revival game, and while I'm a fan of those, sometimes you want something that isn't going a thousand miles a minute.
I think the big problem with FEAR now, or at least the one I hear people talk about, is that it breaks if you have Nvidia hardware. I think there's fanmade patches to fix it.
But god, yeah, the guns in FEAR. Best shotgun in gaming still, to this day, and that assault rifle felt so meaty too, I loved it. And the AI still holds up too.
Shame about the sequels tho.
Nightmare Reaper is some kind of weird mashup of OG doom, Duke3d, a looter-shooter, and a couple of other neat retro concepts.
Contemporary space fantasy is not escapist, since the direction of escape is toward freedom. I can't think of a modern spacefaring IP that posits anything other than space capitalism or endless torment by monsters (usually caused by space capitalism). There are some escapist arcs and ideas in stuff like The Expanse or Shipbreaker, and there are older properties (KSR's Mars trilogy, Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish Cycle) that imagine worlds beyond (and better than) our own. A great deal of modern sci-fi (literature and other media) is "protagonist with gun and quirks" or "team of gun people with quirks" or "space virus plus twist". It doesn't even have the Asimovian flirtation with (but ultimate rejection or lib-brain-ization of) real materialist/emancipatory themes.
Does escapism usually have direction towards freedom? The usual stereotype of escapism is tropy fantasy with feudalism and what not. The protagonists get to have freedom because they're super special badasses, but the ship captain you play in the space game is also like this.
Sword and sorcery fantasy is escapist because it puts the reader in the person or company of a heroic figure doing great deeds in a world of magic and danger. This is a world where, were you a party to its events, you would be more than who you are now because practically everyone is special and even mundanes can be blessed by God or a sexy lake monster or whatever and ascend to MCdom.
Compare to something like Tom Clancy's oeuvre. These are power fantasies, and that's certainly present in some genres of fantasy, but ultimately the escapist elements are diminished because the protagonists are Tier One Operators (rare, theoretically requires specialization and training) and have a Boss calling the shots who is usually not a POV character (diegesis rather than agency/embodiment). This is the sort of fiction you read when you want to read about a cool guy doing cool shit because of how cool he is. Cf. the Master Chief from Halo. You can shoot the gun, but you can't decide who it points at.
Both types of fiction aim to disconnect the reader from their current reality, but one lets them embody something greater than themselves while the other merely holds up a funhouse mirror to some facet of the existing hellworld and changes the background.
It doesn’t even have the Asimovian flirtation with (but ultimate rejection or lib-brain-ization of) real materialist/emancipatory themes.
You think any of the people making these games have actually read any Asimov? I think you'll find 1 or 2 people in a team of 300 contractors that might possibly have. I don't think reading books is very common among videogame devs, their spare time is spent almost exclusively with videogames and writers for these games are always an afterthought rather than the core that the project is built around.
I don't disagree, but I'm also talking about sci-fi literature and film. The whole genre is very fucked vibes, at the moment, across every medium.
I'd say worth the read if you like the genre, if only to see who everyone else is ripping off. He's not a bad writer by any means, but he's politically a product of his time. Also valuable so you can dunk on Rationalists:tm: quoting the laws of robotics at you.
i've only ever heard of the game, i virtually know nothing about it or it's developers, what did they do?
Is there a sudden deluge? Space and sci-fi games have always been popular.
I can't back it up with numbers but I've just watched a couple of those pseudo-e3 presentations (Bethesda/Microsoft and pc gaming show) and like every other game announced is set in space.
I prefer sci-fi to medieval fantasy but a lot of those space games seem to go for mighty generic aesthetics.
A big one that I know of would be Callisto Protocol by some of former Dead Space people. As someone already pointed out space seems to have become a smart choice of setting for indie devs.
Maybe it's a cycle thing, a lot of devs coming up and making projects might've first played games like Elite or Star Wars games, watched TV like star trek TNG and DS9, movies like Star Wars (prequels too). So that's what they want to make, and then Kerbal and Elite: Dangerous came around and demonstrated a substantial market segment that wants to play space games after space games kinda disappeared in the 00s and early 10s.
Because shoot games cannot be set in contemporary settings anymore, now that people are starting to notice just how fucked up war actually is again. Notice how the most recent Call of Duty games are a WW2 flashback and a battle royale game with no plot.
Pretty sure the plot was that the Russians invade teh US and do wwIII somehow, so it fits the zeitgeist.
now that people are starting to notice just how fucked up war actually is again
Pure projection unfortunately
There’s a 45 or 50 year cycle in trends, so the space race is back.
Next up is a new Thatcher/Reagan, wedge super cars, scaled back pixel graphics but this time they’re voxels, and big hair. The hair will not utilize a hair physics engine because hairspray will also be coming back so it doesn’t have to move. It will, however, be flammable so watch out for fire-based enemy attacks and like, torches and stuff.Space is cool. Remember that time where every game was set in WWII? Or the time every game was brown? Or the time every game had a bow in it? Or the time every game had parkour?
corporations are vacuous creative blackholes and copy anything that gets any sort of buzz
idk how much of a deluge it is either they just showcased a bunch at e3 they probably arent all gonna come out the same time
I've noticed myself getting into space games lately, and not just new stuff coming out. I think it's because everyone's anxious and uncertain about the near future, so it's appealing to have a setting that skips past all that where it all more or less worked out. I mean, maybe it didn't work out and things are still shit, maybe they're even worse, but things are still things. The story continues, the world keeps turning, and the anxious tension is resolved.
If you set things in the present, then you have to deal with the present anxiety - and with things potentially changing rapidly, your game might become irrelevant before it comes out. If you set it in the past (or a fantasy version of it), then the anxiety kinda looms in the distance, and it feels disconnected and not relatable.
The feeling of being stuck in a big metal box, isolated from everyone else, where leaving the box can kill you, is probably a feeling that people connect with from being stuck inside with COVID - but then you get to fly your house around everywhere and go super fast and shoot lasers and stuff. That's another reason space is having a moment, because it's basically, "What if: your life, but really cool" which is more appealing than just "What if: something really cool."
