Why are SPACE RPGs so uncommon?

[MrTwinkls]

'well, it’s magic'

I ******* hate when authors do that. Feels cheap and lazy. Good magic is systematic, cognizable, predictable and in a nutshell just reimagined science. Unless it has a will of its own.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Any opinions as to how popular the genre(setting) is with strategy games?

Space strategy games are generally almost entirely set in space. It is not like the devs are doubling the amount of time having to develop both a ground mode and a space mode.

Space RTS might be able to be developed faster because there is no terrain that has to be sculpted or AI navigation over terrain that has to be programmed, ie making AI avoid trying to climbing up steep cliffs. Generally you just have to make the AI avoid going over specific POIs like suns or black holes or trying to clip through a planet or space station.

Spaceships do not require anywhere near the same level of animation as a character with all of their different limbs and bones.

[MrTwinkls]

Any opinions as to how popular the genre(setting) is with strategy games?

Stellaris is pretty popular but it's basically 2d space.

[Element]

The setting takes actual form when you set it on different planets and get to show off cool things like fictional architecture, clothing, integration of technology, social customs, economics etc. The actual space bit very often feels lame and tacked on. Wow, here's a bunch of metallic tunnels joined together, have fun running up and down your 'ship' to check off all the dialogue trees. You could spruce things up by implementing zero-g combat but, eh, that's a gimmick worthy of one or two encounters.

[Acrux]

Any opinions as to how popular the genre(setting) is with strategy games?

It's popular with 4x strategy games (Stellaris, SoSE, Endless, Galactic Civ, Alpha Centauri), but I don't think as much with other genres.

[Acrux]

Tim Cain talks about this I think. Basically fantasy is just a lot easier to start from a baseline. Both as a creator you already have a lot of basic worldbuilding/tropes that you can then adjust or add on to as you see fit. For space/sci-fi stuff there's just a lot more minutiae you have to figure out. People already know what orcs, trolls, goblins, elves etc are from the general cultural zeitgeist. Even if you call them "Orsimer" people can look at them and get a general idea. Even if you're going to be subverting those tropes you know what the average person is gonna think the moment they see them.

However something like a "Turian" from Mass Effect requires it's own loredump so you get what their deal is. A toddler probably knows what a dwarf is but a "Kaleeshi" is a bit dubious. You have to find a way to get people immediately interested but also comfortable in your world without having to overload them with a bunch of wikipedia codex articles about **** they have no reason to be invested in enough to bother reading yet. It's not so bad when you're watching a movie but if you're playing a game where you have to roleplay or even pick a race it can be a bit daunting to see a bunch of random goobers you have no context for.

There's also the issue of it just being such a larger scope to try and tackle where even just the means of transportation requires some sort of explanation. In a fantasy world you don't need to explain the intricacies of why boats work we've had those in real life forever. You do have to at least come up with a decent hand wave for interplanetary travel though.

Really it's just so much easier to have a world with elves throwing fireballs and orcs smashing things with hammers and then tweak things to your liking instead of creating your own entire galaxy.

Good fantasy requires excessive lore dump too especially if it has magic. Otherwise you'll get Harry Potter or Japanese isekai level of worldbuilding which is boring and crumbles completely after some simple questions.
In sci-fi you can skimp on lorebuilding but cannot ignore science aspect otherwise it's not sci-fi.
In fantasy you can skimp on conventional realism but must compensate with lorebuilding to flash out how the world works.
In both cases there must be some universal rules for world to operate by to not break suspension of disbelief.
E.g. your elves throwing fireballs - it's such a simple fantasyish idea but brings with it a ton of questions about the world that must be accounted for in writing. Why fireball? How they conjure it? How did they improved it through the years? How do they build their cities with constant fire hazard? How does it affect their culture and religion? What is the temperature of it's flame? For how long can they hold it? How do they throw it? What military tactics they use? Can they cast it underwater or without air? Can they cast it without arms or inside someone's head? Can they cast plasma torch and make steel products? What countermeasures against fireball magic were implemented by other races? And so on.

You really don't need all that, though, unless you are going for Sanderson-levels of autism which frankly bogs everything down.

How does magic work in Middle Earth? Or Star Wars? Or Earthsea? Or Narnia?

[MrTwinkls]

Tim Cain talks about this I think. Basically fantasy is just a lot easier to start from a baseline. Both as a creator you already have a lot of basic worldbuilding/tropes that you can then adjust or add on to as you see fit. For space/sci-fi stuff there's just a lot more minutiae you have to figure out. People already know what orcs, trolls, goblins, elves etc are from the general cultural zeitgeist. Even if you call them "Orsimer" people can look at them and get a general idea. Even if you're going to be subverting those tropes you know what the average person is gonna think the moment they see them.

However something like a "Turian" from Mass Effect requires it's own loredump so you get what their deal is. A toddler probably knows what a dwarf is but a "Kaleeshi" is a bit dubious. You have to find a way to get people immediately interested but also comfortable in your world without having to overload them with a bunch of wikipedia codex articles about **** they have no reason to be invested in enough to bother reading yet. It's not so bad when you're watching a movie but if you're playing a game where you have to roleplay or even pick a race it can be a bit daunting to see a bunch of random goobers you have no context for.

There's also the issue of it just being such a larger scope to try and tackle where even just the means of transportation requires some sort of explanation. In a fantasy world you don't need to explain the intricacies of why boats work we've had those in real life forever. You do have to at least come up with a decent hand wave for interplanetary travel though.

Really it's just so much easier to have a world with elves throwing fireballs and orcs smashing things with hammers and then tweak things to your liking instead of creating your own entire galaxy.

Good fantasy requires excessive lore dump too especially if it has magic. Otherwise you'll get Harry Potter or Japanese isekai level of worldbuilding which is boring and crumbles completely after some simple questions.
In sci-fi you can skimp on lorebuilding but cannot ignore science aspect otherwise it's not sci-fi.
In fantasy you can skimp on conventional realism but must compensate with lorebuilding to flash out how the world works.
In both cases there must be some universal rules for world to operate by to not break suspension of disbelief.
E.g. your elves throwing fireballs - it's such a simple fantasyish idea but brings with it a ton of questions about the world that must be accounted for in writing. Why fireball? How they conjure it? How did they improved it through the years? How do they build their cities with constant fire hazard? How does it affect their culture and religion? What is the temperature of it's flame? For how long can they hold it? How do they throw it? What military tactics they use? Can they cast it underwater or without air? Can they cast it without arms or inside someone's head? Can they cast plasma torch and make steel products? What countermeasures against fireball magic were implemented by other races? And so on.

You really don't need all that, though, unless you are going for Sanderson-levels of autism which frankly bogs everything down.

How does magic work in Middle Earth? Or Star Wars? Or Earthsea? Or Narnia?

Yes, you don't need to write about it if it's not relevant to the story but you still need to account for it in worldbuilding and storytelling to make interesting believable world that people will want to explore. Same with characters btw. That's why I think writing fantasy is harder. In sci-fi you can write upon preexisting real world with some research but with fantasy you have to create the whole world and its rules from scratch.

[Tweed]

Good fantasy requires excessive lore dump too especially if it has magic. Otherwise you'll get Harry Potter or Japanese isekai level of worldbuilding which is boring and crumbles completely after some simple questions.
In sci-fi you can skimp on lorebuilding but cannot ignore science aspect otherwise it's not sci-fi.
In fantasy you can skimp on conventional realism but must compensate with lorebuilding to flash out how the world works.
In both cases there must be some universal rules for world to operate by to not break suspension of disbelief.
E.g. your elves throwing fireballs - it's such a simple fantasyish idea but brings with it a ton of questions about the world that must be accounted for in writing. Why fireball? How they conjure it? How did they improved it through the years? How do they build their cities with constant fire hazard? How does it affect their culture and religion? What is the temperature of it's flame? For how long can they hold it? How do they throw it? What military tactics they use? Can they cast it underwater or without air? Can they cast it without arms or inside someone's head? Can they cast plasma torch and make steel products? What countermeasures against fireball magic were implemented by other races? And so on.

You really don't need all that, though, unless you are going for Sanderson-levels of autism which frankly bogs everything down.

How does magic work in Middle Earth? Or Star Wars? Or Earthsea? Or Narnia?

Yes, you don't need to write about it if it's not relevant to the story but you still need to account for it in worldbuilding and storytelling to make interesting believable world that people will want to explore. Same with characters btw. That's why I think writing fantasy is harder. In sci-fi you can write upon preexisting real world with some research but with fantasy you have to create the whole world and its rules from scratch.

Tell that to everyone who stole from Tolkien and Gygax.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

All "sci fi" is fantasy. Things that aren't real. Imaginary. The delineation is the aesthetic. "Medieval fantasy" = medieval aesthetics. "Weird west" = Wild West theming. And so on. "Sci fi" just means a certain aesthetic, ie utilitarian looking spaceships. "Space fantasy" just means it has a more zany slant. In "sci fi", "science" is just magick but reskinned from sparkles to devices, but nonetheless it's the same thing: things are happening that could not happen in real life. Talking animals is fantasy. Going to other stars cannot happen in real life. It is imaginary. These labels are useful as a a fast way for marketing to people whether or not something might have aesthetics that appeal to them. You can make up all of the "rules" or "worldbuilding" you want, but that is just more imaginary fluff, and frankly I am not interested in reading paragraphs of fluff rules on how a fireball or a warp drive "works" or the 12 pages of backstory on the ruins of this dead kingdom. I just want to look at the cool aesthetics and then get on with the plot or the gameplay.

The obsession with "sci fi" as a somehow distinct genre from fantasy has more to do with how insular and incestuous the fans have become that they do not want to want to open themselves up to new things, just regurgitate their favorite old stuff. Same issue with the dead metal scene. People want to draw boxes around the things they like to try to make it feel more special than it actually is.

[MrTwinkls]

All "sci fi" is fantasy. Things that aren't real. Imaginary. The delineation is the aesthetic. "Medieval fantasy" = medieval aesthetics. "Weird west" = Wild West theming. And so on. "Sci fi" just means a certain aesthetic, ie utilitarian looking spaceships. "Space fantasy" just means it has a more zany slant. In "sci fi", "science" is just magick but reskinned from sparkles to devices, but nonetheless it's the same thing: things are happening that could not happen in real life. Talking animals is fantasy. Going to other stars cannot happen in real life. It is imaginary. These labels are useful as a a fast way for marketing to people whether or not something might have aesthetics that appeal to them. You can make up all of the "rules" or "worldbuilding" you want, but that is just more imaginary fluff, and frankly I am not interested in reading paragraphs of fluff rules on how a fireball or a warp drive "works" or the 12 pages of backstory on the ruins of this dead kingdom. I just want to look at the cool aesthetics and then get on with the plot or the gameplay.

The obsession with "sci fi" as a somehow distinct genre from fantasy has more to do with how insular and incestuous the fans have become that they do not want to want to open themselves up to new things, just regurgitate their favorite old stuff. Same issue with the dead metal scene. People want to draw boxes around the things they like to try to make it feel more special than it actually is.

They are the same thing. Precisely. And this is why it bogs me when fantasy authors only do surface level worldbuilding with hollow worlds and "because It's magic" explanations compared to scifi deep dive autism. Maybe I just care about "fluff" too much. It makes worlds more colourful for me.

[rusty_shackleford]

Going to other stars cannot happen in real life.

(this is false)

[TKVNC]

The main problem is autism.

Space attracts a particular type of mega-autist who is either: overly critical as a consumer, or overly perfectionist as a developer.

Both of these cause space projects to enter development hell unless you go Space Opera mode and just don't give a ****. But most modern developers are hacks without any vision.

[Stack of Turtles]

'well, it’s magic'

I ******* hate when authors do that. Feels cheap and lazy. Good magic is systematic, cognizable, predictable and in a nutshell just reimagined science. Unless it has a will of its own.

I like it when magic is magical and you can't understand it because it fucks with you on purpose.

[Oyster Sauce]

Feel like we need to categorize civilized (not monstrous animal like xenomorphs) alien designs to get to the bottom of this

-Boomer puppetslop (ET, Yoda)
-Boomer costumeslop (rodian, klingon)
-Humanslop (Superman, Vulcan)
-Humanslop fapbait (twilek, asari)
-Oh **** we can make whatever we want with computers and we're white and don't have to hire infinity ****** tranniescore (geth, turian, krogan, covenant)
-Retvrn to the trad '90s era (avatar)
-Oh **** we can make whatever we want with computers and we love gay guys pissing in our mouthslop(angara, every amorphous hairy brown blob alien from Disney Wars, black people)

We've lost something we can probably never get back. There's no way you can make a cool space game when billions of dollars and the top Indian CG guys get you sequel aliens



You can't make a space game reusing salarians, but you can go nuts with dwarves and elves in a fantasy one.

[UltraFan123]

'well, it’s magic'

I ******* hate when authors do that. Feels cheap and lazy. Good magic is systematic, cognizable, predictable and in a nutshell just reimagined science. Unless it has a will of its own.

I like it when magic is magical and you can't understand it because it fucks with you on purpose.

Agree that "true" magic is stuff that normal living beings will never really understand, hence why I label it as separate from the "arcane science" that has come to dominate modern fantasy and RPGs.

[J1M]

All "sci fi" is fantasy. Things that aren't real. Imaginary. The delineation is the aesthetic. "Medieval fantasy" = medieval aesthetics. "Weird west" = Wild West theming. And so on. "Sci fi" just means a certain aesthetic, ie utilitarian looking spaceships. "Space fantasy" just means it has a more zany slant. In "sci fi", "science" is just magick but reskinned from sparkles to devices, but nonetheless it's the same thing: things are happening that could not happen in real life. Talking animals is fantasy. Going to other stars cannot happen in real life. It is imaginary. These labels are useful as a a fast way for marketing to people whether or not something might have aesthetics that appeal to them. You can make up all of the "rules" or "worldbuilding" you want, but that is just more imaginary fluff, and frankly I am not interested in reading paragraphs of fluff rules on how a fireball or a warp drive "works" or the 12 pages of backstory on the ruins of this dead kingdom. I just want to look at the cool aesthetics and then get on with the plot or the gameplay.

The obsession with "sci fi" as a somehow distinct genre from fantasy has more to do with how insular and incestuous the fans have become that they do not want to want to open themselves up to new things, just regurgitate their favorite old stuff. Same issue with the dead metal scene. People want to draw boxes around the things they like to try to make it feel more special than it actually is.

Science fiction is a genre where one takes reality and proposes a change to it, such as a new invention or physical law, and then explores the logical consequences of that as a way of exploring the human condition.

It is not Harry Potter in space ships.

[Tangerine]

Mining asteroids would involve slamming them into the moon and then using a space elevator to get the resources to earth, it's feasible

We could slam them into India and solve two problems at once.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Feel like we need to categorize civilized (not monstrous animal like xenomorphs) alien designs to get to the bottom of this

-Boomer puppetslop (ET, Yoda) [/img]

It really disappointed me that out of the 1990s/early 2000s sci fi/space opera TV show trend, only Farscape did puppets. Almost all other aliens were humans with paint and rubber forheads, or were 3D CGI like the Asgard. Puppets add so much variety. They can be smaller than a human or larger like Jabba. They could have really inhuman, fantastical proportions that is not possible when pasting stuff onto a human. They just make the world feel so much more wonderous. And games like Mass Effect and KotoR don't have little puppet party members, only human sized and proportioned characters. Xenoblade Chronicles X had Tatsu, but he's not playable.

The blue prequel guy in the yellow pauldrons with the tall scepter/staff looks cool. I also liked how red skinned white horned lady looked, and Jabba's majordomo with his head tail wrapped around himself.

Issue with the sequel aliens is that it did not have George there who recruited the best artists he could find and then curate their designs.

[Oyster Sauce]

Feel like we need to categorize civilized (not monstrous animal like xenomorphs) alien designs to get to the bottom of this

-Boomer puppetslop (ET, Yoda) [/img]

It really disappointed me that out of the 1990s/early 2000s sci fi/space opera TV show trend, only Farscape did puppets. Almost all other aliens were humans with paint and rubber forheads, or were 3D CGI like the Asgard. Puppets add so much variety. They can be smaller than a human or larger like Jabba. They could have really inhuman, fantastical proportions that is not possible when pasting stuff onto a human. They just make the world feel so much more wonderous. And games like Mass Effect and KotoR don't have little puppet party members, only human sized and proportioned characters. Xenoblade Chronicles X had Tatsu, but he's not playable.

The blue prequel guy in the yellow pauldrons with the tall scepter/staff looks cool. I also liked how red skinned white horned lady looked, and Jabba's majordomo with his head tail wrapped around himself.

Issue with the sequel aliens is that it did not have George there who recruited the best artists he could find and then curate their designs.

It's probably a horrific nightmare from hell if you want scenes where 4 puppets are talking to each other and being held to higher standards than Sesame Street. Would take so much time to get right compared to 4 guys in makeup talking in a weekly serial. Haven't seen Farscape but I'm guessing it's mostly 1 puppet talking to humans tops.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Feel like we need to categorize civilized (not monstrous animal like xenomorphs) alien designs to get to the bottom of this

-Boomer puppetslop (ET, Yoda) [/img]

It really disappointed me that out of the 1990s/early 2000s sci fi/space opera TV show trend, only Farscape did puppets. Almost all other aliens were humans with paint and rubber forheads, or were 3D CGI like the Asgard. Puppets add so much variety. They can be smaller than a human or larger like Jabba. They could have really inhuman, fantastical proportions that is not possible when pasting stuff onto a human. They just make the world feel so much more wonderous. And games like Mass Effect and KotoR don't have little puppet party members, only human sized and proportioned characters. Xenoblade Chronicles X had Tatsu, but he's not playable.

The blue prequel guy in the yellow pauldrons with the tall scepter/staff looks cool. I also liked how red skinned white horned lady looked, and Jabba's majordomo with his head tail wrapped around himself.

Issue with the sequel aliens is that it did not have George there who recruited the best artists he could find and then curate their designs.

It's probably a horrific nightmare from hell if you want scenes where 4 puppets are talking to each other and being held to higher standards than Sesame Street. Would take so much time to get right compared to 4 guys in makeup talking in a weekly serial. Haven't seen Farscape but I'm guessing it's mostly 1 puppet talking to humans tops.

There was one other puppet on the main cast, Pilot who was plugged into the ship. And then there were other puppets in the series too depending on the episode. The monster puppets felt much more scary than a guy in a suit.

[Norfleet]

Mass Effect did a decent job of making the galaxy seem much smaller than it is, something I think is probably a lot harder than it looks.

EVERYTHING always makes the galaxy seem much smaller than it is. The galaxy is ******* huge. Pretty much any attempt to make a traversible galaxy in a game necessarily makes it midgetine. The only things I've seen that makes the galaxy seem anything close to lifesized are games that model it as a functionally infinite expanse of procgen slop.

You can easily calculate the MINIMUM involved energies from basic physical laws, and I have. It's not feasible and would be enormously destructive.

The thing is "destructive" is a matter of perception. If you destroy the moon by repeatedly crashing things into it due to using it as an endstop, nobody ******* cares. If anything, it might be good for the environment, since the moon is gradually escaping, and slamming things into it could slow that down. Sure, the moon will develop giant craters on one side that will make nuclear blasts look like a child's firework, but there ain't no whales, so we tell tales, and sing our whaling tune.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Mass Effect did a decent job of making the galaxy seem much smaller than it is, something I think is probably a lot harder than it looks.

EVERYTHING always makes the galaxy seem much smaller than it is. The galaxy is ******* huge. Pretty much any attempt to make a traversible galaxy in a game necessarily makes it midgetine.

The way to make any setting feel larger is you need to have the audience getting glimpses of stuff off in the distance that they can't go to. The way Tolkien did this in LotR was that every river and valley the characters go to is named, and then the characters are asking "what is that mountain range over there?" and Aragorn or Gandalf says "oh, it is such and such place, beyond that is so and so troll country". And he keeps doing that throughout the novels. Most of Middle-Earth is never visited but you hear a lot about it in passing, and by the end of the novel there are more places that are named but haven't been visited compared to places we have visited. That is why the world feels so vast.

Where serialized stories usually trip up is that they often have a lot of offscreen places named in the beginning, but then as the series progresses the writers take you to those places, but do not add in anywhere near enough new offscreen names of places to keep the ratio of unvisited to visited places high. So you eventually reach a point where most named places have been visited, and there are very few named places left that have not been visited, and the world feels small. And it also leads to retcon issues where the writers begin pulling major countries or powers out of thin air that we have inexplicably never heard of before.

[Statesman]

Games, whether tabletop or videogames, are meant to be a form of escapism. Fantasy, as a setting, allows players to disconnect from 21st century issues to immerse themselves in a world where problems can be solved by a single individual with a decent sword, a good spell, a noble heart or just sheer will. Thus the simpler moral dichotomies (good vs. evil, hero vs. villain), can be said to offer a respite from the complexities/moral ambiguities of modern life. Meanwhile, sci-fi usually handles morality as "shades of grey" and confronts players with speculative technological/societal challenges that may hit too close to home for individuals grappling with lackluster progress/innovation and societal decline. Back in the day (Space Race era), society shared a vision of forward-looking optimism, which is why sci-fi was a lot more popular.

[rusty_shackleford]

Games, whether tabletop or videogames, are meant to be a form of escapism. Fantasy, as a setting, allows players to disconnect from 21st century issues to immerse themselves in a world where problems can be solved by a single individual with a decent sword, a good spell, a noble heart or just sheer will. Thus the simpler moral dichotomies (good vs. evil, hero vs. villain), can be said to offer a respite from the complexities/moral ambiguities of modern life. Meanwhile, sci-fi usually handles morality as "shades of grey" and confronts players with speculative technological/societal challenges that may hit too close to home for individuals grappling with lackluster progress/innovation and societal decline. Back in the day (Space Race era), society shared a vision of forward-looking optimism, which is why sci-fi was a lot more popular.

I reject the common notion that games are escapism.
I say games are for transmission of stories, ideas, culture, etc.,

I would be a much different person without Gary Gygax transmitting his ideas in the form of a game.

[Norfleet]

The way to make any setting feel larger is you need to have the audience getting glimpses of stuff off in the distance that they can't go to.

That works when you're dealing with places on the Earth-analogue. Not so much in space. When you show the player a galactic map that shows Earth on one side and Klendathu on the other side of the galaxy, the galaxy is now instantly smol. It does not matter that there's a whole mass of unexplored map that I will not see or go to. The fact that I am able to go THERE has made the galaxy smol just by the implication that this is even feasible.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The way to make any setting feel larger is you need to have the audience getting glimpses of stuff off in the distance that they can't go to.

That works when you're dealing with places on the Earth-analogue. Not so much in space. When you show the player a galactic map that shows Earth on one side and Klendathu on the other side of the galaxy, the galaxy is now instantly smol. It does not matter that there's a whole mass of unexplored map that I will not see or go to. The fact that I am able to go THERE has made the galaxy smol just by the implication that this is even feasible.

Make it so that you cannot see the whole galaxy, only a small part of it, and that small part has lots of locations in it, and you hear about many locations beyond it. It's like seeing a map of a whole continent with only a few countries on it. Small. But then if you zoom in one country and there are many provinces and locations in it, it feels humongous.




Here is a slice of some Star Wars galaxy map. Feels huge. You could have dozens of games and never visit all of these places. And it is implied that there is way more than this. This setting feels enormous.

[rusty_shackleford]

The way to make any setting feel larger is you need to have the audience getting glimpses of stuff off in the distance that they can't go to.

That works when you're dealing with places on the Earth-analogue. Not so much in space. When you show the player a galactic map that shows Earth on one side and Klendathu on the other side of the galaxy, the galaxy is now instantly smol. It does not matter that there's a whole mass of unexplored map that I will not see or go to. The fact that I am able to go THERE has made the galaxy smol just by the implication that this is even feasible.

The explorable space in Mass Effect is, by design, tiny. It's just a bunch of tiny pockets connected by a portal network. It's an example of how you can have two areas on the opposite side of a galaxy in a game without the galaxy feeling small.
IMO they messed up by having conventional FTL which does make the galaxy feel much smaller.

[Norfleet]

Make it so that you cannot see the whole galaxy, only a small part of it, and that small part has lots of locations in it, and you hear about many locations beyond it.

This is what I meant by "modelling as a functionally infinite expanse of procgen slop", yes. I don't even have to hear about "many locations beyond". If all I see is a tiny area, and I'm not told of jack **** beyond it, the galaxy isn't ensmallened. But if I can even *SEE* any of it, the galaxy immediately becomes smol. But, of course, if you don't show it to me, "the galaxy" is not really in the game, now is it? That's the thing with the galaxy: The Galaxy is so ridonkulously huge that the ability to even see a meaningful portion of it has instantly made it smoller.

Here is a slice of some Star Wars galaxy map. Feels huge. You could have dozens of games and never visit all of these places. And it is implied that there is way more than this. This setting feels enormous.

It feels mappy. Then you zoom out. Then you locate Coruscant and "the floor is lava" planet. It looks big! Then you realize that was like, a few hours away. Galaxy is now smol.

The explorable space in Mass Effect is, by design, tiny. It's just a bunch of tiny pockets connected by a portal network. It's an example of how you can have two areas on the opposite side of a galaxy in a game without the galaxy feeling small.

Nope, ME Galaxy instantly feels smol, just by being able to see it.

[Statesman]

I reject the common notion that games are escapism.
I say games are for transmission of stories, ideas, culture, etc.,

I would be a much different person without Gary Gygax transmitting his ideas in the form of a game.

I'm not saying games are just mere escapism, they can certainly serve several purposes...but there is no point in creating a game (just to transmit stories, ideas, culture, etc) if there are no plans to take advantage of an interactive medium that can serve as a respite/diversion from daily life.

[Stack of Turtles]

You can easily calculate the MINIMUM involved energies from basic physical laws, and I have. It's not feasible and would be enormously destructive.

The thing is "destructive" is a matter of perception. If you destroy the moon by repeatedly crashing things into it due to using it as an endstop, nobody ******* cares. If anything, it might be good for the environment, since the moon is gradually escaping, and slamming things into it could slow that down. Sure, the moon will develop giant craters on one side that will make nuclear blasts look like a child's firework, but there ain't no whales, so we tell tales, and sing our whaling tune.

Even if you completely transfer all the kinetic energy from the crash to the moon, then beneficiate the ore and smelt the metal on the moon, there is STILL an appreciable amount of heat, enough to seriously affect the ecosystem over the long term, inherently produced just from moving a significant mass of metal - say a million tons a day - from lunar orbit to Earth's surface where people can actually use it.

Or you can move the people up to the moon, which is also a huge kettle of fish of its own.