We just had a discussion about the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there’s been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it’s kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn’t add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it’s a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman – an indie fighter combat game (not space – atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat – did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I’m thinking that maybe there’s room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of “Hollywood space” – fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around – were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don’t have that around any more.
There’s a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it’s that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn’t handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you’ve got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it’s just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we’re past that point.