crufty
Arcane
After playing X2 again the other day, I've often wondered why there aren't any exploration games in a Neuromancer/Shadowrun Matrix setting. Beyond the potential coolness of the genre, game designers can impose artifical limitations that actually make sense. In counterpoint, for example, in X2, it mildly bugs me that I can't fly to certain objects, land on planets, or just fly really frickin fast as I truck from point A to point B. In cyberspace--well, it's all virtual anyway.
Following a Continuum style level design, you could setup physical boundries that limit the scope of assets and features (otherwise required to maintain sense of a believable world) to a manageable amount--freeing up more time for...say...economy tweaking. Or a plot that doesn't inolve characters named Ban Dana. And yet, developers wouldn't be restricted by any sort of reality, and could just go nuts with the ideas.
The end effect is that *hopefully* gameplay would improve as coders spend more time working on the play itself, rather then spending time on trying to solve problems involving with the vastness of space/time (ie planetfall, the effects of gravity, etc). Does such a beast exist? (Tron 2.0 doesn't count).
Following a Continuum style level design, you could setup physical boundries that limit the scope of assets and features (otherwise required to maintain sense of a believable world) to a manageable amount--freeing up more time for...say...economy tweaking. Or a plot that doesn't inolve characters named Ban Dana. And yet, developers wouldn't be restricted by any sort of reality, and could just go nuts with the ideas.
The end effect is that *hopefully* gameplay would improve as coders spend more time working on the play itself, rather then spending time on trying to solve problems involving with the vastness of space/time (ie planetfall, the effects of gravity, etc). Does such a beast exist? (Tron 2.0 doesn't count).
