Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:43 pm
Shwart!! wrote:Question is where a limit would be reached. You could explore for 4 or 5 real weeks and reach he end of our galaxy-then what? Fly until you hit another one? I doubt you, or anyone else, would do that. If the galaxy was large enough, then a limit might never be reached... but then again, it still could.
Shwart!!
If the game is done well, there are millions -- possibly billions of stars in the galaxy of explorable space. It would take thousands of explorers such as myself to find them all. Let us assume that the game allows me to travel from star to star in an hour (I would be happy if it took a day or a week, but I would imagine that most people would not -- there are lots of things that you could force the player to contend with on an exploration vessel; power management, asteroids, navigation through gravity wells, pirate or alien attacks, &c.). Upon arrival at a planet or star system, I can imagine hours -- days or weeks, even -- of things that a player could accomplish to occupy their time. Once in orbit around the star, it might take some time to catalog the planets, determine if they are habitable, collect samples, meet with indigenous sentient life, avoid their missile screen, &c. For me, much of the reward in an MP context would be finding things that no one else has yet found, naming planets after myself, &c.
It is not about reaching the edge of the galaxy, but about expanding the boundaries of the explored galaxy.
xander