So after revisiting Planetary Annihilation and seeing that it did indeed model planets, moons, and orbits.. I've been wondering... Can there be a game that models stars, asteroid fields, commentary fields, real distances, practical exploration, supernovae, and still have the regular base building stuff but just on massive scale to accommodate the real sizes of planets and stars. Like a Spore 2 from EA or an NMS 2 sometime down the road that would actually mean to give players a real idea of how a star system works.

I mean when Sony was driving the game's marketing I half expected NMS to be like other indie games.. fl0w fl0wer etc that had real art and direction behind them but still meaning for it to be a video game. But I settled for the scale and exploration when art didn't seem to be the games focus. Not showcasing planets moons orbits and life cycles though was disappointing. Kind of tragic really since there's no reason for them to have not modeled those things. Orbits, gravity, tides, seasons, radiation.. It could all have been modeled instead of arbitrary.

You can't get much of a scope of what's happening either since you can't see very much of it. 15 or 18 quintillion stars or wtv.. But nothing happens.. It's still mind boggling. As in what's the point of it being so large if it isn't dynamic? But if you have time scales that allow new systems to form.. Live.. Age.. And then die, sending materials out into the void.. That gives players the impetus to look out into that massive void with ever bigger tools (planetary, orbital, freespace, and even planet or star sized telescopes) and explore AND to build the civilizations necessary to build those tools and ships to drive that exploration.

Civ is along this same lines. Too tiny and derpy and rooted in humanity to really show what's out there. If it had NMS' setting and each star system had a life cycle of a few days or weeks.. Players would have to get the most they could out of every planet in that system before the star started expanding and eventually die. Similarly to Planetary Annihilation which kind of has a death timer on each world because players can blow them up. Eventually, if the player can blow up stars or harness their power and mine them for materials.. That's a kind of power and scale I haven't seen in a game but would make sense for really advanced races. Relatively short life cycles on star systems would also keep the players eyes on that near star field that even Spore had back in the day but didn't use. I hated that NMS had such a good star field view but there was nothing but these stupid dots.

You could at a glance see a stars health.. Age.. Or see what it contained in terms of materials it was cooking up. Or the planets nearby. Or any random shit in the void.. Any lost planets. Are there any Jupiter sized rocky planets just floating around in the void? As a kid I wondered if there would be enough geothermal and radiological power in an expelled world to sustain a civilization? The materials would be there as long as enough energy could be harnessed to keep life going. Anything that interesting would have made NMS worthwhile when scanning that star field.