When I was little I assumed that all video games were eventually going to look like Star Wars. Massive spaceships with chunky irregular outlines, white with the occasional colored industrial markings, would hang in the inky void with tiny fighter ships flaring and dying around them by the dozens. Pink and orange planets and multiple suns and huge smeary nebulae and such would hover in the background. The only reason they didn’t look like that was the technology hadn’t gotten there yet.
I was further confirmed in this belief by Ender’s Game. (Which also confirmed my belief that video games are secretly real.)
Then the technology got there. In 1999. That’s when Homeworld was released. This was a game that looked so exactly like what you wanted, it was freakish. I was just blown away by the screenshots, before I even realized that you had full freedom to control your point of view and could zip around and through fleet formations. And Homeworld 2 looks even better:
(Don’t blame me, it’s impossible to find a Homeworld 2 video that doesn’t have crappy music.)
I had the same exact feeling when I saw EVE Online. This is what video games are supposed to look like:
The irony is that I got bored of both those games in about two hours. It turns out space is really big and empty, so big and empty that it takes an incredibly long time to get anywhere, and it’s really easy to get lost along the way. Also? Combat in three dimensions is very complicated and brain-hurting.
I just hope other people keep playing them, so I can watch the videos.