Summary
As history advances, the world starts to seem smaller. Travel that took months now takes hours, countries that never knew each other as allies, and suddenly space seems like the final frontier. The world seems comparatively miniscule with that much knowledge.
Of course, that’s a misguided notion as the Earth we dwell on is massive, to the point that most games struggle to even have a world that large, letting you only explore sections instead. These games go an extra few (thousand) miles, giving you entire planets to explore as you see fit.
Every Xenoblade game is known for having a massive world, but Xenoblade Chronicles X decided to take that literally. With the remnants of humanity stranded on the alien planet of Mira, it becomes your goal to make this planet hospitable, one treacherous step at a time.
Mira may seem small in regards to being an entire planet, but the sheer size and variety makes up for that. And it is one seamless world too, with no walls to block you exploring wherever you want from the moment you wake up. It’s an entire alien planet at your disposal.
The first new IP for Bethesda since the Elder Scrolls, Starfield held a lot of promise, though didn’t exactly meet it in the ways people might have expected. Its focus on space flight and exploration was a tad more limited, though that’s not to take away from the achievements it did garner.
Of the many planets in Starfield, the procedurally generated ones are fully explorable, in a way. While they aren’t fully open for you, only loading a small section at leach landing zone, you can land wherever you want. In effect, this means you can fully map out a planet. Just very slowly.
Spore was always intended to be a science game, more for mapping out the growth of a species than a playground for monstrosities. That is what the game is remembered for, though many forget that you can progress past the tribal stage into the Civilization stage, and the Space stage beyond that.
In the Civilization stage, the entire world on which you have spend eons becomes your playground, trading and warring with other species. In time, this progresses to the Space Age with colonisation and terraforming the end goal. Suddenly, hundreds of planets just like yours open up. Yes, Spore truly is a space-age game.
Some games leave a decidedly clear mark on the gaming industry, and Outer Wilds is one such game. Aside from the continual confusion with The Outer Worlds, it presents a galaxycaught in a time loop. And you’d better believe you’ll be spending a very long time discovering all its secrets.
The planets are small, but each with their own issues to worry about. Gravity, atmosphere, how long it takes to traverse, can your ship actually navigate it safely. In fact, the exploration of these planets is what makes the game so special, if you give it all the time in the world.
When No Man’s Sky first launched, people dismayed at the lack of multiplayer and actual freedom to create on this countless planets. Astroneer felt like an answer to that, giving you innumerable tools to shape worlds as you saw fit, all with your friends.
While it doesn’t have such grand ambitions with regards to its planets, each is meant to be thoroughly explored and made a home out of. The simplistic, chunky graphics give it a more light-hearted feel as you jaunt across these planets. Just make sure to manage your resources.
Space Engineers falls on the exact opposite end of games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky, instead putting an incredibly deep emphasis on the technicalities of space travel. Equipment will break down, you have to actually plan your journey. you’re able to’t take anything for granted.
Here, planets are just a backdrop, a place togather more resources to build your ships, space stations, outposts. And yet you still have the freedom, the obligation even, to explore the entirety of these planets. In the name of engineering, of course.
Of course, if you are looking for an even deeper scientific look at space travel, there really is no surpassing Kerbal Space Program. The very act of getting your feet of the ground is the work of hours, hours that can very easily result in many workplace casualties.
Kerbal Space Program uses actual scientific formulae to judge its space travel. Your ships have to be the right shape, have a reasonable center of gravity, enough fuel, a trajectory that doesn’t have an asteroid during its course. Then, and only then, will you have the luxury of reaching another entire planet. Now you have to get them back home.
Let’s step away from space travel for a minute. So many games put an emphasis on traveling to other planets because when you actually look at our planet, you realise it would be a gargantuan task to recreate it. The kind of thing only a massive corporation could achieve. Enter, Microsoft Flight Simulator.
There really is nothing that compares. It is a 1:1 scale of the planet, using real weather data and maps to plot out the entire planet. There’s a reason it needs to be run from the cloud to even be played. You’re never going to see an in-gameas detailed and complex as our own, but this is a close second.
Space Engineers and Kerbal Space Program try to demonstrate the difficulties that go into maintaining space travel, while Elite Dangerous instead puts the focus more on the aspect of actually building a life there. Planets are big, and long haulage suddenly feels a lot longer when its the vast expanse of space you’re traveling through.
Planets in Elite Dangerous are built on a 1:1 scale, an obscenely impressive achievement even if those planets are relatively simple in geometry. Though if you’re looking for an even more immersive experience, the Odyssey expansion adds even more life and variety to planetary exploration.
Really, it’s a foregone conclusion to even mention No Man’s Sky. It is the basis of the entire game, from its launch in 2016 to where it is now. Every change in the game has never shifted it away from that core premise.There are over a quintillion planets. You will never see them all. Try anyway.
You can explore entire planets in No Man’s Sky. It doesn’t even matter that they’re nowhere near the scale of real planets because of the sheer number and variety of them. Land, do some sightseeing, then blast once again in search of new horizons.
