One of my GOAT moments as a videogaming youngster is the final mission of Psygnosis cyberpunk flight sim G-Police. (It came out in 1997, and as such, I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has passed, but if you still intend to play, stop reading now.) The mission completes the long arc of foreshadowing begun by the intro's mention that capital-class spacecraft have been outlawed, following a ruinous war.
It turns out that one particular evil corpo has been sneakily building one of these megaships - not only that, but you get to fly inside it, cannons ablazing. It was while doing so that teenage me realised the true exceptionality of the Video Game Artform. You can't fly inside capital ships in, like, symbolist poems or baroque symphonies, can you? You can't fly in poems or symphonies at all, unless you do so metaphorically - "metaphor" being a kind of poor man's graphics card.
The technology of flight simming has advanced mightily since G-Police's day. For instance: in Everspace 2 's just-announced Titans DLC, you get to fly inside not just regular old spaceships, but massive space kaiju with procedurally generated digestive systems. Here's the trailer.
The expansion will add two new storylines, triggered midway through the main game's story - Dreadnought and Leviathan. Each lasts about three to four hours, and introduces new enemies, gear, craftables, characters and resources. In Dreadnought, you're off in search of a legendary colonial war battleship that has been hijacked by bandits - the basis for the "the biggest battle in the Everspace series so far!" Sounds like a hoot, but space battles in Everspace are ten-a-pulsar.
I'm more interested in the Leviathan storyline, which adds secretive star monsters that are effectively huge, roaming, spontaneously-forming dungeons with a taste for passing pilots. Here's the blurb: Sightings of the legendary Leviathan have spread amongst the fortune seekers of Cluster 34 including your least favorite cultists, the Redeemers. Venture deep into the Khaït Nebula to discover the truth of these massive, presumed-to-be-extinct creatures! Not all that is swallowed is lost--treasures are said to lay deep inside the bowels of this beast and that's exactly where you're going to end up.
Travel inside to discover valuable new resources can be found inside the guts of these massive creatures. No two ventures inside will be the same as the many stomachs and organs of these beasts rearrange themselves. Sound cool, I think? Not since reading about Underspace have I experienced such a frission of cosmic abandon.
I can only imagine what teenage me would have made of being able to fly inside a space kaiju. I would have had no choice but to become Peter Molyneux. Anyway, the new Everspace 2 DLC doesn't have a release date yet but you can always go coo over the Steam page .
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