Well it's in space and you are flying space ship, so it's a space sim.
Not even.
That looks like a bet you would have lost.
Hope you didn't state you would eat a sock if they didnt!
Still the absolute best title song ever attached to a game ever, period
Awesome game
That'd be true for a single-player game, sure. The original Elite's 2048 stars was plenty for then - I doubt very many players visited all of them (well, in the original some of them were inaccessible, but even in remakes which allowed you to get to them) though I know a few made a good attempt at doing so.
Let's say a future "Borders Development" is looking to make a vaguely Elite-like MMO in the 2040s: so, set in space, and with "exploration" as one of its primary professions. They aim to - because Borders Development is filled with only the best staff in the industry, hardware has moved on a lot, Unreal Engine 9 is looking great, and so they will obviously avoid all the previous mistakes - at least match the old Elite Dangerous' performance (not counting the Epic giveaway) and get to at least 5 million players with the game lasting over 10 years
For exploration to continue to be a primary profession for all of those 10 years, there needs to be new things to discover for most of that time. My first long-range exploration trip in Elite Dangerous wasn't a massive one by full explorer standards but took around 1000 systems, most of which were new to me.
So, let's say that the average player will take one trip of that sort of length in their career - most will do far less, some dedicated explorers will do a hundred times as much to balance out. That's 5 million times 1000 systems needed for the planned game lifetime, or 5 billion systems. Well, let's say not every one of those needs to be a first discovery, and the later players are going to get fewer of them. We can probably get by with just a billion systems.
Once you have a method which can generate a billion systems at all - or even a million systems at all [1] - you may as well go for 400 billion and make the galaxy the right shape. It doesn't get any harder to generate them after the first million [2].
But equally, you're not going to be able to hand-design even a million systems no matter how good your team is, so even by that stage you're running in to the "99.99% of them are based on fairly obvious patterns" problem. EVE - which has been going for two decades and adding them as it goes along - is I think the game with the largest number of hand-designed systems, and that's a number measured in thousands, which is nowhere near enough for exploration to be a primary profession.
"Borders Development" - because they're filled with the best staff in the industry - will conclude at this point that "exploration as a primary profession" is basically incompatible with doing any of the other professions well, and drop it before it ever gets close to being a rumour. The game will be very successful, but people will still wish it had exploration "like Elite Dangerous had back in the 2010s".
[1] Just the top ten EDSM submitters between them have a million systems. That's not sufficient for MMO-level exploration as a primary profession.
[2] The original Elite had 2048 but could have had 576,460,752,303,423,488 just as easily, even on the hardware of the time. Once you hit the "we're not doing this by hand" point, it doesn't matter how many more you do.
If you think visiting every star of the 1:1 galaxy is its purpose you are missing the point and disqualify yourself from further discussion.
Just to add to the previous poters:
You are indeed missing the point of the 400 bn stars Milky Way in Elite.
Oh really? Are you guys going to enligtned me, or just keep me in the loop?
R type was my poison. So many great space sims from the past.
Galaxians, Galaga, Space invaders, Asteroids
I am not a developer, so i couldn't confirm whether 5 billion and 400 billion stars is the same in the game world. What do you think?
But the most exiting part about 5.1 Unreal Engine update was that it can now support much larger worlds. Went from 22 km to 83 000 000 km. For reference Solar system diameter is 246 000 000 000 km - so we are almost there. And since Star Systems are seperated instances - Boom you got your self a Galaxy on Unreal Engine 5.
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Looks like you're missing a few zeros there!
That figure is still inside Earth's orbit.
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World size in square kilometers that would be, for reference surface area of the earth is over 510m square kilometers, so you are still nearly a factor of ten out for rendering even a single smallish planet, so that's a BIG nope for rendering an entire solar system, you seem not to understand the scale of what you are trying to discuss!
The jump from 2 digits 22 km to 8 digits 83 000 000 is a huge leap. Also not sure you would want to render entire planet, that would kill your performance, no?
I don't think there is any figure for number of systems that rules out exploration being a major focus for a game's content.
If 'exploration' continues to imply reaching a star system, doing a cursory scan, and moving on, with travel and scan times that allow one to knock out a system on the order of minutes...sure, you'll need a lot of systems to keep people busy. At the other end of the spectrum, it's taken a good hundred-billion people many thousands of years of history to not even come close to exhausting the exploration opportunities on real-life Earth.
Personally, I think travel is way too fast and far too certain in ED. The content at any given destination is both sparse and repetitive. It's not really a very satisfying exploration experience for me, but that has very little to do with the number of systems.
That's so that when we are flying our spaceship in to land on said planet we actually see the planet and not some sort of made up placeholder that bears no resemblance to what we will see after we actually land, you know, like we do in Elite Dangerous?
So UE5 is not actually able to render planets in a space ship flying game that allows us to land on said planets, surely that would be a bit of a problem.
In sandbox games, you come up with your own purpose. It doesn't change the fact that's it's still a wasted space. This is why exploration in this game is very shallow, and they couldn't even do much with it in 8 years.If you think visiting every star of the 1:1 galaxy is its purpose you are missing the point and disqualify yourself from further discussion.
Bigger doesn't means better, and Elite Dangerous is number 1 proof of that.
As I said, you don't get the point.