So we made the decision early on to make starship movement in XO as real as possible.Īnyone who’s taken Physics 101 will recall that an object in motion will remain in motion without an equal and opposing reaction. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got about the tactical challenges and fun involved in commanding starships in battle according to their actual physics. There are notable exceptions – Kerbal Space Program for one, but I’m not aware of a single RTS game that tries to model Newtonian movement. It’s funny that some classic arcade game – Asteroids, Space Wars, and Lunar Lander for example – model spaceship motion more accurately than most games do today.
During my research I found this really cool website, which we’ve mentioned before, that talks about how Hollywood and most video games get movement in space all wrong. I started wondering why the starships in RTS games don’t move like they really would in space.
Corey, and the Vatta’s War series by Elizabeth Moon.
While working on the design for XO, I was reading a lot of hard sci-fi science-based works like The Lost Fleet series by James Campbell, Leviathan Wakes by S.A. Lately with movies like Gravity, Interstellar, and Ender’s Game, a much broader audience has been introduced to the reality that movement in space doesn’t work like it does in Star Wars or in nearly every game set in space. That instantaneous movement is satisfying and familiar, but it’s not how starships would move in real life. In most video games set in space, starships move like boats or aircraft.