What guarantee do we have this vision of Dean Hall's will come true?īecause of what has come before with DayZ and more recently cancelled space game Ion, Hall is being very careful. The visions are exciting but so far they are only visions - so little of it is in game. Or perhaps they may specialise in producing fizzy drinks and selling them to other players. One day players could be running prison colonies or tourist destinations or hospital stations. Should you die, you can either restart afresh or you can be carried to a cloning station and cloned, a real timesaver when character skill-trees come in. Other players can kill you too, although Stationeers is not, repeat not, designed as a PvP game. Do you know the scientific composition of air? You soon will do. That's on top eating and drinking, all in a place that doesn't naturally provide water, food or air. There's hygiene that leads to disease if you ignore showering, there's even insanity if you are outside for too long - reducing it means going inside to the bar. They can be damaged by pressure and by suffocation, but can also be fixed by surgery, even enhanced genetically and transplanted. Lungs and brains are things in Stationeers - objects inside of you. Then there's survival, and Dean Hall loves survival. All of a sudden, the space station I'm touring doesn't seem so basic, and the idea of building, pressurising and even fuelling a shuttle seems positively daunting. That means pressurisation chambers, which involve multiple doors and processes linked together by you. Rooms may need pressurising, if you want to walk around them without a spacesuit on, which means mixing and piping gasses into the area, and making sure they are properly sealed to avoid explosive decompression. Walls, to give another example, consist of metal sheets welded to a frame underneath.īeing in space makes this all more complicated still. Take a light switch for example: it first needs a casing, then a circuit board, then a screen, and then a disk inserted to program it to behave like a light switch. Unlike in Minecraft, where one built thing tends to represent one block, in Stationeers one thing can have many layers. Eventually you will attempt to design and build a shuttle, and when you succeed, unlock Away Missions and fly off on adventures to repair, rescue, battle aliens and more. But over time, through mining and refining and crafting and farming, you will become self-sufficient, and gradually more complex technology will open to you. You begin on a planet, or in deep space, and naturally with very little, so you'll order vital components in.
These are the areas Stationeers is specifically interested in. But players don't really build things in Space Station 13, and gameplay happens round to round - not over a course of days, weeks and months. It's an enormous, community-powered-and-evolved project that has proven hard to imitate. Space Station 13 is a top-down, round-based, multiplayer game where people take on a multitude of roles aboard a space station and try to keep it running. Persistence and building are the most important distinction between Stationeers and the legendary Space Station 13, a game Dean Hall is a big fan of and openly inspired by. One day worlds may be linked but this is not a massively multiplayer game. Your game worlds are like realms in Minecraft, quick to start and for you and a small amount of friends (currently 16 max). The big idea in Stationeers is to build a base with friends - or alone - over the course of weeks and months, then explore the galaxy from it. But as Dean Hall explains it to me I start to see. A lot of the bigger picture cannot be seen yet. It's in very early shape at EGX Rezzed and is still "a matter of months" away from an Early Access release. This is Stationeers, the new game from Dean Hall's studio RocketWerkz, a small project with a hardcore niche in mind. I don't see a castle or a palace just a basic, bland space station. I feel like I'm touring someone else's creation, like I would in Minecraft, except in Minecraft I know what I'm looking at, know how it was made. But I don't feel like I'm playing a game. I even wave at the one or two other astronauts I see around. I burn hydrogen in a 'burn room' at ridiculous temperatures to make water. I fiddle with valves and control panels to alter mixtures of gasses, put a rock on a conveyer belt leading to a furnace and turn it into an iron bar. I press digital panels to open doors and pressurise chambers.
I move a cartoony astronaut around a space station, floating outside, walking inside.