I agonized when it came to choosing a game for this final contest entry. I’d bounced between GearHead (which I’ve written about too much), Deus Ex (which has generally been written about too much, despite it being excellent) and System Shock 2 (which I’ve never gotten far enough in to really write about).
Then xkcd came along and solved all my problems with its most recent comic.
Comic courtesy of Randall Munroe.
I am doing a little cheating here, because only one part of the Escape Velocity series was released in the 2000’s, but as someone who has never owned an Apple device the first game in the series that I got to play was the third and final installment, Escape Velocity: Nova, which released in 2002.
As I mentioned in the title, EV: Nova is a little bittersweet for me. I'll get into this in a while, but let me just start off by saying that it's a masterpiece. Think of the old arcade game Asteroids, but push the concept a step further into a game that becomes masterful on many different levels.
Image courtesy of Ambrosia Software, archived by Wikimedia Commons.
There’s a common trend between EV: Nova and the other two games I’ve chosen as my representatives of the 00’s. Avernum was the first game where I felt like I connected deeply with the characters. Morrowind was the first game where I lost myself in the world. EV: Nova was the first game where I lost myself in the plotlines.
This was because EV: Nova offered something few other games to this day have really managed to achieve: a world that feels living but also adjusts dramatically to match the events of the stories that unfold within it.
It was possible to join one of a half-dozen or so major factions for mutually exclusive storylines that shaped the world.
The gameplay was simple; a menu-based planet interface and 2D space combat, but the narrative was rich and delivered carefully through both text presented at ports and events in space. Resource management played a role, as ammunition and fuel both needed to be tracked, but the latter was more significant for plotting routes between systems rather than as a combat mechanic.
But one of the strengths of the gameplay is that it tied everything together. You were the captain of a ship. All of the gameplay revolved around captaining your ship and gathering resources and influence to upgrade it. New ship types and modules gave access to both more utility and more earning capacity, but also reflected the player’s trajectory as a member of the world, as faction-specific gear was unlocked and added.
Although I don’t think the characters were as strong as those in Avernum and the world wasn’t as immersive as Morrowind, both the characters and world came together in interesting ways; not only did each faction have a distinctive visual identity (even if only in the color of their ships), they also had interesting world-views. From your traditional interplanetary federation to warrior-poets to near-aliens to psychics who projected their minds into spacefaring vessels, it felt like entering a whole world like Star Trek or Star Wars and being able to fly around and acquaint yourself with its inhabitants.
And then you hit the points of the story where you change the world. Half a sector of space might break off from its original faction in a civil war, or a planet may become accessible as you reach a new rank, or planets may become inaccessible due to them being hostile or being destroyed. A trade route may become dangerous, the ships in orbit above its planets engaging each other in battles that catch even neutral third-parties in the crossfire.
Lots of open world games give freedom. Lots of narrative-driven games put the player in control. Rarely do two games combine these elements, especially in an earlier era. What EV: Nova really achieved was giving players a chance to live out the sort of sci-fi dream that you’d have gotten from TV shows, ranging in flavor from the rebellious independence of Firefly (which first aired in 2002, the same year EV: Nova came out) to the exploration of Star Trek and the conflicts of Star Wars. Without being derivative of anything, EV: Nova managed to become a representative of everything.
Unlike the xkcd comic suggests, it’s hard to play the Escape Velocity games on modern hardware because few people still have old computers that would run it well. It is even more difficult to play thn a classic console game that might conceivably still be around in a dusty garage or could be run in emulation. When I tried to install EV: Nova on my Windows 10 machine, I couldn’t get it to play and the authentication process wouldn’t work. Even if I had gotten it working I would have been subject to the shareware limitations. There is a convoluted work-around involving a lot of compatibility modes, but it’s not guaranteed to make the game playable and I haven’t bothered with it. The publisher, Ambrosia Software, has recently disappeared entirely from the internet and the only way to currently get any of the Escape Velocity games without the shareware limitations is through illegal third-party channels.
There is one consolation, however, in the form of Endless Sky. Although it is smaller than EV: Nova in terms of content, it is an open source game with direct inspiration coming from the Escape Velocity series. Although it does not have frequent updates, it is still being worked on and it already gives the same quality of experience that I find myself pining for.
This post was written for the Archdruid Gaming Decades: The 00's contest. Consider checking them out.