I’ve been fascinated by gas giants since a young age. We have a pretty good idea of what Mars is about at this point, with the Curiosity Rover having spent over 10 years trawling its surface. And we can kinda glean that Venus is an infernal hellhole from those couple of minutes that Russian probe spent there in the 70s before being decimated by blazing heat and atmospheric pressure.
But Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? Uranus? These big boys take up the bulk of our solar system’s space in surface area (though not in density, being made of gas and storms and nasty liquids and stuff), and yet they remain mysterious and unfathomable. While I can forgive our space agencies not wanting to blow a load of money to chuck an expendable craft with a super high-def camera into Jupiter’s atmosphere just to see what would happen (though I can see Elon Musk doing something like that), it’s weird to me that space-based videogames haven’t seen fit to explore these mysterious places.
I genuinely didn’t know going intoStarfieldwhether there was some kind of option for exploring gas giants, but alas, while the game lets you get pretty close to them (well, through a menu essentially), there are no ‘Landing Zones’ and therefore you can’t reallyget in there.
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Same goes forNo Man’s Sky, and that game’s had alotmore time to add gas giants into the mix. Inan interview with Games Radar, Hello Games CEO Sean Murray said that gas giants were one of the most requested features from the game’s community, but that it wouldn’t work for No Man’s Sky. Here’s what he had to say about it:
People keep asking for gas giants. They want gas giants so that they can fly down and just instantly die. It’s a bunch of work that may not have the biggest payoff for people, ultimately, but also I understand that it is role-playing, in a sense. But we also have to factor in new players and find a balance there – people don’t like to just die inexplicably, if they don’t know the reason behind it.
Now it seems to me like abitof a copout to suddenly apply ‘what would realistically happen in a gas giant’s atmosphere’ to a game where every planet has the colour palette of a Wes Anderson movie and is filled with mix-and-match toybox creatures. Yes, obviously we’d die if we tried planting our flag on the liquid-hydrogen surface of Jupiterin real life, but in a clearly fantastical sci-fi setting, why are developers so reluctant to have some fun with the concept?
The enigmatic state of gas giants, which transition between liquid and gas, and some theories suggest to actually have solid cores at the heart of it all, makes them ripe for creative interpretation. Floating sky cities, extraction of precious resources from their dangerous metallic oceans and skies (with greater risks but great rewards awaiting you the deeper you go into their atmosphere), hostile creatures swimming around in the atmosphere, and secret civilisations somehow managing to dwell in the cores of these planets. The possibilities and typically intense atmospheric conditions would lend themselves brilliantly to endgame content, offering multiple layers of increasing difficulty for the most intrepid of players to dig through.
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The way gas giants turn the rules of terrestrial planets upside-down is precisely what makes them such a great canvas for fiction, and yet developers have refused to engage. Starfield case keeps them pretty much at the same distance as we engage with them in real life, while No Man’s Sky’s universe simply pretends they don’t exist (which, honestly, is just as absurd as suggesting people—or other galactic creatures—could find a way to inhabit them, however precariously).
Point being: it’s all fiction, so why not have some fun with it?
Incomplete though it may be,Star Citizenis one of the few games that’s had a pop at depicting what’s happening beneath the thick clouds of gas giants (which is apt given that Star Citizen is basically the Jupiter of gaming: massive, mysterious, mercurial, and we’ve no idea what, if anything, is really at its core). In the game, the gas giant Crusader has a breathable upper atmosphere (see? Just make stuff up!), and there are floating platforms high above the hostile gasses below. It looks great.
Now, maybe Star Citizen’s not the best example given that the game might never be completed, but stunning indie space simOuter Wildshas its own twist on the gas giant concept. Giant’s Deep is a gas-giant-like planets with several fluid layers swirling around it and a stormy surface atmosphere that literally chucks the islands freely floating around on it into space. It’s kinda terrifying, much like I imagine a gas giant would be, but also totally fictionalised and wonderfully creative, basically playing into the idea that beneath the thick clouds of a gas giant, anything is possible.
I confess that I’ve only been to maybe six or seven planets so far in Starfield, but so far the feeling I’m getting is that they’re incredibly ‘vanilla.’ Some are kinda forested, most are mostly rocky, but whatever I find I know that it’s fundamentally going to involve a largely homogeneous surface (with water that you can’t swim under the surface of). Space is a pretty well-trodden frontier in games, and explorable gas giants are just the kind of thing Starfield and its ilk need to give us something that we truly haven’t seen before.
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