Digging up my soul now
Going down excavation
I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly"
U2 - Elevation
Before I go on, let's admit it: for a game whose basic graphics at first glance can barely give SimCopter a run for its money, Kerbal Space Program looks surprisingly pretty at times:
For that matter, Meridian: New World doesn't look half bad either:
The difference being that Kerbal makes good on one of the oldest promises of electronic gaming while Meridian's an uncreative throwback to the circa-Y2K post-Starcraft era of gratuitous RTS shovelware. Notice me not linking it, as it's not worth buying even at trash bin prices.
By the mid-2000s I'd already gotten into MMOs, and before long had started to gripe in exasperation at their wasted potential. When City of Villains came out set in an archipelago, it only flared up my old annoyance at Paragon City's lack of aquatic environments. Though I did not regret quitting World of Warcraft, I had played a druid and missed exploring WoW's sprinkling of submarine adventures like wrecked ships in my seal form. That and my ability to escape gankers by diving like Moby and flipping my pursuers the Dick. I'd gone from that to City of Heroes where water was simply another form of ground. Squishy ground, but nonetheless just another walkable surface. No chance for me to Namor it up or Aqua any men.
By the time Warcraft 3 came out, it made a rather savvy move to abandon naval warfare. Warcraft 2 had included boats of various denominations, as had the Command and Conquer games and their copycats. Decades of World War 2 documentaries showcasing destroyers lobbing depth charges at sneaky torpedo-loaded submarines had led to the assumption of naval combat as a logical part of any strategy game. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few brave classics like M.A.X., strategy gamers are never tasked with maintaining supply lines. Units instead possess infinite fuel and ammunition thus removing a principal historic necessity for sailing the high, low and intermediate seas. Combined with strategy games remaining flat maps even as their graphics expanded to three dimensions, this has usually rendered the naval element a pointless drain on processing power, inflating map sizes with vast swaths of blue desert which may become relevant, on average, less than once per match. A lack of fuel requirements also removes the economic motivation for naval freight hauling, making seagoing vessels utterly redundant in games which invariably also include air units (and air transport) as the pinnacle of their technology trees. Warcraft 3 came out in 2002. By 2016, Meridian had still not gotten the memo. Its expansion's randomized maps tend to generate a single comically undersized teacup upon which your stalwart navy can storm utterly divorced from anything else going on around the table.
So, ponders the would-be sea wolf, instead of including water as just another kind of ground, why not include liquid as just another kind of air? At the top of that Kerbal screenshot lies the altimeter, below it a bar colored from the inky vacuum of space to cheery tropospheric cerulean. Air density plays a critical role as a barrier to take-offs and a source of braking for landings, as a source of lift or reaction mass for spaceplanes. The turbine in that picture remains effective up to about 12000 meters. But why stop at the datum?
Imagine a game set in a soft science fiction universe, upon various planets whose atmospheres consist of (miraculously) discrete layers of imiscible fluids. Craft gliding down through breezy helium and thick, soupy methane clouds to dive into light frothy ethane seas and even lower into halogenated hellscapes. Whether as a strategy game or first-person RPG, navigating such environments could provide both strategic challenges (not just density but corrosion, volatility, etc.) and a very satisfying dose of extremophilia. Also, from the standpoint of production values, auto-generating masses of shifting clouds should prove much more cost-effective than landscaping and populating solid ground. Imagine taking the standard, cheesy "floating islands" pulp fantasy motif and giving the islands a reason to float: a world of managing lift and turbine efficiency, of gas giants, blimps, monstrous jellyfish and amphibious fighter craft.
Even creating a top-down strategy game fought on multiple layers of density may prove just enough of a compromise between 2D and 3D to at last give us a true spiritual successor to Homeworld.
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