[ZeroCool2u]

The main things that come to mind are somewhat related. The big one, especially in comparison to a game like NMS, which is similar at a high level, is that much of the game is fully 'physicalized'. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology or just a term popularized by CIG, but the goal is that, while meeting the rule of fun, all entities are represented physically in game. This includes things like ship components/modules. Your radar, cooler, or shield components should all be physically moveable. Ship parts are one of the more complicated outcomes for this goal, but cargo and items, their precise physical location is stored by this hierarchical graph database in real time and persistent. Another example is you can put one ship inside of another and act as a large scale transport.

The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet!

Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship.

The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before.

Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.

[paulryanrogers]

How are the player count limits? Is it sharded? Does it deliver on 'meshing' the shards?

I ask because player count is how I'd measure scale. Not fidelity.

[ZeroCool2u]

That's a fair point and one of the most consistent criticisms of CIG. Right now servers are limited to 50 players at a time. If you look at reddit or the CIG forums you'll see a lot of people talking about the goal of 'server meshing'. This is really just offloading as much work as possible into their own services, so the server side application doesn't fall over under load. Server meshing is the outcome of this work, which lets them scale up to larger populations more easily.

They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.

Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.