Making Space Interesting

Portraying space, or more correctly the starfield, in scifi games presents an interesting problem; In real life its pretty boring, and everything is really dark:



some of the little dots are tinted different colours, but that’s pretty much it. There isn’t really much colour to work with at all, so conveying a sense of location, or trying to differentiate between two different locations, is really difficult.


The game ‘X3’ tries to get around this by having backdrops that are almost realistic, but with just enough of a hint of colour to make them interesting:






In contrast, Eve Online went as expressive as possible, using false colour hubble images of nebulae as inspiration for its backdrops;









By doing this, Eve is able to create distinctive locations in space with different colour schemes. Its technically unrealistic, but is reminiscent of real images of space (which are admittedly false colour), so doesn’t seem incongruous.