So, there is the "Quantum Economy" and there is "Quantum the simulation and mission generator". I don't know if CIG sees these as two separate parts of Quantum, but I think from the player's perspective they are kind of separate. This post is not about the "Quantum Economy", I've put up plenty of posts on that, if you're curious about my thoughts on it ask and I'll link you some old posts. This post is about "Quantum the simulation and mission generator". Its a topic that isn't brought up much, and I think its the source of some people's almost religious belief in the revolutionary nature of the game. I personally think its an interesting idea, but am quite skeptical on whether such a feature/technology will really lead to a marked improvement in the game's overall quality as far as the player is concerned. In other words, I don't think its going to make the game much better. Before we go further, I must stress that: 1. All games are simulations. All of them. 2. Star Citizen aims to eventually features a specific kind of simulation, where it persistently simulates NPCs. So the big unanswered question regarding Quantum and Star Citizen in general, is what is the value of simulating NPCs in a game? How does it improve the player experience. If it doesn't do much to improve the player experience, then why does it matter? I had this thought yesterday, and the thought was... If simulating NPCs in the manner Star Citizen intends to do is something that adds significant value to games, why haven't we seen more of it? I mean, CIG can't be the first company to come up with this idea right? Why not an investigation game with dozens of simulated characters and one murderer that you have to find? Why not an FPS where all of the enemies persist, have unique identities and act in a simulated manner in the game world? Why not a multiplayer FPS with simulated NPC factions? Where is the value? So to investigate this, I've been thinking about games that simulated NPCs in this way, and I have a few to list. Hopefully some of you can come in and list more of them. Dwarf Fortress (and Adventure Mode in particular) Dwarf Fortress is the king of simulation games. If you haven't played it, you should play it immediately. Its available on Steam, and I believe its cheap too. Dwarf Fortress used to be a very hardcore very deep simulation that was not particularly popular because of its impossible learning curve, but recently its been made far more approachable in a steam release with things like a real UI. Dwarf Fortress may not be your cup of tea, but it is an absolutely legendary game, and you've heard of its clones and played the game's its influenced, which includes games like Minecraft and Rust. Dwarf Fortress has two game modes. Fortress mode and Adventurer mode. Of the two, Fortress mode is far more popular, and the one I recommend playing, but I think Adventurer mode - which I haven't played and is coming to the steam version of the game soon - is more relevant to this discussion. In Adventurer mode a whole world is simulated. All NPCs, they persist and go about their business whether you're there to see them or not. And here's the hard truth. Adventuerer mode is not particularly popular. There are people that like it, but its not the mode that people tend to play. People play Fortress Mode, where you have a bird's eve view of an entire simulation which you can pause and investigate and dive into. That is popular. Playing as a single player in a simulation doesn't seem to do much for Adventure mode... And here's why that's relevant, if building a game into a simulated universe did much to improve the game, then Adventure mode should be amazing, because it runs on the quite in depth Dwarf Fortress Simulation. It should be highly acclaimed, and widely recommended. Its not. If you came here looking for good examples of games where being a simulation improved the game markedly, I'm sorry to disappoint, but of all the games we're going to go through, Dwarf Fortress features the most robust and deep simulation of them all, and the mode most analogous to a Star Citizen... isn't the mode that people actually play. Sandbox Multiplayer games (Rust, Ark) In many ways, Dwarf Fortress is a primitive game with a primitive UI. Perhaps its not a fair comparison. How about more modern games with simulated NPCs, games more like Star Citizen? What about those? Well.. there are the sandbox multiplayer games, better known as survival games. Rust, Ark, Atlas, Mortal Online. All feature NPCs which are simulated... but none of them are simulated in the way that Star Citizen seeks to simulate NPCs. They don't persist, don't have deep histories. They pop into existence when you come near and stop existing when no one's around. They are generally not unique, and don't have unique identities. So, you might ask, why bother talking about them? They're nothing like what's in Star Citizen. And to that, my response is... that they could have been. They could have been more interesting, more fleshed out, unique. Those games could have added uniquely generated NPCs with back stories that persist in the world. The devs chose not to, and I think the reason is, that they didn't think it would be worth the effort. And that's kind of a theme in this post. Large technical challenges built into a game have to be worth doing. There's an opportunity cost to building out something like Quantum. Others aren't taking this route, and it might be because they lack vision, it might be because its too difficult an engineering challenge for them to pull off. Or it might be that they're correct and the value proposition isn't worth it. Animal Crossing Animal Crossing is a game that I haven't played much, but years ago I had friends that were in love with it. I didn't get the charm myself, but I do have to concede that some people absolutely love it. Animal crossing style gameplay should be at least somewhat possible in Star Citizen due to Quantum. You can meet NPCs, get letters from them, meet them in places, and have them tell you stories (provided that they don't get killed). I guess the part that I don't get is that all of this is already possible without simulating so much of the game world. You can tell stories without simulating every NPC. So I don't really get how this matters, or what it means. Maybe one of you played Animal Crossing yourself and can explain to me how its simulated nature added meaningfully to the experience. Maybe I just don't get it. But if we're looking for hints that there's value in a Quantum simulation, I at least am not seeing it coming from something like Animal Crossing. Oblivion Perhaps the best example of an attempt at creating a compelling game out of a simulated world is Oblivion. For those that don't know, that old game originally had all characters completely simulated. They would work for money, buy their own goods, steal when they were out of money, forage in the wilderness... it was quite cutting edge. The reason you don't remember any of this, is that it was cut. It didn't work. Key characters would be killed by characters over a slice of bread. Characters with important story arcs would wander into the woods or be butchered by the guards for minor infractions. What did remain in the game that was simulated - Goblin Wars - was not noticed by players. Turns out that if you stole a goblin staff in the game around launch time, you'd cause a goblin war, but it was never obvious to the player that your theft of a staff is what started the war. It looked like just some strange occurrence where a bunch of goblins would show up and attack you out no where, you wouldn't have any idea why, and it would keep happening until the game world ran out of them. So its not that the "simulated game world" thing hasn't been tried, it has... but its failed. Oblivion's simulation was largely cut from the game, Dwarf Fortress's simulation - while deep -doesn't seem to add much to Adventure mode. Conclusion Does this mean that Quantum is a dead end? The most honest answer is that I don't know. We don't know, no one knows, probably not even CIG. Bethesda sure thought that its Radiant AI was going to be a hit, they invested much in it, and in the end it was a failure. Quantum might end up the same way... or it might not. With new tech, new AI techniques, perhaps they can cobble something together that's compelling. I think that what thinking through the history of simulated NPCs in gaming tells us, is that there really haven't been any wins in this area. Its been tried, but its failed. Maybe CIG will succeed anyway, but this is a risky endeavor. I think the evidence strongly indicates that people should temper their expectations regarding Quantum.