As a counterpoint, as a long-time Eve player, Elite Dangerous has that "a mile wide, but an inch deep" feeling. Those billions of procedurally generated system

As a counterpoint, as a long-time Eve player, Elite Dangerous has that "a mile wide, but an inch deep" feeling. Those billions of procedurally generated systems begin to blend together. Likewise, the procedurally generated minor factions are nearly indistinguishable from one another. The heart and soul of Eve is based on its "single shard" system, where there is no opt-out. As a result, actions have consequences; decisions matter. Players who don't leave "empire space" are relatively safe, but if they're transporting something particularly valuable, other players will weigh that against losing their own ships to the empire police. Players drive the "Background Sim" in Eve: prices of commodities and manufactured items are set by the players who sell and buy them, they depend on the ebb and flow of non-stop warfare, affecting even players that never leave "empire space". In ED, you can join with a few friends and team up to do stuff like mining, hunting other ships, transporting goods. In Eve, you can do that, too. Or join with a few thousand friends and deal with the politics, espionage, specialization, and sometimes bureaucracy that goes along with any thousand+ person organization. There are lots of characters that never even pilot ships, instead specializing in industry, for example. Well organized teams tend to succeed (for whatever definition of success they choose). The tools used to manage such organizations is impressive, and can mirror those in "real world" orgs of that size, covering not only tings like wikis and forums, but Slack integrations, videoconferencing systems, bespoke ERP systems for industry, and HR systems for managing people. Eve's developer (CCP) encourages this by providing an API[1] that lets external services interact with the game. I would love a hybrid Eve/ED system- it would be very cool to pilot small ships in the Eve universe. I'd love for Eve to be able to expand beyond the 8000 star systems. [1] https://developers.eveonline.com/ https://developers.eveonline.com/