JGE also takes great strides towards fulfilling my own personal fantasy by looking gorgeous. Systems in JGE hearken back to the environments you’ve seen in Freespace 2, Star Wars, or some of the more fantastic vistas in Star Trek. Colorful nebulae, massive planets, and detailed space stations will temporarily steal the breath of any spaceophile. The developers wanted to keep space from being empty and lonely - something with which they wholly succeeded at as traveling to new systems and encountering different spacecraft will be worth the trip just to take in the sights.

Despite looking eye-ticklingly magnificent, most of the assets in JGE were designed for very low hardware specs. Shaders and post-process effects give the game that glowy awesomeness on higher end PCs, but toggling them off will (according to NetDevil) allow JGE to run on incredibly dated hardware. The dev team even claimed to have the game running on a GeForce 2 system, so your eight year old Dell in the basement might have found a new use. Tailoring to a low system spec has another benefit: the game can easily handle hundreds of players pitted against each other in massive PVP battles. The prospect of these hordes of warriors duking it out in space with lasers flying and ships exploding made my mouth water, but such a situation could sadly not be arranged as there were fewer than ten people in the demonstration room.

Of course, JGE wouldn’t be an action MMO without some sort of advancement system. A traditional leveling system is there, with experience earned by defeating mobs, completing quests, exploring, mining, etc. Since the combat isn’t primarily stat or level based, a gimmie level here or there won’t unfairly tip the balance of the game. This frees the developers to throw experience more liberally at the player. Quests will be automatically shared with anyone in a given group, and merely being close to other players participating in the same quest as you will “soft group” them together--giving them credit for each other’s actions.