“Wait wait, you’re from Doloron? Oh my god, I work with someone from the Swamp Planet!”
“Why does everyone call it that. It’s a planet with one or two famous swamps.”
“What was it like growing up in a mud hut?”
“We have other ecosystems! You know, mountains, fields, outlet malls…”
“How did you get to school? Bark canoes? On the back of a swamp snail?”
“No, like everyone else… In hover cars.”
“Is it true you all have eggs sacs? Take off your pants.”
“No I’m not taking off my pants!”
“Aha! We got a swamp monster here!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! (sigh) 50 years ago, Dread Trooper scouts landed in a swamp on our planet, and for some reason didn’t bother exploring anywhere else. If they had gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beachfront condos. But they didn’t. And now… we’re the (air quotes) swamp planet. How you think that makes me feel?”
“I uh…”
“Don’t say anything. Let’s just eat our lunch in silence.”
“… Is that moss!?”
“It’s a delicacy!”
Hmm. Still no resolution on the egg sac question, though.
Moss is to be sorted by color not taste!
Laughing in Metroidvania.
I imagine No Man’s Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.
As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It’s just lazy.
No man’s sky also did it because of lazy. People may have forgotten, but that game released as pure hot garbage and only got better after tons of updates.
It’s still pretty trash. Every update adds new boring activities but the core gameplay loops still get old quickly and the game is an endlessly scaling grind to nowhere. It’s “redemption story” is drastically overrated.
One way this could work is having biomes so far apart that it’s more resource efficient to hyperdrive to another planet than traveling all the way.
Outside of that, it probably wouldn’t change No Man’s Sky much if a planet’s poles were colder and had mildly different features
They do. You have to go to different planet types to find materials from the different star types in order to have better warp drives.
Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.
Or a really cheap single set piece that vaguely fits the theme of an ancient earth culture that has managed to not change at all in millenia, and then there is a single high tech alien device in the middle of it.
BTW, I say that with love. Stargate is the best.
It’s an ice planet!
Carter, after exiting the second gate on Earth
Always one of my favorite parts of that episode.
You can see a decent bit depending on terrain in most places, more if the terrain is higher than surrounding areas, but she pops out of a crack, looks around and sees ice for a few hundred yards, and gives up.
In fairness, without direction, some form of marker, or obvious landmark, wandering around in a blizzard would have been death for both of them… Not that they would have been able to walk to civilization even if they DIDN’T have injuries…
Still though, they’ve experienced varied terrain in plenty of planets, so assuming the whole planet is ice is something Sam would have corrected someone else on in a heartbeat. (and also made the argument that for all intents and purposes, for them it may as well be a whole planet)
I wonder how much better we could have had it if the location budget were like 4x what they had. Eventually you start to recognize specific rocks in the quarry… My wife likes to call one rock Terry because it has two vaguely eye-shaped holes, and “because it’s terrible how often they use that place”
No, Carter had a point. Antarctica is a terrible place to put a Stargate. The Ancients usually put them in places where people can live. She didn’t know they put Atlantis in Antarctica.
Assuming that people lived near this Stargate thousands of years ago, and it’s now in an arctic climate, an ice age is the logical conclusion.
Don’t quote me on this, because I can’t remember the specific episode, comic, or book, but I vaguely remember the ancients settled places thy were most like their original homeworld of Alterra, and gave them the best comfort overall. That just happened to be what the Pacific Northwest region of North America looks like, so most of the planets are still pretty close to that. Some obviously have continued morphing over the millennia, but it makes a nice explanation for why everywhere looks like the same 30 mile area around their BC studio lol.
At the time they didn’t really know much about the ancients, definitely didn’t know that Atlantis took off from Antarctica 5 million years ago…
That’s fair, however it always felt a little weird for the scientist of all people to make such a broad generalization.
Even the desert is Canada. The desert scenes were filmed in Richmond, BC at a sand and gravel quarry (no longer there now).
Dr Who: Every planet is a disused quarry.
Also Star Wars… Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet.
From Irregular Webcomic!, #87 via https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet
Imperial Officer: Lord Vader, the rebels have fled the ice planet of Hoth. After going to the swamp planet of Dagobah, Skywalker has rejoined his friends on the desert world of Tatooine. And now the rebel fleet is massing for an attack on the forest moon of Endor.
Darth Vader: I sense a great disturbance in the Force.
Imperial Officer: My lord?
Darth Vader: How else can so many worlds be totally covered with only one terrain type without regard to latitudinal variations?That’s probably more realistic. Most planets are just barren rocks that are too hot or too cold, aren’t they?
Those planets typically don’t heave a breathable atmosphere, though. You pretty much need a large biosphere if you want to be able to walk around without a spacesuit. An iceball world or a barren rock probably won’t contain a breathable amount of oxygen in an otherwise mostly inert atmosphere. If you want to breathe pure carbon dioxide or get fried by nearly unfiltered UV radiation, though, they’d be great.
If there is somewhere where humans can live, then likely there are also zones nearer and further from the poles.
So e.g. surely almost all planets with a livable zone would have polar ice caps.
I don’t know if we have enough evidence to make such claims tbh. In our solar system, half the planets are rocks with a metal core (riffs playing in the background), the other half are gas giants. Among the gazillion moons though, there are some ice moons (like Titan and Europa), Venus only has no oceans because it is too hot, Mars has a volcanic past and may be warmer had it a thicker athmosphere and has polar ice caps, etc. There is a lot going on on these “barren rocks” and a lot of them being barren rocks could be due to them being located outside the goldilock zone.
I mean we have deserts in Canada too.
Yeah but they’re cold and boring. Doesn’t make great tv.
Prairie deserts, they exist in every climate.
They didn’t film Stargate there
What’s that got to do with you saying the only deserts Canada has are cold and boring?
There’s even tropical deserts fyi.
Not a desert but Vancouver is perfect for the screen! https://youtu.be/ojm74VGsZBU (Every Frame A Painting - Vancouver Never Plays Itself)
I watched a film years ago that actually had Toronto as the location and they actually got to showcase local stuff.
It’d be nice if Van or Vic ever got to do the same thing.
Star Trek: Every planet is either a set or within driving distance of Los Angeles
Honestly i think it’s quite possible that earth actually is rare on that regard. Most planets are majorly more uniform than earth. Conditions have to be juuuuuust right for a single planet to have water that exists in all 3 forms at the same time on different areas of the planet. That fact alone creates 4 of the 6 boxes.
Water doesn’t have to be the thing that brings variation. Titan has a methane “hydrology” with clouds, rivers, valleys, and beaches whose sand is made of ice. On Triton, ammonia cryovulcanism powered by tidal forces from Neptune create plains with ammonnia snowfall, ice mountain ranges, and underground lakes. On Miranda, the planet is ice, but there are massive terrain differences from 10 km cliffs to flatlands. Io has a massive variety of volcanic planes with color differences visible from space because of their entirely different chemical compositions. The turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter is streaks of water vapor clouds, upwellings from deep beneath the surface, cyclones and massive pressure drops that dent the atmosphere inward by kilometers, with ionosphere above and gas as dense as water below. Even an atmosphere-less grey rock like Mercury has basalt plains, craters, ridges, highlands and dust plains.
In No Man’s Sky, many planets have life, which requires complex chemistry being possible at the temperatures the planet has using the chemicals that are available on that planet. This then naturally creates temperatures that are “too cold” for that life and “too warm” for that life, and complex adaptations made by that life to take resources from places that get “too cold” or “too warm” with less risk of predation or competition. Similar adaptation is possible to other extremes/variations, such as “submerged”, “on land”, “flying”, “too dry”, “too few nutrients”, “too acidic”, “too basic”, “too steep”, “cave”, etc. And thus we get complex biospheres that vary across the planet.
Also there have been eras in earths history where it was basically like one of two environments. Like before the continents emerged from the oceans properly, or the several snowball earths, or the multiple times a super continent formed and created swamp land and desert land because of the fucken Appalachian mountains.
Personally, I think you’re half-right in that (with a sample size of our solar system) the Earth is the only one with an actually diverse range of biomes - really only possible because the availability of water in multiple forms…
But the Earth-like planets in NMS should rightfully have the same biome diversity if they were being scientifically accurate…
Though we all know the real reason for the lack of diversity is to force movement between planets. If every resource was on one planet, there’s be no reason for the player to explore.
Nature is just so insanely beautifull that its hard to come up with something even nicer without seeing it. I actually think that if theres life on other planets then earth is among the more beautiful ones because it is subjectively beautiful to us. Yes mountains and rainforests are beautiful, siberia and the chinese planes, but so is the sahara and especially the places we come from. Im from hungary, one of the more boring parts of europe based on nature if you actually look at it objectively but every time i go back i feel a connection to it. Think this is one of the reasons scifi doesnt work for me. The real cultures and nature and everything else we have on this beautiful planet is more than enough for me and nothing pains my heart more than when these places and peoples are distroyed and restricted. When i watch scifi, its kind of an escapism for me to see those very motifs that make us special but in a better light. But yeah i think we struggle to create something more beautiful than what we are basically coded to find as the most beautiful.
I wonder if a single-biome planet with life would actually be more likely to produce predators that could threaten a human visitor. Like, would Wampas actually be more likely to evolve on a fully frozen planet like Hoth than a planet with some temperate climates that creep into their niche occasionally over the eons? Sci fi loves when dangerous native fauna threatens an advanced human visitor.
But the planets in our solar system, except Earth, have not a lot of different biomes. To me this is one of the proofs leaning toward the simulation theory. Why make different biomes if your players and NPCs are only on one planet?
To get real pedantic, the planets in the solar system besides Earth don’t have any biomes because they don’t have any life as far as we know.
My psyche doesn’t like this.
I would love it if something like star trek would address this. Even a handwavey “this region is the only area with humanoid life” would be good enough for me
