Agreed. I've said it before, somewhere else. I would love a persistent universe that takes place in the solar system. Navigating around Sol takes a real amount of time. To make it really interesting, the rest of the galaxy is explorable too. It would take a massive amount of effort, but eventually you can build ships that can travel to the stars. But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. Basically this game would be very similar to Eve in many aspects. Probably one of the reasons I enjoyed playing Eve for so long.
"Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' "
What was that game when you had to drive for several hours on a straight road to get to the destination, only to get a bonus level of traveling back home (and then needing to swerve around a single stray dog in the last hour just to stay on the road)?
If you are getting antsy, you should, of course, play Space Engine! It's the ultimate exploration game. It aims to be a complete, accurate simulation of space, and you can download it for free. Of course, it's riddled with bugs, but it is absolutely worth playing anyway.
