Game-ending Disasters

NECROOOo....... But still:

I don't think he meant the sun exploding as a literal thing...

In fact, I think it would be cool to try to survive in a dying world, after the sun has ran out of hydrogen. Plants die, but you could adapt to survive in hydrotermal vents for a time... until the oceans freeze.

Although, I guess it is difficult to survive to that point, as, the less hydrogen is left, the more bright the sun becomes. So temperatures would increase to unbearable levels, and then they would drop to near 0 k...

It would be probably impossible, but to see how long can you survive can be still a fun challenge.

Perhaps that could be a speed run-type gamemode for experienced players, it would be very interesting to see that implemented. For example, when you start as a cell in "speed mode" perhaps it could have a year timer for how long till the sun goes e.g 5 billion years or something like that. It sounds like quite a fun idea.

Only if you want there to be that chance.

Some people like a challenge, especially if they know its coming. But i agree that having some type of disaster that hit that wipes out your entire game can be ruining, so i think there should be an option for some of those, but there should also be something similar to that, that sets you back a little bit, but not completely ruining hours of gameplay. There is a balance in there somewhere.

It's more in line with a rogue-like / story generator sort of gameplay. For example take "Rimworld". In that game you get plenty of crazy events which wreck your whole game (I remember my last remaining character, the medic, succumbing to the flames that engulfed the whole wooden base trying to drag her husband out of it, it was a grim moment).

However that's kind of the point of it. You can play on creative where you just build a cool base and have fun with the different systems. And you can play on a hardcore mode where chaos slams repeatedly into the little world you are trying to build and rips it to pieces. It's more about having an interesting experience of struggling to survive not a guaranteed grind to victory. 

It's only half real to say "you must fight to survive each life but don't worry your species will always be fine", it's more real and more true, if people can hack it, to say "you have to fight to survive every step of the way against a hostile universe that won't miss you for a second".

IMO it's really interesting to get to the space stage, for example, and find you are in the middle of the large space empire that immediately slaves you. What do you do? Do you play along? Do you push for political rights for your people? Do you try and rebel for independence? What do you do if they glass half your planet as a punishment and push you back into hunter gathering, do you want to grind up another entire civilisation in order to fight back against them and hopefully one day overthrow them?

That kind of thing is awesome, IMO, and helps a lot with replayability. It will feel so good to struggle through to the space stage and feel like you really made it.

Because that's realistic. 

Quite a lot of roguelikes / rpg's have systems where you can die to a single random event and the game is over. One tabletop game I heard about had the game master kill all the players permanently after stepping through what they thought was a portal, but was actually an energy vortex. He tore up their character sheets after 60+ hours of developing the characters. They hated him for it and never played with him again but he has made it into the all time game master hall of fame.