Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.
And it is this fact that will more than likely exclude Arcen, which seems to be allergic to that concept. I know there is a thread about why somewhere. It's a shame because I think they could have done it, skill-wise.
It's not that we don't want to do moddability, but it would seriously conflict with our rapid-iteration approach. It's one thing to have giant mods out there that have to be updated every three months because of an official patch; it's another thing if the modders are having to at least check to see if something needs updated multiple times a week. The alternative would be our having to make sure all of our patches don't break what the modders are relying on, which would drastically slow us down and/or restrict the kinds of changes we could make.
On the player-base-fragmentation thing, eRe4s3r, that would be very real even if it were a purely singleplayer game: if there were 3 different big "balance mods" out there for AIW (and there
would be), then the feedback on the actual game's balance would both diminish and become diluted with reports that really only apply in a modded situation.
Not to mention less significant issues like having to ask every single bug-reporter "what mods were you playing with?"
But sure, the actual code-work for moddability would not be hard the way we do things, and where it makes sense and doesn't have costs that outweigh the benefits, we're happy to include it. For example, graphics modding in AIW and AVWW, levels in Tidalis, rooms in AVWW, etc.
