A fully randomized hexcrawl style West Marches campaign through a dark, low fantasy world is one of my many dream campaigns. Someday. . .
Yeah, WestWorld is actually a great example of this sort of thing, albeit of a heavily pre-planned variety, rather than a randomized one: this vast world, increasingly wild and dangerous the further out from civilization you go, with this bewildering array of interlocking plotlines (and even non-interlocked plotlines can be brought together by sufficient “player” effort). Only difference is that WestWorld resets itself on some sort of automated timer, whereas a pure West Marches game would simply continuously build on itself until reaching the conclusion (whatever that might be).
Your state engine is a great way of doing a version of this kind of thing on PC. Like I said, there’s not a living mind (AI or otherwise) at the core of the StarCon simulation that can take any crazy player suggestion and run with it to generate new content from existing materials in the game-world (at least not yet), but with sufficient pre-planned branches and paths, you can replicate most of the feel of it. Mind, actually coding a state engine that can accurately track dozens of interweaving plot threads each of which might have half a dozen or more states on three to four different progress tracks apiece would probably be an engineering miracle. . .but the mind does salivate a bit, does it not? :-D
Sorry for the weird tangent, but like I said above, some parts of how you guys are designing this–large amounts of open, explorable, progressable content spread across a vast and unexplored region that’s highly player-responsive and largely “non-necessary” (from the perspective of a main plot track)–remind me of a West Marches style campaign, which is super impressive. If y’all pull off something in that vein, I’m gonna feel like I ripped you off with the $100 buy-in!