I was playing some Everspace 2 and while it sure is pretty and feels pretty good there was something lacking that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’m only 20 hours or so into it but I just felt like it wasn’t quite living up to my memories of Freelancer.
Now I last played Freelancer over 15 years ago so I was sure that I was just seeing this through a heavy mist of nostalgia, so I reinstalled the old game, installed the HD mod and a few other user made tweaks and loaded it up. The opening scenes were definitely nostalgic but once I started to fly missions properly again it became crystal clear, nope Freelancer still kicks the shit out of every other space game I’ve ever played since.
Elite Dangerous, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Everspace 2, Spacebourne 2, EVE Online, (edit adding more I’ve played here: Chorus, Star Citizen, No Mans Sky) they all have strengths but nothing feels as good as the grand daddy Freelancer.
Freelancer just nailed everything. The looks, the sounds, the world, and the story/atmosphere. On top of that it was great fun in multiplayer.
It wasn’t very realistic but it didn’t need to be. It was fun and easy to play. It also wasn’t filled with overly complicated crafting systems or complex economy simulations.
That’s one thing I really dislike about many modern games, why do they always need to have a crafting system? Take Elite Dangerous, a game I really love, even that has crafting in the form of Engineering. It’s just too much hassle and it takes away the fun for me. It feels like a job.
I’ve sunk about 180 hours into Elite Dangerous. I do genuinely enjoy it and the passive MMO stuff. It’s a cool community but for me the space exploration is too much of a sim to really fall in love with, and I hate that the story as much as there is one with the Thargoids etc, is so passive. But it’s so big and ambitious and deep that it’s really impressive. I’m sure I’d give Star Citizen a chance if there was anything to play through but it seems even more empty than Elite.