- A low-brow, open world space sim. (Yes, I'm aware of Star Citizen, No Man's Sky, Elite and all the others, but hear me out):
I would love to fly my cheap, derelict Lada Riva equivalent of a spaceship into a space station. No landing sequence or wrestling away of controls, I want to land on my own and I want to land shittily. As I touch down, garbage is stirred up and space rats scurry away from the landing site. I get out of the ship (of course, the canopy jams and needs some hitting to open) and some spaceport employee alien comes running towards me to complain that I'm parked across two landing pads. I walk away, muttering "yeah, whatever" and head to the bar.
...you get the picture. This world, with trading, exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it.
Star Citizen itself is my answer... I remember reading an article in Popular Science about it [0] when I was a kid, and specifically the sentence about "For example, designers modeled each ship’s landing gear to retract without interfering with the hydrogen fuel system that feeds the nuclear reactor." That sounded like the coolest thing ever.
So, now that I've gotten eight years older but still haven't seen the game release, it makes me kinda sad.
Relatedly, another PopSci article [1] promised that flying cars would be available by ~2015. That never happened either :-(
LevelCap has done some great star citizen videos recently, just him and some friends playing the game. If you're interested in the current state check out his channel:
Star Citizen was the first thing that came to mind too! I "pledged" in 2017 as a teenager and now I'll be graduating college next year. Unbelievable how poorly the game's been managed.
WC: Privateer is a little bit like that, especially if you played the WC (wing commander) games first. Moving from a military, "we have budget for everything" (ammo, missiles, fixes) to a "oh, should I fix my auto pilot or buy an extra missile?" setting feels a little bit like that.
Plenty of low-brow there as well, and basically being forced into the plot against your will is very on-point for a "I just want to make a buck" character.
Yeah - Privateer 2, the darkening got me into the whole genre. Five CD-ROMS in a multi disc case, Clive Owen, Mathilda May, Jürgen Prochnow, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Brian Blessed and Amanda Pays and Dani Behr playing in the cutscenes. If you could have walked around the space stations and planets in3D it would have been as close as it gets to this.
In this same vein, I want a modern remake of Escape Velocity with the high quality choose-your-own story arcs, but multiplayer. The graphics could be absolute garbage and I'd still play it daily.
Unfortunately development has been paused for over two years now. But yes, outside of Arpia + some other total conversions for older EVs, this is really the only thing out there that directly scratches the EV itch.
The closest contenders IMO are StarSector, the X series, Free Space 2 with extensive modding. Then many games that are similar to those 3.
I have still yet to find a space game holistically more enjoyable than EVN though.
Hmm, paused by the main dev? Probably yeah, but community continues to develop it if you check the discord group and git commits. There's some model/sprite rework and the coalition campaign that they were working on the last I checked.
I played the X series since X2, I found the latest X3 (TC, AP) more enjoyable than Rebirth and even X4. X2 had the landing part (quite annoying, in reality), X3 had the fun, later games had better graphics but not the same immersion. Unfortunately the universe is quite limited, even with 100 sectors, and very static endgame.
Ostranauts definitely gets the "flying heaps of scrap" and manual landings down. Last run my first ship was a converted cargo container with no life support.
Problem with the space heap of scrap aesthetic is that in real life space, even aside from all the other problems you need a lot more radiation shielding than that to survive outside low Earth orbit.
How can that be enjoyable though? You're just hauling cargo from point A where it's cheap to point B where it's expensive. Even in Eve's player driven economy it's a grind.
> exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it
Completely agree. I really enjoyed exploring planets in Elite Dangerous.
I would love to fly my cheap, derelict Lada Riva equivalent of a spaceship into a space station. No landing sequence or wrestling away of controls, I want to land on my own and I want to land shittily. As I touch down, garbage is stirred up and space rats scurry away from the landing site. I get out of the ship (of course, the canopy jams and needs some hitting to open) and some spaceport employee alien comes running towards me to complain that I'm parked across two landing pads. I walk away, muttering "yeah, whatever" and head to the bar.
...you get the picture. This world, with trading, exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it.