It's more like the genre suffer from an obsession with "open world". Freelancer (and Independent War 2) were good because they were first and unique, but a space game with limited fly model with an open world often time just feel a game with a bunch of random encounters. I wish there are more games that go back to the mission base like Freespace 2 or Tachyon: The Fringe. The X series has always been more of a empire building or space tycoon for me, I rarely play it for the combat. I wouldn't be surprised if statistically less than 25% of my playing time is in active combat across all X games.mr.WHO wrote: ↑Mon, 18. Jan 21, 22:36Ever since I discovered Egosoft games, I can't go back to Freelancer style games - they are totally boring an identical. You're locked within small class of ships, usually cannot own big things like station and capships and you're locked in average plot + generic missions (that usually are no better than X-series generic missions).
I think the only exception to above fromula is Starpoint Gemini Warlords, but somehow I couldn't got past the grind and got bored after several hours.
It's kinda depressing that Freespace 2 was released over 2 decades ago, and I can't still recall I ever fought a space battle that are more epic than some of the missions in Freepsace 2 (or even in some of its total conversion mods), and I played pretty much all of the space games in between then and now.