Thoughts on the Demise of Spaceflight Simulators

[Calax]

I miss tie fighter. As complicated as the control scheme was, once you got it down you could do just about anything. I personally don't like the whole open world gameplay, as I feel it forces the player to do things like operate a shipping business or other stupid stuff. Give me a whole blooded Xwing or Tie fighter back with updated graphics and I'll shell out the money.

 

[geldonyetich]

If you ask me, the trouble is that Freespace 2 set the bar too high. Everything that came afterward was somewhat lackluster. For every Freelancer there were dozens of humdrum games.

It also could be a sign of the times. When depression sets in, people stop wanting to think about the future, and instead reflect on the good times of the past. Up goes fantasy, down go sci-fi.

The last good one I played was Darkstar One. It's cheap, give it a try if you haven't yet.

 

[Phyroxis]

I loved Tie Fighter and X-Wing! Man that takes me back.

 

[Social Pariah]

I try so hard to like the newest of the X series, but they're just awful, every release is always bugged to crap for half a year before it's particularly playable, the plots are awful and poorly executed and once I buy a capital ship the game is basically over for me, as I no longer care and they're unwieldy and seemingly useless whilst being so expensive and powerful.

It's really not what I'd hope to have as one of the only new space simulators out there, but there are no more to choose from, so it forces me to use it to fulfill any spacey imaginings I have.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

You know, I'm a little mystified as well. I guess I agree with yonsito, in that it is a genre that publishers perceive as having limited appeal. The fact that a really good one requires a joystick probably further reduces the appeal of making one.

It doesn't help that LucasArts released the lackluster X-Wing vs. TIE-Figher without a campaign mode. Just pretty graphics and multiplayer that didn't work so well over the 56K modem connections most people had back then. X-Wing Alliance added a campaign stocked with insufferable characters and viciously hard missions. I mean, one of the Rebel training missions required that you destroy three different convoys over the course of about 40 minutes, the last convoy under heavy escort. Meanwhile, the Star Wars prequels were busy devaluing the entire franchise in the eyes of its old fanbase.

Freespace 2 and Independence War were both brilliant, but I-War was again savagely difficult and neither were based on well-known properties. Chris Roberts extended the Wing Commander franchise well past its expiration date (the games were good, but I'd argue that WC3 was the pinnacle of the series, and should have been the conclusion to the story).

But I think we all know the solution to this malaise. Someone needs to license Battlestar Galactica and produce a combat flight simulator where people can pilot the Vipers and the Raptor, and maybe even Cylon ships in a few special cases. BSG is still a hot property and if it was attached to a flight sim with AAA values, I think it'd get a lot of people's attention.

They did make a PS2 Battlestar Galactica, but supposedly it was too hard and kinda cruddy. I'm not sure whether it was a space sim or just an arcade shooter, but whatever.

 

[Grampy_bone]

The market for spaceflight games basically imploded on itself. No one was buying the new games. No one was trying anything new with them. The last game which actually tried to spice up the genre was Freelancer, with it's third person camera and mouse-centric controls, and it still didn't sell. Is it surprising that people didn't buy games which were designed around a controller that almost no one owned anymore? The joystick was killed by the d-pad in the NES days but it still took the PC developers a decade to realize it.

If you want to see more space flight sim games you shouldn't hope for more hyper-complex byzantine PC affairs but instead start pining for an Xbox360 or Wii game there I said it.

 

[Valiance]

I find it depressing that this genre is becoming less and less represented. I can understand why, though. Developers want to cater to the mass market currently, and the only games they know that -everyone- will play is yet another generic FPS, or sequels of games that sold in the past.

It pains me to see games I love go untouched, like Tachyon : The Fringe. I find that to be one of the most solid space sims I ever played. Freespace 2 is probably the best that I've ever played. Unfortunately, neither of these games really had commercial success. That's probably why they don't make them so much anymore.

I agree that WC3 is much better than WC4 and Prophecy.

I'm still wondering if Descent 4 will ever come out, even though it's not so much a space sim as a true 3D shooter. Interplay seems to be back in action from what I know, so perhaps it's possible.

 

[Tyran107]

- An enormous but empty universe with extremely weak fast travel options and slow ships.
While I agree it is pretty empty, I don't understand what you're talking about slow ships and weak fast travel. I enjoy the SETA drive alot more then *press button to instant teleport to location x* like other games seem to have, and the only ships that felt slow to me are capital ships.

-Lackluster combat.
Please explain. Other than the frustration of getting raped in fights when just starting I love the combat.

-The flight interface is ok, but the inventory and ship loadout interfaces are so clunky and unintuitive that it literally took me 15 minutes to figure out how to move stuff from one ship to another.
While I think it could be better, I found interaction easily enough, then again I read the manual

-Confusing backstory that seems to have nothing to do with the actual game.
Totally agree with this which is why I just play the sandbox mode and not story

-Missions that take a week and a half to complete, and you have to pay to save your game in open space, so if you die at the end of your mission, you end up at your previous autosave (which can be a couple hours in the past) unless you shell out 3 grand for a single save.
Didn't even know you could save in open space o.o Though I never had a problem with auto saves cause it auto saves every time you dock at a station...and are you speaking of storyline missions or just random generated missions you can get at stations?

 

[Crazyshak48]

If you ask me, the trouble is that Freespace 2 set the bar too high. Everything that came afterward was somewhat lackluster. For every Freelancer there were dozens of humdrum games.

Ironic isn't it, how nothing can kill a genre more easily than a sublime game

The market for spaceflight games basically imploded on itself. No one was buying the new games. No one was trying anything new with them. The last game which actually tried to spice up the genre was Freelancer, with it's third person camera and mouse-centric controls, and it still didn't sell. Is it surprising that people didn't buy games which were designed around a controller that almost no one owned anymore? The joystick was killed by the d-pad in the NES days but it still took the PC developers a decade to realize it.

If you want to see more space flight sim games you shouldn't hope for more hyper-complex byzantine PC affairs but instead start pining for an Xbox360 or Wii game there I said it.

Hey, if the game's fun, I don't care what platform I play it on. Besides, most consoles have USB ports now too, so I bet I can use my joystick on my PS3. As long as the game is interesting, fun, and requires a degree of skill to beat, I don't give a damn if I have to play it on my toaster. I'm betting most of the other people here would agree that having ultra complex controls and interfaces is what killed the genre and continues to butcher the few remaining titles like X3. I think the part developers keep missing is that a great space sim game doesn't have to be open-world and/or have ridiculously complex gameplay. Freespace did the trick with a campaign that was both long, engaging, and challenging enough that beating it multiple times never failed to satisfy, while ships were easy to configure and fly. Add that with multiplayer that that offered a variety of modes including simple deathmatches and more complex coop missions, and you had a game that you could easily lose your social life to.

I just think more than anything, we'd just like a sim with jaw-dropping modern graphics and a decent storyline that would work for both the old flight sim audience and the newer crowd of twitch gamers.

 

[Crazyshak48]

- An enormous but empty universe with extremely weak fast travel options and slow ships.
While I agree it is pretty empty, I don't understand what you're talking about slow ships and weak fast travel. I enjoy the SETA drive alot more then *press button to instant teleport to location x* like other games seem to have, and the only ships that felt slow to me are capital ships.

-Lackluster combat.
Please explain. Other than the frustration of getting raped in fights when just starting I love the combat.

-The flight interface is ok, but the inventory and ship loadout interfaces are so clunky and unintuitive that it literally took me 15 minutes to figure out how to move stuff from one ship to another.
While I think it could be better, I found interaction easily enough, then again I read the manual

-Confusing backstory that seems to have nothing to do with the actual game.
Totally agree with this which is why I just play the sandbox mode and not story

-Missions that take a week and a half to complete, and you have to pay to save your game in open space, so if you die at the end of your mission, you end up at your previous autosave (which can be a couple hours in the past) unless you shell out 3 grand for a single save.
Didn't even know you could save in open space o.o Though I never had a problem with auto saves cause it auto saves every time you dock at a station...and are you speaking of storyline missions or just random generated missions you can get at stations?

The SETA/jump drive fast travel concept was fine, except for one minor problem I had. I got into a fight on the way back from a mission, and my SETA module got blown to bits. Hence I had to trudge all the way home, and scrape together enough cash to buy a new one. Time compression is fine, but make it part of the UI, not part of your ship! A better fast travel option would have been the autopilot system from Tachyon. You select the correct gate, then hit autopilot. A brief cinematic shows you flying across the sector, then jumping through the gate. You then appear in the next sector. You have to do this for each gate though, so you still feel like you're traveling without having to trudge across each humongous sector.

As for the inventory interface, that could just have been me being thick. However, I still wasn't able to find much help from the manual on property management, and general tips to help you when you're an insignificant speck in the galaxy, which is arguably the time you need it, not when you're lord of your sector. However, I'll chalk that one up to it being late and me being tired when I first played

As for combat, I just found it boring. I don't know what else to say. There was no particular joy in fragging an enemy ship, and the weapons literally felt and sounded like I was sneezing at my target. Maybe I'd enjoy it more at the bridge of a destroyer bristling with big guns, but personally I was just bored.

 

[orifice]

Elite 4 is Coming! should be early 2010.

 

[bkd69]

You really want to check out Allegiance: http://www.freeallegiance.org/
I see that it's mentioned in the 14 games list.

Falcon 4.0 killed the combat flight sim market, more or less. Though it is still around, we don't have anywhere near the number of combat flight sim games that we used to. Non combat sims were pretty much always dominated by Microsoft, and now we have X-Plane to compete with it.

Xbox killed Mechwarrior, which was the premier sf vehicle sim that didn't involve spaceflight, though there's hope that it may return.

As far as the spaceflight sims go, it's hard to pin down an single point of abandon for developers. A combination of things, certainly, Xbox development poaching pc development, Descent, chnaging market tastes, etc. A more detailed study might be of interest. There's certainly still an active market for them, as weekly postings in the forum show, particularly if they're of the Elite trading+spaceflight style.

 

[Chiggins]

Has anyone tried "Starlancer"? It's a bit old (eight years? It's been awhile) - anyways, it was a hell of a fun space-combat game. It had the gritty, up-close dogfights that made the wing-commanders great.

Also - which was the game that had Clive Owen doing the live action cut-scenes? I remember hating the actual gameplay, but it's hysterical to see how far that guy has come.

 

[cuddly_tomato]

Spacefore - Rogue universe. Is that any good?

 

[NoSeraph]

I was hoping that there'd be some more talk about Wing Commander, a series that I sorely miss. I still have fond memories of playing it on my old 486, back in the early 90s. A 25 meg processor was all you needed back then.

But getting back on topic, I think that Spaceflight shooters/sims petered out not because there was anything wrong with the overall concept (who doesn't want to be a spaceship pilot?), but because space is no longer "trendy". Even Star wars doesn't focus so much on space fighters today as they do on lightsaber duels.

Remember a few years back when everyone was making sandbox gangsta games, but now there are only two or so games that are designed that way? It's like that.

I hope that the spaceflight genre makes a comeback, though. Then we can all act like elitists and say we've been playing this stuff for years

 

[Theo Samaritan]

I don't know if you've tried it, but Darkstar One is a pretty good recent effort in this regard...the plot and character interaction are however are crap to say the least, some awful dialogue too. But the game itself I thought was pretty fun. There's other neat little things, like having only a single ship but letting it grow and transform as you advance.

Exactly what I think. The story is somewhere between awful and unintentionally funny, the game is very linear but I enjoyed playing it. They sell it on gog as well, at 10$.

The reason alot of people who are into space flight games don't mention this title is because many of them are aware of the first X game, X: Beyond the Frontier, which was essentially the exact same (one ship you constantly upgraded) but on the same token was less linear.

Oh, and it was released in 1999, so Darkstar One is essentially a poor remake of a game from ten years ago =/

 

[Lazyjim]

But I think we all know the solution to this malaise. Someone needs to license Battlestar Galactica and produce a combat flight simulator where people can pilot the Vipers and the Raptor, and maybe even Cylon ships in a few special cases. BSG is still a hot property and if it was attached to a flight sim with AAA values, I think it'd get a lot of people's attention.

Actually there is a very nice BSG stand alone mod for FreeSpace 2, called Beyond the Red Line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Red_Line

 

[Quiotu]

Ahh, the good old days. I fondly remember playing the entire Wing Commander series, including 4 which completely missed the mark of the franchise. I did like where Prophecy was going, and was sad when Origin was swallowed by EA. I was re-energized when Starlancer came out, but Freelancer didn't have enough of a Privateer feel to it to sell well. The game also took WAY too long to be released, and the hype died when it came out three whole years after Starlancer.

I find it funny that it was Microsoft that dissolved the company into itself later on, two companies that were rather well known for their flight simulators, suddenly wanting nothing to do with them anymore. I'm still waiting for indi developers to make some decent games of this genre for consoles. While we may not see them on PC much anymore, there are a few gems out there you can cling onto.

Look up Jumpgate: Evolution sometime. It's a spaceship MMO that's been around for five years, that's currently getting a major facelift. It's in Beta and is aiming for a Spring release this year. And no, it's not like EvE at all. It's actual flight, not point and click, in a realistic physics environment. Thrust in one direction, and you continue that way indefinitely until you use rear thrusters or change directions.

 

[Liverandbacon]

I do miss the glory days of the spaceflight simulators. However, Freespace 2 is still eminently playable, especially with the Source Code Project and the multiple campaigns, missions, and total conversions available for the SCP engine.