What ever happened to spaceflight sims?

[Eudaemonian]

I was able to satisfy some of my hunger for this with SW Battlefront with the space missions where you have to sabotage the enemy carrier, I thought that was a good idea.

I did play that and take a small bit of joy out of it, but it felt very much like the "vehicle level put into a standard shooter". Its controls are awkward and clearly not well-thought out. It was nice to be gunning around space again, but it felt like a simulation of a simulation. Like playing the game simplified, or by proxy.

Still, it was something.

 

[Lance Icarus]

Freespace was a wonderful series, that really made you feel extremely tiny and insignificant at times, just like spaceflight sims should.

Just like someone above said, the spaceflight sims died with Mechwarrior. Any game that has a thick bitchin' instruction manual is almost automatically stillborn if you need ten million sales to justify the costs of production nowadays.

Now that I've heard this agreed with a few times, I have to address it.

What is so complicated about Freespace? There are a lot of keys? To be honest, most of them are unnecessary or could be simplified. Yes, just about every key on the keyboard is mapped to do something, but I bet I could put a very playable version of Freespace's controls onto an Xbox controller.

Honestly, I don't even remember a big instruction manual with the Mech games or the Freespace series. Most of what you needed to learn, you could learn in-game. Weapons do different things... shock.

The only commands (besides such things as SHOOT) that you often needed were "target nearest enemy" and "match speed". You might occasionally use "tell wingmen to go fuck themselves" and "find that bomber that is raping your cap-ship" but to be honest, most of this could be implimented through radials.

To blame this disappearance on anything relating to the game's complexity or difficulty in production is ridiculous. There is nothing about modeling a few ships and rendering some background graphics that necessitates particularly high production values. There's no overly complex physics engine to produce, you don't have to render your girly main character's hair flapping lovingly in the breeze, you don't have to make sure that the water reflects the vista of the rising sun oh so perfectly... it's just ships, objects which are by definition largely geometric and relatively simple to model. The models can be used repetitively with no complaints. I cannot believe that a spaceflight sim would have production values radically different from any shooter or rpg in production today.

I'm happy to hear an explanation that proves me wrong, but I'm just not seeing one.

Freespace? Complicated? This man here has summed up my entire keyboard map for that game. The only thing I'd add is the "Stop the ship and figure out exactly where the hell you are before you make a sharp left turn right into your capital ship's bridge" button. Oh, and missiles. When you could shoot down that last enemy big ship with your potato up the tailpipe missile, it was a warm fuzzy feeling that any gamer would never forget.

Also, I played Freelancer on a LAN and it was tons of fun. I just wish towns were more than "go to bar and talk to freaking everybody". Really, the game would have been so much better if there was, I don't know, a CITY in the city.

 

[Anarchemitis]

I actually found EXACLTY what all you guys miss:
It's called "Infinity: the Quest for Earth". It's being made by a group of independent developers and is currently in progress and won't be done for some time (about a year or so) but you can look up on it on http://www.infinity-universe.com/ It's awesome. And If you want to there's a working combat prototype you can play on against other players.

 

[Eudaemonian]

I actually found EXACLTY what all you guys miss:
It's called "Infinity: the Quest for Earth". It's being made by a group of independent developers and is currently in progress and won't be done for some time (about a year or so) but you can look up on it on http://www.infinity-universe.com/ It's awesome. And If you want to there's a working combat prototype you can play on against other players.

Seems interesting, at least more interesting than EVE or other alternatives, but I really wish everyone would pull their heads out of their asses about MMORPGS. They act like massive multiplayer capabilities are a panacea that magically makes all game formats better.

News Flash: It's not.

Having to deal with other fuckers and being dependent on a game's popularity for it to be fun or even continue to exist is a serious negative in many cases. Imagine if your most favorite obscure game could not be played if at a bare minimum you found a few dozen other people to play it with. Or even worse if it simply poofed into oblivion the moment not enough people worldwide continued to play.