So, Starfield was a disappointment (in my opinion).
The story isn’t interesting.
The lore and world-building do not make sense.
The game mechanics do not mesh together.
(And it doesn’t run well on the Steam Deck.)
But the promise of Starfield?
The big space game? The big space RPG where you can play as Captain Reynolds type character?
That’s something I can get behind.
I want to traverse space, visit different planets, get lost, meet interesting characters, solve their problems, and shoot some stuff.
Two games come to my mind when I think of this:
No Man’s Sky
Mass Effect
I’ve only played a few hours of No Man’s Sky, but I think it does space traversal well.
To put it bluntly, flying from planet to planet without interruption is better than fast travel.
But the gameplay loop did not
Mass Effect nails the space adventure side of things.
You visit multiple interesting places, you meet different people with curious problems, and you solve these problems (mainly by shooting).
But it’s a typical Bioware game: The places you visit are small and confined, and there are (comparatively) few of them. The space traversal is done by clicking a few buttons in a menu.
My question is: Are there any “big space games”? Are there any games that deliver on the promise of Starfield? What are your favourite sci-fi RPGs?
Throwing Elite Dangerous in there as well. The learning curve is steep, and story is not driven by anything but you. But oh my god does it satisfy that “fuuuuck space is so big” feeling. The one thing that was fun in Starfield was the gunplay, which is the only thing missing in vanilla Elite, but they have an expansion that adds that. I haven’t played Odyssey, but supposedly it has gotten much better over the years.
Adding to the other comment, I feel like you can get a taste for all that by visiting the game’s subreddit. Seeing all the cool things people do and how the community moves the story forward really motivates me to play the game. I guess you could also watch a youtube video to get up to date on the story and different ways to play the game.
It is a great game but you really do need to look stuff up to fully enjoy it, unfortunately. Also, space trucking is only one way to play it.
You have to read the news in game. There is an evolving story line about the thargoids invading known space. There are new colonies that are being formed hundreds of light years from known space that need protection and supplies. There are communities like the fuel rats that are constantly coming to the rescue of stranded explorers. It’s a really big, open, beautiful galaxy that has a lot going on. It’s a shame it always gets overlooked because you have to search the story out instead of it being served to you on a platter by npc and cutscenes. Don’t get me wrong, I looooove a good story driven game. Elite is probably, in my little opinion, the best execution of a true open world game. You just have to really search for the story, and I can see how that could be a barrier for entry for a lot of people.
The E:D devs shit in every existing player’s mouth when the first paid expansion dropped, and they’ve never fixed their abusive pricing model. You’re actively punished for being a legacy user.
I probably would have bitten the bullet and kept playing if the game wasn’t incredibly shallow, though. Somehow it manages to still be that way after several content expansions… Everything is a novelty that gets repetitive the second time you do it, and the variance between systems is frankly embarrassing. PvP is the only facet that has any real replay value, and I’d rather dogfight in Star Citizen.
so for something completely different and focusing solely on the “size” aspect:
the biggest, that i am aware of, game in terms of sheer SIZE involved, is Stellaris:
it’s a paradox grand strategy game, not first person at all, so completely different from the other recommendations and probably nothing to do with what you asked for…but if you want something truly MASSIVE…well…can’t go much larger than galaxy spanning all out war involving gigantic fleets and armies!
so if power fantasies is something you’re interested in, maybe take a look! it’s pretty easy to get into, but has a lot of depth (but no requirement) to master later on! and it has a lot of settings regarding game speed and difficulty to tailor it to your tastes.
and mods, god help me, the mods; play a couple hours to get to know the game, then definitely get Gigastructural Engineering from the workshop.
short list of ridiculous engineering:
Attack Moons
Behemoth Planetcraft
Neutronstar Gigaforge
Matryoshka Brain
and a bunch, even more ridiculously huge projects!
(sidenote: the new DLC subscription on steam is…kinda worth it honestly. not the worst idea, especially to just try it out for a couple hours. i was extremely skeptical, but it’s kinda, surprisingly, less predatory than the previous “we’ll release 2 20$ DLCs, and 1 30/40$ DLC per year” model…)
The Outer Worlds is pretty much what Starfield could and should have been and was made by Obsidian, the developers behind a ton of other great games such as (in chronological order, with the best of all games ever bolded)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
Neverwinter Nights 2
Fallout New Vegas
Pillars of Eternity
Tyranny
Pillars of Eternity 2
There’s even a sequel to it coming out some time this year so you don’t run as much of a risk of running out of game any time soon!
Hard disagree. They’re both equally boring as shit, but Starfield at least had decent ship flying/building mechanics. What did outer worlds have? Nothing.
It did? Outer Worlds was just an over-exaggerated parody of capitalism, Starfield at least had some somewhat-believable world building in terms of how the tech progressed, how/why did humans start to live among the stars, conflict between different religions or factions, the xenomorph threat…
Like I’m not saying any of these were done well, but it did have decent worldbuilding and some neat ideas, it was just the execution that sucked. OW might have some better parts than SF, like companion writing (although it was pretty cliched and cheesy there too) so I’m really surprised you use world building as your example lol
im just salty about starfields world building
shouldve chosen different example
OWs world building was fine. nothing special, just fine.
there were stupid things but they were either a joke or there to back up a point (“we moved this dangerous animal to this planet to make a deodorant and now its killing us” 👈 this shit is supposed to be funny and anti corporation. does it work? dunno, its stupid, might be funny to someone, its fine, little cringe )
starfields world building just grinds my gears. when there are stupid things, they are there because someone at bethesda thinks its coool as heck or didnt think it through. fucking space cowbois. fucking colony war. why add mechs into your world and ban them? why artificially limit the number of star systems the nations can control?
Thank you! Felt like I was I playing a different game than everyone else.
Everyone mocked Starfield’s Neon for being Discount Cyberpunk. But at least they played it as straight as they could. Like, I could believe people live there and had a life.
It felt like Outer Worlds kept trying to make jokes about how cruel capitalism is versus tell a real story. Like, “Oh boy time to go increase shareholder value!” Or “I love Space nuts. I have to say that or I die.” Like wtf, where’s the subtlety?
It’s not Borderlands 3 bad, no where near it. But it’s pretty bad.
Totally agree the dlc really made it one if those “it gets good after x hours” sorta things; All different vibes for the dlcs too.
The raider one was lonely but it felt like it was supposed to be.
In this genre of “big space games”, The Outer Worlds stands near to Mass effect, because it follows “the Bioware formula” pretty closely: The player and a group of followers visit several semi-open worlds, where they look for a MacGuffin related to the main story while solving local problems. (I’ll write a short essay about the Bioware formula someday…)
The Outer Worlds was a good game (not great) and I look forward to the sequel. I’ve played most Obsidian games and I wish they wrote more sci-fi.
Starfield was much better than Outer Worlds IMO. I enjoyed my time with Starfield, it’s not perfect of course. I’ve tried to get through Outer Worlds three times but it’s just not fun, I also strongly dislike New Vegas. Just ok writing doesn’t make up for shitty gameplay.
Yeah they gave up announcing new release dates for it like half a decade ago if not longer lmao, but now they’ve started again. Hopefully it’s true this time.
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
I bought myself into sf before you got a hangar, i only had that one person race ship and after a while they added a hangar where you could spawn and walk around it.
After a while i noticed loads of reviews so i tried playing it, but always ran into issues making it unplayable. So i got really fed up with it for a while.
Then a couple years later i could actually run it with some issues, ended up buying a better ship and i’m now basically waiting for it to release and computer parts to be affordable once again.
I would love for star citizen to be my jam, but i doubt i’ll ever be able to put enough time into it. The most i ever managed to do consistently was diablo 4 season 1 to 3 before i dropped it completely.
I mean, they kind of do. It’s just not driven by cut scenes or NPC interaction. Have to read the news and be involved in the off game communities to get into the lore that’s happened in game.
That’s why a lot of people didn’t engage with the lore of Destiny - you had to go to a website totally separate from the game, link your account old-school Bungie style, and could only access the grimoire cards from said site after you went through the hoops. There was nothing in the game giving you more aside from the NPCs and the few cutscenes themselves. Not even a link to take you to the site from the game itself.
Almost every other game has an in-game lore/info screen talking about the world and characters of the game.
Shit, even Star Trek: Online does what Starfield promised better, and it’s basically just another dime a dozen MMOs with a high profile licensed IP behind it.
For the most part, it’s either going to be missing a few things you’re looking for, or will offer everything but not actually be good/finished (such as with Star Citizen or anything ever made by Derek Smart, and why none of those are in the above list).
I’ve had my eyes on the X series for a long time. But they’re “fly around in your ship and do stuff” games and not “fly around and walk around” games, right? I’ve also heard there’s no learning curve, more of a learning wall.
You’re right, Star Trek Online is close to my ideal game. If only it weren’t a janky MMO…
I looked at Derek Smart’s games. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. But they kinda reminded of a GDC talk by Jeff Vogel where he talks about how he makes a living by making these niche isometric RPGs.
What about it being a janky MMO takes it away from being your ideal game though?
Quite a bit, I think. It being an MMO has some practical consequences, namely the fact that I can’t play it offline and the monetization of the game. It also influences the game mechanics: For example, STO’s combat uses tabbed targeting¹. I like tabbed targeting² but I don’t think it’s the peak of combat systems; a different combat system could/would make the game more engaging and enjoyable.
I can look at the individual parts of the game. There STO shines. But when I look at STO as a one compact package, it doesn’t.
¹ It also has a shooter mode but I remember it being janky as hell.
² I’d actually love to see a sort of “offline MMO” which would use tabbed targeting.
Star Citizen will get a story mode called Squadron 42 witch should be feature complete and it has a star studded Hollywood cast. It looks worthwile but it won’t be here for at least a year.
Star citizen right now is great if you have a group of friends to play with. You can divide up work, do your space cowboy stuff. You and your friends just need a high tolerance for jinky systems
I’ll just assume you didn’t mean to respond to me. In any event, Squadron 42 is completely separate from the main game so I’ll wonder how jinky it might be.
As much as I’m a fan of the project, I don’t think SC/SQ42 would scratch the same itch that somebody who just got done playing Starfield or Mass Effect would feel. Star Citizen is way more on the simulation side and light on RPG elements.
Yeah the prologue level they showed looked incredible. I really hope they can give the game all the polish it needs, after so long in development they absolutely need to release something with quality to match.
Well, Star Citizen is playable right now (and has been for years), and they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live Squadron 42 gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
Given the history of these guys, I am not gonna believe it until I see the game released and in the stores. Until then, as everything around star citizen, this is vaporware aimed at milking the whales that keep giving them money.
I love how it gets called “vaporware” when it’s a playable product with more gameplay than many MMOs. I’m also very grateful to the whales for providing the funds to develop the game.
I wouldn’t be so sure that SQ42 will be a guaranteed slam dunk as many SC fans seem to be speculating. That’s if it ever does get released or course.
The gameplay in the recent demo is subpar. FPS combat in particular was trash, far worse than HL1; a game released more than a quarter of a century ago. Turret gunning and the platforming parts looked decent but they are not going to carry the game. No example of player controlled space flight was shown.
The space battles looked nice in a b-movie kind of way, but I have my doubts how this will translate to fun space flight gameplay.
From SC, we know that they have a very history of even basic conceptual balance and they are horrible at iterative play testing.
Regarding the Hollywood cast, Gary Oldman sounded like he wanted to get his money and get out of there ASAP. Anderson wasn’t much better. Writing was some high school-level drivel “we must win because we must!” and lots of shouty one liners. There is a very real possibility that the whole thing will be a Wing Commander: The Movie - 30 hours of tedious custscenes. And you just know it’s going to take itself extremely seriously (think the space bulldozer scene in Wing Commander).
Looking at the UI/UX of SC, it’s not unreasonable to assume SQ42 will suffer the same sorry fate. Very flashy ironman-style UI visuals that are nigh unusable in a video game.
Now, many years after the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
Why not? Seems like a fun adventuring game that lets you travel from planet to planet solving problems/doing tasks for people. Seems similar to what the OP is looking for.
Everspace 2 (first one was a rogue like, you don’t need to play it to enjoy the sequel)
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (also a sequel, the first one doesn’t have a Y axys so you may not like it)
Chorus
All three are a lot of fun, neither are AAA games so they lack a bit of polish but aren’t vanilla as hell either. I enjoyed each one better than Starfield but neither as much as ME 1-3.
Cowboys in space is not my favourite trope, but I’ve heard good things about the first Rebel Galaxy. How was the switch from 2D combat to 3D combat in the sequel? (And is the story any good?)
I’m commenting late, but there is The Precursors which does require Slavjank tolerance, but if you have it, it provides an interesting flavor on a space opera adventure.
I also haven’t tried The Tomorrow War which seemingly requires even higher Slavjank tolerance, and probably isn’t a top of all time game, but seems interesting if you like peering into strange forgotten games. Warlockracy did a video of this one.
I’ve actually heard of The Precursors before. It was featured in Tehsnakerer’s Playing series.
I don’t know what my tolerance of slavjank is. I’ve played Operation Flashpoint a lot when I was a kid. Does that qualify as slavjank?
Really it just means the sorts of bugs you find with minimal QA testing combined with stilted voice acting, potentially untranslated audio or text, cultural beats that don’t quite cross over, and some game design choices that are different than how a game developed alongside western games might do things.
If you can stand this lack of polish, these sorts of games can at least give amusement for their price point.
It’s loosely in the same genre but you may like Rebel Galaxy. It takes a slightly different approach to space combat making it closer to naval warfare. Very enjoyable soundtrack.
Love this game! Just reinstalled yesterday after years to start a replay of it.
I just hope if they make a third they go back to this style (more capital/naval ship feeling) and not the smaller fighter style the second one adopted.
Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
Elite Dangerous: Best space travel, strap on your VR, put on a virtual monitor playing star trek into your cockpit and stand in awe of how gigantic planets truly are. It has fallen under mismanagement and its mid to late game is terrible. But for the price it’s great.
X4: Space sandbox game from the legendary studio behind… the x series. Fantastic galaxy sim where you can do whatever. Hunt bounties, be poor space trader who converts all their life savings to silicon wafers only to find out nobody is buying them or become ceo of the entire space. Only negative for me is it would be the perfect game if it had open space and orbiting planets and all.
Star Sector: basically mountain blade in space. Not on steam.
Space Engineers: Build your own spaceships and do whatever. The resources are more befitting of an automation game and you can automate.
More niche games:
Astrox: Even online but singleplayer.
Objects in space: Abandonware that takes an interesting approach to space travel.
Delta v: rings of saturn: hardest sci fi space mining simulator around the rings of saturn.
Starship EVO: very early access but has the best ship building system I’ve seen so far and ring worlds.
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Throwing Elite Dangerous in there as well. The learning curve is steep, and story is not driven by anything but you. But oh my god does it satisfy that “fuuuuck space is so big” feeling. The one thing that was fun in Starfield was the gunplay, which is the only thing missing in vanilla Elite, but they have an expansion that adds that. I haven’t played Odyssey, but supposedly it has gotten much better over the years.
I have Elite Dangerous on Steam. I have 8 hours of playtime. Alas, without a story to hook me in, space trucking is not for me. :(
Adding to the other comment, I feel like you can get a taste for all that by visiting the game’s subreddit. Seeing all the cool things people do and how the community moves the story forward really motivates me to play the game. I guess you could also watch a youtube video to get up to date on the story and different ways to play the game.
It is a great game but you really do need to look stuff up to fully enjoy it, unfortunately. Also, space trucking is only one way to play it.
You have to read the news in game. There is an evolving story line about the thargoids invading known space. There are new colonies that are being formed hundreds of light years from known space that need protection and supplies. There are communities like the fuel rats that are constantly coming to the rescue of stranded explorers. It’s a really big, open, beautiful galaxy that has a lot going on. It’s a shame it always gets overlooked because you have to search the story out instead of it being served to you on a platter by npc and cutscenes. Don’t get me wrong, I looooove a good story driven game. Elite is probably, in my little opinion, the best execution of a true open world game. You just have to really search for the story, and I can see how that could be a barrier for entry for a lot of people.
The E:D devs shit in every existing player’s mouth when the first paid expansion dropped, and they’ve never fixed their abusive pricing model. You’re actively punished for being a legacy user.
I probably would have bitten the bullet and kept playing if the game wasn’t incredibly shallow, though. Somehow it manages to still be that way after several content expansions… Everything is a novelty that gets repetitive the second time you do it, and the variance between systems is frankly embarrassing. PvP is the only facet that has any real replay value, and I’d rather dogfight in Star Citizen.
so for something completely different and focusing solely on the “size” aspect:
the biggest, that i am aware of, game in terms of sheer SIZE involved, is Stellaris:
it’s a paradox grand strategy game, not first person at all, so completely different from the other recommendations and probably nothing to do with what you asked for…but if you want something truly MASSIVE…well…can’t go much larger than galaxy spanning all out war involving gigantic fleets and armies!
so if power fantasies is something you’re interested in, maybe take a look! it’s pretty easy to get into, but has a lot of depth (but no requirement) to master later on! and it has a lot of settings regarding game speed and difficulty to tailor it to your tastes.
and mods, god help me, the mods; play a couple hours to get to know the game, then definitely get Gigastructural Engineering from the workshop. short list of ridiculous engineering:
(sidenote: the new DLC subscription on steam is…kinda worth it honestly. not the worst idea, especially to just try it out for a couple hours. i was extremely skeptical, but it’s kinda, surprisingly, less predatory than the previous “we’ll release 2 20$ DLCs, and 1 30/40$ DLC per year” model…)
Prey is worth your time.
Prey is so good! It’s one of my favorite games. It is not really like Starfield, though
Yeah, I’ve heard that it’s a great immersive sim. I wouldn’t call it a big space game™.
No, there’s nothing Skyrim about it in terms of game style. No open world, but it’s a very cool rpg space game.
The Outer Worlds is pretty much what Starfield could and should have been and was made by Obsidian, the developers behind a ton of other great games such as (in chronological order, with the best of all games ever bolded)
There’s even a sequel to it coming out some time this year so you don’t run as much of a risk of running out of game any time soon!
Hm. In my opinion Outer Worlds was just as boring and mediocre as starfield.
You aren’t wrong, but it’s better than starfield.
Hard disagree. They’re both equally boring as shit, but Starfield at least had decent ship flying/building mechanics. What did outer worlds have? Nothing.
world building that makes sense
It did? Outer Worlds was just an over-exaggerated parody of capitalism, Starfield at least had some somewhat-believable world building in terms of how the tech progressed, how/why did humans start to live among the stars, conflict between different religions or factions, the xenomorph threat…
Like I’m not saying any of these were done well, but it did have decent worldbuilding and some neat ideas, it was just the execution that sucked. OW might have some better parts than SF, like companion writing (although it was pretty cliched and cheesy there too) so I’m really surprised you use world building as your example lol
I’d agree that most of the world building in SF was better, but the unity just destroyed everything. It made it so everything you did, did not matter.
im just salty about starfields world building shouldve chosen different example
OWs world building was fine. nothing special, just fine. there were stupid things but they were either a joke or there to back up a point (“we moved this dangerous animal to this planet to make a deodorant and now its killing us” 👈 this shit is supposed to be funny and anti corporation. does it work? dunno, its stupid, might be funny to someone, its fine, little cringe )
starfields world building just grinds my gears. when there are stupid things, they are there because someone at bethesda thinks its coool as heck or didnt think it through. fucking space cowbois. fucking colony war. why add mechs into your world and ban them? why artificially limit the number of star systems the nations can control?
tldr - both are shit but starfields worse
Yeah I played it halfway and it didn’t grip me like New Vegas and KOTOR2 did. The story just seemed pretty convoluted and meandering.
Gameplay was about as fun as NV though!
Thank you! Felt like I was I playing a different game than everyone else.
Everyone mocked Starfield’s Neon for being Discount Cyberpunk. But at least they played it as straight as they could. Like, I could believe people live there and had a life.
It felt like Outer Worlds kept trying to make jokes about how cruel capitalism is versus tell a real story. Like, “Oh boy time to go increase shareholder value!” Or “I love Space nuts. I have to say that or I die.” Like wtf, where’s the subtlety?
It’s not Borderlands 3 bad, no where near it. But it’s pretty bad.
Yeah, I really enjoyed the polish of it and how it showed us what a better fallout could be.[
That said, it was woefully lacking on content and committed a cardinal sin of gaming: the ending felt like the game was just getting started.
Also, not a fan at all of whoever is telling them to ignore romance options.
I’d say it was a solid 7/10. One of the DLCs (Peril on Gorgon I think) is better than the base game, I’ve heard.
On a good day, Starfield’s a 5/10 in my eyes.
Totally agree the dlc really made it one if those “it gets good after x hours” sorta things; All different vibes for the dlcs too. The raider one was lonely but it felt like it was supposed to be.
It’s not the be~st choice, it’s spacer’s choice!
In this genre of “big space games”, The Outer Worlds stands near to Mass effect, because it follows “the Bioware formula” pretty closely: The player and a group of followers visit several semi-open worlds, where they look for a MacGuffin related to the main story while solving local problems. (I’ll write a short essay about the Bioware formula someday…)
The Outer Worlds was a good game (not great) and I look forward to the sequel. I’ve played most Obsidian games and I wish they wrote more sci-fi.
Starfield was much better than Outer Worlds IMO. I enjoyed my time with Starfield, it’s not perfect of course. I’ve tried to get through Outer Worlds three times but it’s just not fun, I also strongly dislike New Vegas. Just ok writing doesn’t make up for shitty gameplay.
Elite Dangerous
if only elite dangerous had a campaign
Star Citizen will get one
Sometime in 3025.
When Squadron 42 finally comes out, it’ll just be considered commentary on contemporary issues. Basically like Job Simulator… in space
2026 i think they’ve announced somewhat recently, we’ll see if it actually holds though
I’m old enough to remember the Kickstarter campaign. I lost track of how many release dates flew by since then.
Yeah they gave up announcing new release dates for it like half a decade ago if not longer lmao, but now they’ve started again. Hopefully it’s true this time.
Well, they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
I bought myself into sf before you got a hangar, i only had that one person race ship and after a while they added a hangar where you could spawn and walk around it.
After a while i noticed loads of reviews so i tried playing it, but always ran into issues making it unplayable. So i got really fed up with it for a while.
Then a couple years later i could actually run it with some issues, ended up buying a better ship and i’m now basically waiting for it to release and computer parts to be affordable once again.
I would love for star citizen to be my jam, but i doubt i’ll ever be able to put enough time into it. The most i ever managed to do consistently was diablo 4 season 1 to 3 before i dropped it completely.
I mean, they kind of do. It’s just not driven by cut scenes or NPC interaction. Have to read the news and be involved in the off game communities to get into the lore that’s happened in game.
That’s why a lot of people didn’t engage with the lore of Destiny - you had to go to a website totally separate from the game, link your account old-school Bungie style, and could only access the grimoire cards from said site after you went through the hoops. There was nothing in the game giving you more aside from the NPCs and the few cutscenes themselves. Not even a link to take you to the site from the game itself.
Almost every other game has an in-game lore/info screen talking about the world and characters of the game.
Pretty sure the in-universe news can be read in game.
I have a faint memory of them introducing a feature of text to speech for them as well, not sure I might be imagining this. Long time since I played.
X3: Reunion/Albion Prelude
X4
Elite: Dangerous
Spacebourne 2
Shit, even Star Trek: Online does what Starfield promised better, and it’s basically just another dime a dozen MMOs with a high profile licensed IP behind it.
For the most part, it’s either going to be missing a few things you’re looking for, or will offer everything but not actually be good/finished (such as with Star Citizen or anything ever made by Derek Smart, and why none of those are in the above list).
I’ve had my eyes on the X series for a long time. But they’re “fly around in your ship and do stuff” games and not “fly around and walk around” games, right? I’ve also heard there’s no learning curve, more of a learning wall.
You’re right, Star Trek Online is close to my ideal game. If only it weren’t a janky MMO…
I looked at Derek Smart’s games. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. But they kinda reminded of a GDC talk by Jeff Vogel where he talks about how he makes a living by making these niche isometric RPGs.
What about it being a janky MMO takes it away from being your ideal game though?
I really wouldn’t look at DS’s games, they are shite.
Quite a bit, I think. It being an MMO has some practical consequences, namely the fact that I can’t play it offline and the monetization of the game. It also influences the game mechanics: For example, STO’s combat uses tabbed targeting¹. I like tabbed targeting² but I don’t think it’s the peak of combat systems; a different combat system could/would make the game more engaging and enjoyable.
I can look at the individual parts of the game. There STO shines. But when I look at STO as a one compact package, it doesn’t.
¹ It also has a shooter mode but I remember it being janky as hell.
² I’d actually love to see a sort of “offline MMO” which would use tabbed targeting.
Thanks!
In X4 you can walk around on ships and stations, jump in other ships etc. It’s very limited though, which is a shame.
The gameplay is fantastic though, you could lose days building an empire.
Star Citizen will get a story mode called Squadron 42 witch should be feature complete and it has a star studded Hollywood cast. It looks worthwile but it won’t be here for at least a year.
Star citizen right now is great if you have a group of friends to play with. You can divide up work, do your space cowboy stuff. You and your friends just need a high tolerance for jinky systems
I’ll just assume you didn’t mean to respond to me. In any event, Squadron 42 is completely separate from the main game so I’ll wonder how jinky it might be.
I enjoy your optimism. I hope we see Squadron 42 soon and I hope it’s good. (The shitstorm if it isn’t would be huge!)
As much as I’m a fan of the project, I don’t think SC/SQ42 would scratch the same itch that somebody who just got done playing Starfield or Mass Effect would feel. Star Citizen is way more on the simulation side and light on RPG elements.
Yeah the prologue level they showed looked incredible. I really hope they can give the game all the polish it needs, after so long in development they absolutely need to release something with quality to match.
A year or twenty. Given how long they are taking, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game was never released.
Well, Star Citizen is playable right now (and has been for years), and they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live Squadron 42 gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
SQ42 has gone gold and is in polish phase, I would expect it within two years for sure.
Given the history of these guys, I am not gonna believe it until I see the game released and in the stores. Until then, as everything around star citizen, this is vaporware aimed at milking the whales that keep giving them money.
I love how it gets called “vaporware” when it’s a playable product with more gameplay than many MMOs. I’m also very grateful to the whales for providing the funds to develop the game.
I can’t tell if it’s satire or not
I wouldn’t be so sure that SQ42 will be a guaranteed slam dunk as many SC fans seem to be speculating. That’s if it ever does get released or course.
The gameplay in the recent demo is subpar. FPS combat in particular was trash, far worse than HL1; a game released more than a quarter of a century ago. Turret gunning and the platforming parts looked decent but they are not going to carry the game. No example of player controlled space flight was shown.
The space battles looked nice in a b-movie kind of way, but I have my doubts how this will translate to fun space flight gameplay.
From SC, we know that they have a very history of even basic conceptual balance and they are horrible at iterative play testing.
Regarding the Hollywood cast, Gary Oldman sounded like he wanted to get his money and get out of there ASAP. Anderson wasn’t much better. Writing was some high school-level drivel “we must win because we must!” and lots of shouty one liners. There is a very real possibility that the whole thing will be a Wing Commander: The Movie - 30 hours of tedious custscenes. And you just know it’s going to take itself extremely seriously (think the space bulldozer scene in Wing Commander).
Looking at the UI/UX of SC, it’s not unreasonable to assume SQ42 will suffer the same sorry fate. Very flashy ironman-style UI visuals that are nigh unusable in a video game.
Let’s see what happens.
Lmao
I know there has been some controversy around it, but Star Wars Outlaws might be worth a look.
It’s not.
Why not? Seems like a fun adventuring game that lets you travel from planet to planet solving problems/doing tasks for people. Seems similar to what the OP is looking for.
It’s not fun and the writing is bad.
Fun and bad writing are subjective. Would you care to be more specific on why it’s not good?
Not really, there’s plenty of reviews out there. I just don’t think that someone who found Starfiield to be mid will find Outlaws any better.
Everspace 2 (first one was a rogue like, you don’t need to play it to enjoy the sequel)
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (also a sequel, the first one doesn’t have a Y axys so you may not like it)
Chorus
All three are a lot of fun, neither are AAA games so they lack a bit of polish but aren’t vanilla as hell either. I enjoyed each one better than Starfield but neither as much as ME 1-3.
Also I’ve had some luck with https://www.50gameslike.com/ finding games.
Everspace 2 is heaps of fun and looks fantastic.
I’ll check out all three of them!
Cowboys in space is not my favourite trope, but I’ve heard good things about the first Rebel Galaxy. How was the switch from 2D combat to 3D combat in the sequel? (And is the story any good?)
The story is alright, but the combat is pretty good.
Cool site. Thanks for the link.
You’re welcome!
I’m commenting late, but there is The Precursors which does require Slavjank tolerance, but if you have it, it provides an interesting flavor on a space opera adventure.
I also haven’t tried The Tomorrow War which seemingly requires even higher Slavjank tolerance, and probably isn’t a top of all time game, but seems interesting if you like peering into strange forgotten games. Warlockracy did a video of this one.
I’ve actually heard of The Precursors before. It was featured in Tehsnakerer’s Playing series. I don’t know what my tolerance of slavjank is. I’ve played Operation Flashpoint a lot when I was a kid. Does that qualify as slavjank?
Really it just means the sorts of bugs you find with minimal QA testing combined with stilted voice acting, potentially untranslated audio or text, cultural beats that don’t quite cross over, and some game design choices that are different than how a game developed alongside western games might do things.
If you can stand this lack of polish, these sorts of games can at least give amusement for their price point.
It’s loosely in the same genre but you may like Rebel Galaxy. It takes a slightly different approach to space combat making it closer to naval warfare. Very enjoyable soundtrack.
Love this game! Just reinstalled yesterday after years to start a replay of it. I just hope if they make a third they go back to this style (more capital/naval ship feeling) and not the smaller fighter style the second one adopted.
Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
Haven’t seen anyone mention Starpoint Gemini. Warlords was probably the best iteration. Kinda like Eve but single player and a half way decent story.
Elite Dangerous: Best space travel, strap on your VR, put on a virtual monitor playing star trek into your cockpit and stand in awe of how gigantic planets truly are. It has fallen under mismanagement and its mid to late game is terrible. But for the price it’s great.
X4: Space sandbox game from the legendary studio behind… the x series. Fantastic galaxy sim where you can do whatever. Hunt bounties, be poor space trader who converts all their life savings to silicon wafers only to find out nobody is buying them or become ceo of the entire space. Only negative for me is it would be the perfect game if it had open space and orbiting planets and all.
Star Sector: basically mountain blade in space. Not on steam.
Space Engineers: Build your own spaceships and do whatever. The resources are more befitting of an automation game and you can automate.
More niche games: Astrox: Even online but singleplayer. Objects in space: Abandonware that takes an interesting approach to space travel. Delta v: rings of saturn: hardest sci fi space mining simulator around the rings of saturn. Starship EVO: very early access but has the best ship building system I’ve seen so far and ring worlds.