Quarto said:
The free-form Elite-style game and the storyline-oriented WC-style game are two completely different things. You very rarely get anywhere if you try to merge them into one product...
As other people have mentioned, Terminus and Hardwar are pretty damn good flying thing sims (because Hardwar isn't technically a space sim
) in this regard. Since I love both games, I'm gonna have to advertise them once again.
Hardwar is closer to Freelancer in that there are certain points in the storyline that, when reached, change the game world and allow no turning back (ie: everyone starts permanently shooting everyone else) - but you can still disregard the storyline from the start and do whatever you want within the game world... which is small as hell, and that's the major drawback I see to this game. There are other excellent aspects to it, such as the totally dynamic economic and item production models and the ability to purchase buildings and set up shops in them.
Terminus... damn, that's just the best damn game since Privateer and Elite 3 (FFE). It is closer to FFE, however, in that storyline missions aren't really glued to one another, they're more like a general set of events which directs the universe towards someplace (ie: war
)... and also there's the fact that missions can be "missed on". You don't report to your post in time, and some time later the game will act as if someone else had performed the mission you were called to. It may sound great, and more realistic than Sandoval waiting at New Detroit forever until Brownhair comes along... But the storyline will advance automatically without you being out there clicking NPCs to watch it develop, so what it does mean is that you'll miss out on parts of the game (you will probably prefer to reload an old save and leave that cargo run for later, because you know you have to be at Mars in 2 days or you'll miss out on a storyline mission). The fact that Terminus allows you to play as a member of 4 different factions, giving you essentially 4 totally different campaigns, more than makes up for this, though (and even if you miss a mission once in a while, you usually have enough time to respond to when people page you). Terminus also has the best damn flight system ever, which you can scale between Arcade and Newtonian at will.