![]() Rather than directly flying their ship, players would control their ship indirectly with mouse and keyboard commands.ĮVE was the realisation of what fans of open-world spacesims had been craving for years - an open-world where they could encounter other players. EVE is not strictly a “spacesim” per se, but it captured the feeling of open-space better than most other games. The other big name from 2003 is a game that is still played to this day, a game that has thoroughly ingrained itself in gaming history –the MMO, EVE Online. ![]() This wasn’t a game that would pass an astronomer’s realism tests, but it was a damn beautiful game. Another notable feature that gave Freelancer much of its flavour was the “science-fantasy” aesthetic. One of the most notable features was the flight model, which was entirely mouse-and-keyboard based, unlike most other games in the spacesim genre. Developer Digital Anvil was eventually acquired by Microsoft, who finally put their foot down and pushed the game out before the entire scope of Roberts’ vision was realised.įreelancer might not have lived up to the hype, but it was a phenomenal game. By the time 2003 arrived, Freelancer’s development had been dragging on for many years, and in true Roberts fashion, was subjected to monumental hype thanks to some pretty outlandish promises. Roberts had been there from the start with Privateer, and was finally returning to the genre with the highly anticipated Freelancer. The first of these was a title from a name that has become synonymous with spacesims, Chris Roberts. Independence War 2: The Edge of Chaos (2001) is one frequently overlooked game, but it was in 2003 that this next generation of games peaked, with two particularly notable open-world space games. Besides 2000’s semi-open-world Tachyon: The Fringe, the new generation of open-world spacesims could mostly be played without a joystick. By the year 2000, the joystick was becoming a less-common peripheral, and spacesims were falling out of favour. X wasn’t the first open-world spacesim of this next generation (The Software Refinery’s underappreciated gem Hardwar was released in 1998), but it was one of the catalysts for a brief revival of the genre, albeit in a changed form. X has a steep learning curve, but for those players who conquered the complex gameplay and occasionally awkward English translations, they were rewarded with an incredibly deep and complex game. ![]() X was the Wall Street of the space trading and combat genre - Not only did players have a huge universe to explore, they could use their accumulated credits to buy fleets of industrials spaceships, factories and space stations to exploit resources and manufacture goods to sell throughout the universe. This is exactly what Egosoft banked on when they spearheaded the next generation of open-world spacesims with 1999’s X: Beyond the Frontier. The first generation of these games showed that players were not only happy to pursue mundane sci-fi equivalents of real-life jobs - they absolutely loved it. One thing that people perhaps didn’t expect was that players would so thoroughly immerse themselves in “mundane” jobs - transporting passengers and cargo as a freight pilot, or pursuing credits as a trader. They embodied what most gamers desired more than anything - the freedom to totally immerse yourself in a another world. X: Beyond the Frontier (Source: MobyGames)įrom the moment they appeared, it was obvious that open-world spacesims would be successful.
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