this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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The biggest competitor to Star Citizen right now is Elite: Dangerous. I've played it a lot and it's pretty good. You can play solo or online, too. It can feel a bit slow and it doesn't hold your hand when it comes to learning how to play. There's combat, trading, and exploration. Also pretty active communities online.
If you want to go back in time a bit, there's also the X series from Egosoft that's spanned back many years. There are a few installments and more is being developed. These games are definitely more colorful in several ways than Elite: Dangerous. More of a focus on the Rule of Cool than trying to be real sims.
Haven't played Star Wars: Squadrons, so I don't know the state of the multiplayer side of things. It does offer a solo story mode, apparently. May be worth looking into.
Every now and again I'll think about games like Freelancer, Freelancer 2, X-Wing, and the Wing Commander franchise for straight sit-in-cockpit combat action. Those are very old- early Mid 1990's to early 2000's. If you feel like something retro and can run them, those are options. I wish we had more games styled after those early space sims.
This game was infuriating for the enormous wasted potential that it was. From the day of launch they said they were planning to never update it, add to it, or expand it.
It could have been the successor to X-Wing/TIE Fighter, but they starved it from the beginning. The multiplayer was bad and they only had a few servers in the US, so it was too laggy for everyone overseas.
The game could have been something great, but it was dead out the door.
Idk, I'll take a short and sweet tie fighter tribute with modern graphics over a microtransactioned live service game any day of the week.
Those aren't the only 2 choices though. Ideally we'd get something like modern visuals on top of the game design of 15-20 years ago. Remember when you could host your own server and play with dozens of people? Remember college LAN parties of Wolfenstein with 60+ players? That's what this could have been. We need TF2 in space, but we got Overwatch.
Squadron's ugly flaw (aside from the bad latency caused by US-only servers) was that they copied the current trend in pvp games where it's a 5v5 battle and everything has to be "balanced." It was like playing crappy football with Star Wars ships. The objectives were pathetic and matchmaking was so bad that the games were almost always a pathetic wipe because one side was a team of 5 near-pro level gamers vs 5 solo newbies.
Still, it was gorgeous. And in VR it was chef's kiss
With some patching it could live up to its potential, but as it is it's sadly a dream that never came true.
I guess, but realistically EA doesn't work that way. Especially under disneg licensing terms. Overall, I kinda appreciated squadrons for being a no BS, give the fans what they want kinda game. Trying to do live service updates with Disney licensing terms just doesn't work- look at avengers and fan reactions to battlefront on release.
I can appreciate that.
I enjoyed it for what it was. I just saw so much more potential in it, and was heartbroken that it didn't go in that direction.
If you want a great game though, you have to play freespace 2, which i raved about in another post.
Thanks! I will check it out!