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?
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.
There’s always Star Citizen… :)
Okay but really I agree that Starfield is a mess. The thing is, nobody else has really delivered on the whole package yet. Ground and space combat, trading, and a narrative.
Mass effect and Freelancer gave two different sides of the coin and I think they’re the next closest.
Freelancer
+1 for that. One of the best space sims, despite its age, and my first contact with actual zero-g dogfighting (boost, turn off engine, rotate ship to try and hit the enemy)
I can’t believe (actually I can) that Microsoft didn’t base starfield’s space mechanics (and overall everything else) from Freelancer. The template to improve upon was right there.
Considering all the problems Bethesda had with simply making space work at all, I’m not surprised they didn’t even try to look into better games to copy from
If you’re into retro-gaming, Starflight and Starflight II were both excellent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight_2:_Trade_Routes_of_the_Cloud_Nebula
SpaceBourne 2 is a single-player, open-universe RPG and third-person shooter game with an abundance of features, including role-playing, mining, trading, piracy, crafting, and deep exploration. The story picks up where it left off in SpaceBourne, but now the player’s goal is to build a new empire in the galaxy, with the methods of doing so being completely up to the player.
Star Citizen is the only modern game that I’ve got any hope for. It’s still years from being a proper game, but in the meantime you can have a surprising amount of fun in the persistent universe, assuming you can run it at acceptable framerates.
It gets a ton of hate, which I think is pretty unjustified given that it’s the single most ambitious gaming project ever, and the progress they’ve made with in-house tools is frankly amazing. Just don’t go dropping hundreds on ships and you won’t have anything to regret.
Store Citizen
Lol
Classic no-thought throwaway line that dismisses the massive accomplishments already made. Literally, you can go play the game right now and it’s better than Elite Dangerous, for a lower price.
Feel free to stop by the store and purchase a thought out response for only $420.69, and it might be released in a few years.
I believed in Chris Roberts because of Freelancer and backed it on Kickstarter, and have watched from the shadows as the story has unfolded. I occasionally dipped my toes in to see how it was coming along, but the performance was awful on midline hardware so I put it back down and waited. Now that the turmoil at the top has come out and people are leaving, I don’t hold much hope for the future of the game.
I think the reason it gets a ton of hate is that Roberts had gone and proven that Microsoft were absolutely right to take Freelancer away from him so it could get finished. They weren’t shackling a maverick genius, they were mitigating losses from his poor leadership.
Maybe check out Starsector by https://fractalsoftworks.com. It’s written in Java so it runs on basically anything, and it’s 2d top-down but the detail on the ships is great. I love this game very much because it scratches most of the itches I was hoping for from Star Citizen.
mmmmmmmn
Delicious copium.
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…)
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.
Not really what is looked for here in most ways, but there’s Parkan.
I have little to say other than it exists.
Duskers. A game that seems to be inspired heavily by the aesthetics of the first Alien movie. Instead of one terrifying xenomorph, there are four (?) different kinds all working independently to exterminate humanity. You’re at the point in the story where they’ve basically succeeded, and you’re trying to figure out what the heck happened. You get to do some basic scripting as well!
if only elite dangerous had a campaign
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.
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.
Elite Dangerous
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.
Also I’ve had some luck with https://www.50gameslike.com/ finding games.
Cool site. Thanks for the link.
You’re welcome!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks!
