When I think “space game” I usually have a specific genre in mind and Mass Effect isn’t it. You don’t even do anything in space unless you count the hub area since it’s your spaceship. For Starfield to be an honorable mention but Elite completely devoid from the list has dealt me near lethal psychic damage. 😩

I still have a soft spot for Freelancer, despite all the years that have gone by (and aside from some minor UI issues, plays perfectly on a modern PC), and it still looks remarkably nice for its age, too. The story is pretty linear, and the characters not hugely memorable (despite some voice acting from George Takei, John Rhys-Davies, and Jennifer Hale), but it’s just fun to play. It can be challenging if you want to venture into areas less travelled, but because progress through the game is largely dependent on the money you earn (in-game), if you just want a chill evening, you can just trade goods.

And like… this is a game I’ve been playing on and off for 20 years, and occasionally I still find something new. I played it a couple of months ago, committing to docking with every planet and station… and discovered a new trade route that was both shorter and more profitable than the one I had been using. It probably only cut 10 minutes off my three stage trade run around the entire map, but it was still kind of exciting to go “oooh, I never realised this was an option!” All because I visited a station I don’t usually visit.

Sort of surprised Elite Dangerous never made your list. It seems like it would be right up your alley! I’ve invested thousands of hours in Elite Dangerous and several thousands hours across the entire Elite franchise.

I’ve had lots of fun with more recent space games, but to this day Star Citizen’s Squadron 42 is the closest I’ve seen any game come to Elite’s level of flight control and maneuvering. I would say it’s currently held down by how they try to manage additional content and flushing out existing content. Endgame content isn’t as exhilarating as I’d hoped, but there’s still plenty to do in the game to keep you busy for hundreds if not thousands of hours.

Elite certainly isn’t without it’s faults and I’d be pleased to see more contenders in this space (ha!), but I also recognize that space sandbox games are very difficult to get right.

Warframe! I haven’t played in a while but the art style and game in general will always have a place in my heart.

Of the ones on your list I have only played mass effect back in the xbox360 days. It was one of the first games I played. Super good memories. I might need to revisit those if my Xbox is still working

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.

I just finished playing X3: Terrain Conflict, and I’ll never play another X game.

As an achievement hunter, I normally play past the point of normal enjoyment, but this game told me, more or less, to go fuck myself.

The first kick in the nuts was completing “Dead Is Dead” mode.

You don’t get to save (with the exception of shutting the game down, but the save will delete upon starting it back up).

The game is prone to crashes, meaning you can have your entire save wiped in an instant because the game decides it doesn’t like it when you use the fast forward function within 10 seconds of a cut scene.

On top of that, one of the campaigns requires you to set up a massive complex of microchips and silicon, which also has a chance of triggering a crash each time you place a factory down.

The final 2 achievements are basically “grind until we say stop”. Which functionally resulted in me leaving my computer on overnight, four nights in a row.

The fact that the devs left the game in this state is inconsiderate at best, and disrespectful at worst.

Besides, the game is basically just an excel sheet simulator, it really isn’t very engaging.

Disclaimer: It’s been 2 years since I last played this game so a lot might have changed (though I suspect it hasn’t).

Not sure if it counts as AAA but since you mentioned X4, I think Elite: Dangerous can be included as well. Honestly, I have a love-hate relationship with this game because I feel it has so much wasted potential.

Just as an example: the devs made a 1:1 replica of the Milky Way galaxy, featuring more or less 400 billion star systems. From what I could gather, it uses real astronomical data and you can travel to each and everyone of those systems. I’m not sure how much it has changed nowadays, but last I checked, around 99% of the galaxy was yet to be explored. Also, someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it takes months to go from the populated systems to the far end of the galaxy and its a massive, massive undertaking, where you sort of need to use external tools to plan your trip. And honestly, for me, the sheer scale, the possibility of exploring actual, real places, like the Galaxy core, and also the actual undertaking, is probably the best part of the game. Just going from the core systems to Colonia (which is the other cluster of populated systems) takes a good while, namely days, or even weeks.

But there’s a catch: there’s not much to see or do in these trips. You’re basically warping from system to system and you might stumble upon some really cool real life phenomena like a neutrino star or a hypergiant star or even a black hole (which does nothing to your ship, as far as I know, just gives you a cool visual effect). I’m going to be honest, when I first got to the system harboring the Betelgeuse hypergiant, it was so massive, I couldn’t see the end of it and thought I was going to crash into the star and lose my ship. There was another time where warped in the middle of a binary star system. Again, panic ensued. And honestly, these moments are memorable and stick with you for a long time. But they’re not nearly as a common as one might think.

And it wouldn’t be that bad if, again, there was more to do and see. To put it simply, most of the time, the game feels aimless and empty. You can trade, be a pirate, mine, but you’re doing it just because. Sure, there are community events where you can have an effect on the galaxy, but I don’t feel they have that much of an impact. I guess they were trying to change that with the addition of an hostile alien species but I’m not sure how’s that working out nowadays.

But even then, I could’ve tolerated all of this if it wasn’t for the consistently stupid decisions made by the devs. Instead of actually addressing the current criticisms of the game, they added fuckin’ space legs to the game instead, which nobody asked for. Adding insult to injury, this expansion, Odyssey, is (or was? Not sure how it is nowadays) an unoptimized mess. I had the game crashing on me so many times, I eventually got fed up and uninstalled it. The framerate was also very unstable as reported by a lot of people.

Oh, and they also stopped supporting the console versions. Not sure if they got some sort of compensation, honestly.

And yet, I still haven’t found a space game that managed to equal the highs that I experienced in Elite: Dangerous. I tried No Man’s Sky, X4, Everspace, and all of them came up short. I’m sure they’re great games but the game that makes me forget about Elite: Dangerous is yet to come. Although I should probably try No Man’s Sky again.

I nominate chorus for the AA showdown

Also, was outer worlds considered for this one? I hear it’s also a Bethesda game in space, would be interesting to compare it to starfield

EVE always fascinated me, but at the same time how beginner unfriendly I’ve heard it is + feeling like I’ll probably not last long before I get killed off makes me wary of trying it.

If Outer Wilds counts as AA, then I’ll nominate that next (even if I still need to finish it)

I got into gaming late and don’t have a ton of time to play, so I’m not a super experienced gamer. I LOVE No Man’s Sky. Any thoughts on which of these I would enjoy most if I feel like branching out?

I like Starfield, but as you point out, unless “space game” means “space-themed”, it’s really not the same genre as some of the other games in here. It has space combat, but it’s little more than a minigame. It’s not trying to be a space combat-oriented game. It does have some zero-gravity first-person-shooting combat sequences, which is kinda nifty, but

Of course, the same apply to Stellaris – it’s a 4x game that’s space-themed.

I haven’t played Mass Effect, but my understanding is that something similar would apply.

For me, the genre has more to do with games being comparable than the theme.

So, if I were gonna compare top games, I think I’d maybe do space 4x games, space combat games (and maybe subdivide those into Newtonian and non-Newtonian physics), and first-person games set in the far future, maybe a few other divisions (e.g. I’d certainly call Kerbal Space Project a good “space-themed game”, though it’s not a combat game). I’ve enjoyed all those sorts of games, but I’d be hard put to compare a game in one genre to the other…it’s like asking “what’s better, a steak or a banana split?”.

Non-Newtonian space combat flight games

This refers to games where you’re flying something that works kind of like an aerodynamic fighter in an atmosphere, but in space. If you turn, your spacecraft moves like flying in a fluid, and your whole spacecraft’s velocity changes.

This was a really big genre in the late-90s and early-2000s, but it saw a major dropoff over time. It was also big in TV series an movies – stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars.

It’s not really a “hard space sim”, but it has a lot of conventions aimed at making it pretty and exciting. Some conventions in the genre:

• Space looks a lot like the kind of false-color photos that NASA puts out (note that other genres are not immune to this either).

• Often has “Star Wars lasers”, which are visible, slow, and make sounds going by.

• Sound transmits through space, so you get explosions and such being audible.

• Fighters play a major role, and combat typically takes place at extremely close ranges (relative to our best guesses at what real-life space combat would look like), in World-War-2-style dogfights. The job the human has is usually in significant part the same as a WW2 pilot would have in a dogfight, lining up the weapons, maybe managing “ship energy” or some other such system. There are likely missiles, but these are used at close range, and don’t have high-off-boresight targeting. There’s typically some kind of CIWS or flare-countering-infrared-homing-missile analog.

• Forward-mounted weapons are common, though usually not exclusive.

• There’s usually some form of “warp drive” to deal with the kind of distances in space in a meaningful amount of time.

• The pilot is usually in an environment analogous to a 20th-century air-breathing jet fighter: there are glass windows looking out on space, and visual identification of targets plays a real role.

• Carriers often show up.

• There are often torpedoes or analogs – hard-hitting weapons that move more-slowly.

• It’s often the case that there’s some form of energy shield which can readily-regenerate and blocks a certain amount of weapons fire.

• Tractor beams often show up.

• Usually issues like utilizing gravity wells or something don’t play a major role in the game.

• It’s common to have some form of engine sound. Engines often look a lot like rocket engines – like, there’s visible combustion products coming out the back and a roaring sound; sometimes you’ll have ion thruster-looking things.

• The “space trading” genre is probably a subgenre of this; I don’t know of any “space trading” games that don’t also have space combat as an element.

I think that the genre is in significant part a mix of American cultural elements from the WW2-to-maybe-post-Vietnam era. A lot of the stuff is analogous to carrier combat plus having futuristic-themed forms of weapons common in air-to-air combat in the 20th century.

Those are all conventions developed over time by Hollywood and comic books and video games to make games work and appealing. Some of them work pretty-differently from reality (or what our best guesses are as to likely future space combat). But they’re pretty fun (at least, in my opinion).

I miss this genre, myself – there are a relatively-few games that have come out recently, and personally, I think that it’s people missing games in the genre that drove Star Citizen’s funding. I think that one reason that it was such a big deal in the late-90s was the confluence of cultural elements and the fact that space can be relatively-cheap to render, compared to atmospheric combat flight sims; you don’t need a lot of texture memory to make things look good, and hardware was often kinda limited then.

Newtonian space combat flight sim

This is a bit more of a catch-all, but it generally eschews some or all of the above (particularly the “flying through space is like flying through fluid”) and focuses more on the “hard sim” side.

4x space game

This is a strategy genre; space isn’t really critical other than in that there are many isolated, habitable worlds to conquer.

Master of Orion and similar fall into this genre.

Space RTS

Not a lot of entrants here, but I think that Homeworld permitting for the use of a third dimension does meaningfully change the RTS genre.

Space sim

I’m not aware of a lot of games in this genre, but I can’t really fit Kerbal Space Project into another category, and it’s undeniably a space game.

Space-themed games

I’m kind of using this as a catch-all, but there are games in many genres that are set in the future and have space as a theme, but play pretty much analogously to games set in a present-day theme. Maybe there’s a bit of stuff that they pull in that wouldn’t happen in a present-day setting (e.g. Starfield’s zero-g FPS combat), but you could basically reskin most of the game and have it play the same way in a present- or past-setting.

The idea of Eve was always very interesting to me, but I’ve never tried it. The whole aspect of the massive battles wasn’t what I was looking for, I was just interested in the mining and building end of it. I could never tell if I would be able to do that without getting blown up all the time, and never wanted to invest the time in trying it without knowing. I ended up doing something similar in RuneScape. I spent most of the few years I played crafting and selling products and sometimes going on quests.

Ogame is one of those free browser games with pay to win mechanics. I play it every few years just to get rid of that build and deploy fleet bug.

NMSky was pretty mellow and I enjoyed it, up until all the planets i discovered and named had thier names reverted back. No cursing or anything obvious as to why, most were Donkey themed since I am a_d0nkey.

Great write up, thank you for sharing and I can’t wait for Part 2! I’ve never heard of X4, but now you’ve got me curious to check it out. I appreciated your thoughts on Stellaris. I played Stellaris after Crusader Kings and found myself wishing it had a little more of Crusader Kings in it, so it’s interesting to hear you describe it as having “a high focus on randomized events, narrative events, and overarching story lines.” Maybe I need to give that another chance, too.