Personally I think that the reason space games have gone is because people want too much and have high expectations.
A game like X3:TC (which I played and couldn't quite get into) had really ace combat but doesn't scale the enemy NPCs with your level - so some missions you will literally piss through and others will be near impossible without an entire fleet at your disposal (not that the game will tell you that either!).
They tried adding diffiuculty to the missions but some 'hard' missions you could easily take out a M3+ ship by staying its dead zone and a 'medium' mission would have an entire fleet of xenon that would quickly kick your ass cus your wingmen are (to quote yourself) pants on head retarded!
I played X3:TC for the combat, but its very hard to make money that way - combat missions are few and far between and if you feel the urge to gun something down you need to fly around different sectors and FIND the mission - you can't just goto a military base and ASK for one.
As I started with the problem is choice - alot of people want the combat element of space games, but done badly (like grinding) takes the fun away from it and it becomes really boring really quickly.
Other people want trading - which is fine but also gets boring and slow if you need to do it all yourself (which is why X3 has 'auto traders' to do the work for you)
Some other people want to explore, but to be honest all you will see is more black stuff and planets you can never actually get close or land on. Maybe you will find a free ship floating around but generally it seems like a complete waste of time considering you may never gain anything more than a pretty pretty view.
Personally the best space game I have played in years (and it is years old) is 'Freelancer' - the combat was fun, controls were easy to use (and didn't require a degree in dogfighting or a flightstick), ships were interesting and the story was interesting enough to keep you going. The only real problem was once you had finished the story the only thing you could do is get more useless credits to buy more useless stuff for no real reason other than to say you've got it - but I guess thats just me
A game like X3:TC (which I played and couldn't quite get into) had really ace combat but doesn't scale the enemy NPCs with your level - so some missions you will literally piss through and others will be near impossible without an entire fleet at your disposal (not that the game will tell you that either!).
They tried adding diffiuculty to the missions but some 'hard' missions you could easily take out a M3+ ship by staying its dead zone and a 'medium' mission would have an entire fleet of xenon that would quickly kick your ass cus your wingmen are (to quote yourself) pants on head retarded!
I played X3:TC for the combat, but its very hard to make money that way - combat missions are few and far between and if you feel the urge to gun something down you need to fly around different sectors and FIND the mission - you can't just goto a military base and ASK for one.
As I started with the problem is choice - alot of people want the combat element of space games, but done badly (like grinding) takes the fun away from it and it becomes really boring really quickly.
Other people want trading - which is fine but also gets boring and slow if you need to do it all yourself (which is why X3 has 'auto traders' to do the work for you)
Some other people want to explore, but to be honest all you will see is more black stuff and planets you can never actually get close or land on. Maybe you will find a free ship floating around but generally it seems like a complete waste of time considering you may never gain anything more than a pretty pretty view.
Personally the best space game I have played in years (and it is years old) is 'Freelancer' - the combat was fun, controls were easy to use (and didn't require a degree in dogfighting or a flightstick), ships were interesting and the story was interesting enough to keep you going. The only real problem was once you had finished the story the only thing you could do is get more useless credits to buy more useless stuff for no real reason other than to say you've got it - but I guess thats just me
