What are some space games that give you total control?

[Shintsu2]

I've seen a few space games that when you go to land or dock somewhere, the game autopilots and does everything for you. Back in the '90s I swear I remember a few games that let you guide your ship and dock it, as well as run the risk of damaging it by running into things. Ignoring games like KSP and Space Engineers, what other games are out there that in this aspect, give you a lot of freedom? Seems like too many games hold your hand and assume you're too stupid and basically remove any consequences.

I feel like there's an old '90s game I'm remembering in there somewhere that I'm forgetting. Maybe Hive? Wing Commander? Descent? Either way, would love some recommendations both old and new if anyone has them.

 

[Supernova1138]

Sounds like Elite: Dangerous might be interesting to you. It's an open world space sim that is pretty open ended as far as how you want to play eg. combat focused, trading or exploring the universe, and you do have to manually control your ship during docking, failure to land on the right pad or flying around recklessly tends to get the authorities after you.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Evochron Legacy and Elite Dangerous do it to different extents.

Evochron Legacy has simplified station landing, where you just cruise into the docking port and approach the central column and it docks you, but intense planetary landings, where you need to carefully manage velocity going into and out of atmospheres and approach planetside docks. This is to say nothing of the intense and super complex 100% newtonian space flight where you can spin like a damn gyroball and shoot down missiles behind you while flying backwards.

Elite has in-depth station and planet landing. For stations, you have to approach, carefully adjust your speed and drop out of lightspeed into the station's instance, then hail the station and request docking, then fly into the small little slot of the station, then fly to your designated landing spot, and gently touch down. Goofing up and landing on the wrong slot could get you vaporized by security. Planetary landing is only with the Horizons DLC, but also has you carefully manage speed before you can drop into the atmosphere, then slowly cruise down until you can land. Flight controls are more like flying a plane in space, but if you're using a gamepad or joystick it works reasonably well.

I'd lean more towards recommending Elite, as Evochron (while super deep) feels kind of sterile and like you're just interacting with game mechanics than a world, whereas there's plenty of ways to liven up Elite (play online, join a player guild, etc)

 

[Bad Jim]

You might actually be thinking of Elite, Elite 2 or Elite: First Encounters. In each case, manual docking was pretty tricky, risked losing your ship and usually took much longer than an automatic dock. I hardly ever docked manually by choice. So I can definitely understand why some games just dock you automatically.

But manual docking is pretty common in my experience. I think in the X series you can actually fly around inside the space station.

 

[helwyr]

Hardwar was a game that did it back in the day. It was one of my favourite games and there's not been anything quite like it since.

 

[happyninja42]

Freelancer was a really good one. You could be a legit pilot, or go pirate, could attack shipping lanes or defend against pirates by working with the authorities. You could simply be a cargo pilot who just flew supplies around, or a combat pilot taking bounties on scum operating in the sectors. You could align with specific factions against others, and this would directly impact how you would navigate the systems. Being a pirate meant using the established lanes was dangerous, as they were patrolled by cops, so you had to use the uncharted warp holes to get around safely, and vice versa.

Overall a very fun game. Also, Tachyon the Fringe had a very open world design to it. You could just ignore the storyline missions and just fly around doing your own thing all day if you wanted.

 

[Yoshi178]

Space Invaders

 

[Silverbeard]

Let me add my vote for Elite: Dangerous. It's basically the exact game you're looking for: A wide open galaxy, freedom to move around and make or break alliances as you please (with the attendant consequences of both) and manually controlled and occasionally obnoxious landing sequences.

Freelancer was a really good one. You could be a legit pilot, or go pirate, could attack shipping lanes or defend against pirates by working with the authorities. You could simply be a cargo pilot who just flew supplies around, or a combat pilot taking bounties on scum operating in the sectors. You could align with specific factions against others, and this would directly impact how you would navigate the systems. Being a pirate meant using the established lanes was dangerous, as they were patrolled by cops, so you had to use the uncharted warp holes to get around safely, and vice versa.

Overall a very fun game. Also, Tachyon the Fringe had a very open world design to it. You could just ignore the storyline missions and just fly around doing your own thing all day if you wanted.

That was a good game. I do wish there was more battleship combat beyond the story campaign. I had all those torpedoes sitting around in my hold with nothing to shoot them at!

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Freelancer was a really good one. You could be a legit pilot, or go pirate, could attack shipping lanes or defend against pirates by working with the authorities. You could simply be a cargo pilot who just flew supplies around, or a combat pilot taking bounties on scum operating in the sectors. You could align with specific factions against others, and this would directly impact how you would navigate the systems. Being a pirate meant using the established lanes was dangerous, as they were patrolled by cops, so you had to use the uncharted warp holes to get around safely, and vice versa.

I hear so many good things about that game, and I'm really upset it doesn't have a Steam or GoG release.

 

[Marik2]

What happened to fun space game the game?