These are the ones I’ve played over the years. Hope I’m not missing anything:
Elite Dangerous - Highly reccomend this, it’s basically a huge sandbox, with full size galaxy, “real” star distances and orbits, excellent flight model. It also has the most awesome community around it. Downsides are that while it has lore and ongoing background story, there’s no quest, no interesting characters, no rpg elements. Also there’s quite a learning curve, and quite a grind (albeit maneageable these days). There’s also a new colonization feature in the works that will involve a lot of comunity effort. If you do decide to play it, join a group, a squad, or just buzz me so I can add you here and there. Friends make the game sooo much better.
Everspace 2 - This may be what you’re looking for, as it has story, good gameplay, arcadey flight model and lots of rpg elements. Overall a great game. Only problem with it is that it’s not particularly large. Its universe is far smaller than starfield’s.
NMS - Another one with an immense galaxy. This one has a storyline, but not a lot of rpg elements. A lot of it is procedural and after a while feels very samey and shallow. It does have crossplay and a great community as well.
X4 - Not especially large, but great single player game, with a universe that feels lived in. Also no rpg and I hear the endgame gets a bit managery.
Spacebourne - Haven’t played it long but iy gas good potential. There’s a bunch of systems, there’s quests, reminds me a bit of freelancer. The downside is that there’s a single dev, so development is slow and there’s a fair amount of jank.
Edit:
ME - I feel it is still king of story driven spage-rpg even after all these years. Maybe give Andromeda a try? The story is meh, but it has great gameplay, and far fewer bugs.
I always felt Andromeda got a bad rap. It’s not a great game. It’s not on par with mass effect. But it’s fine, I had fun. I never felt like it was a waste of money. Not a masterpiece, but I enjoyed it
Czy planuje? Od zanim powstał szmer. Jest to jednak zależne od pracy deweloperów i nie jest to proste. Z powodu złożoności potrzebnych rozwiązań konsekwentnie uciekają od kwestii od jakichś 5 lat.
W napisaniu części oprogramowania, która by za to odpowiadała - ze względu na zdecentralizowaną strukturę platformy (tzn. że treść generalnie ma być jednocześnie wyświetlana na wielu serwerach).
Perhaps Starsector? It’s a top-down sandbox rpg. I personally find the lore and world-building interesting. Has great mechanics, and you can really get into the nitty-gritty when it comes to ship and fleet builds, you can basically do anything you want, whether you want to do solo stuff or form an empire. It also has a fantastic modding community.
Came here to suggest it and here it is, the newest comment! The modding scene is insane, too, for such a relatively small and unknown game.
I love Starsector. I just wish it was written in something more performant than fuckin’ Java. But, if it were, there probably wouldn’t be the mods for it there are today.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing a quest line of my own. Honest.
Yeah, Starsector is probably my favourite lesser known game. There’s a mod/tool called “Mikohime Java 24” that’s supposed to help a lot with the performance, but I haven’t had a chance to test it myself. Would be great to see another quest line, if I had the skills I’d love to make a mod myself lol.
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.
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 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.
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.
Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):
BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.
There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or tboi.com open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?
But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.
avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
The stupid behavior of X item sucks is part of the fun of the game and why it’s so great, though. You pretty much forget all those broken runs you got, but I’ll never forget the times I found Plan C or used the Bible on Satan. I also think you’re missing that repentance modernized all this and there’s even fewer bad items than before. At this point there are only a handful of truly bad items.
Hades is great and holds your hand, but the fact that every upgrade is more-or-less the same type of skill addition to your build is also boring.
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.
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!
I forgot to mention that part – yeah, the series is still alive, and fans have been waiting for that sequel from the original creators for what, 30 years now?
A game that meaningful should always be given a look, even if it can feel a bit “dated” in some ways.
I often see Star Control 2 mentioned as an inspiration for Mass Effect. How does Star Control compare to Mass Effect? Is there a set story or is it more of an emergent narrative?
There’s a set story, but it’s discovered. The world is wide open, and the player can go anywhere right at the start of the game. There’s minimal railroading at any point.
Unless I misunderstood what you meant by emergent narrative. The progression through the game requires the player to learn what to do by interacting with aliens and also exploring a bit. There is an in-game hint system (an alien dialogue tree with prices), but there are often multiple solutions to each “problem”. The player can even get through the game being good or evil – whatever they choose!
The game plays very differently than ME, but you’ll probably find the dialogue trees very familiar. And I think SC2 actually does them better than ME.
Came here to suggest The Binding of Isaac, but it looks like people already convinced you. Hope you love it! I’ve achieved 100% completion at around 870 hours, and one of my acquaintances is currently at 4.1k hours played of that. It’s an incredible amount of fun
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