SpaceSimCentral

I love Space Sims. I love everything about them. But I especially love the freedom of roaming around an open galaxy from star system to star system. IMO, the game that did this best was Independance War 2. ...But... out of all those planets and space stations that you fly near and dock to, you never actually get to disembark and explore the universe on foot. You are pretty much resigned to live either in a menu screen or the cockpit. And that my friends, is no way to live. In fact, I think it's the major reason that space flight sims have fallen out of favor. People prefer the personal feeling of rifles & grenads to space cannons & torpedos and just-out-of-reach planets.Likewise, I feel that games like the Mass Effect series are only half a game. Without the ability to fly a spaceship, you are only reminded that you are actually in space via cutscenes... lame... lame with extra lame sauce on top poured in the paper cut that is my disappointment in "modern" space games. We've had full fledged open universe flight sims since the early 90s. We've also had 1st person shooters since the 90s. How hard would it be to combine even the most basic elements of these two genres into a functional game? By now, there has to be a glut of relatively easily available code from the two genres that could be stiched together into the semblance of a decent full fledged space sim experience. Am I being unreasonable thinking that this should be possible in 2011?

Oh it is very much possible, its just the time needed to deliver on the scale most space gamers want and with the game market being over saturated with all types of games you really need to have a AAA title to succeed and re-coop the costs of development. Or you go the route of indie developer where you have the time just no budget so development time is extended. Look at Infinity: The Quest for Earth. It will be an amazing game when it is released but it has been in development for 4+ years already and probably still has 2 more.I thought CCP was coming the closest with the marriage of EVE Online and Dust 514 but they are two different games just in the same game world. Kerberos Productions will be working on a game called Northstar that at first glance will have what you are describing and will take some time to build. You also have Salvation Prophecy that does this as well and will be in beta shortly, I believe it won't have the huge endless scale your talking about, precursors is another one as well just not a large game itself.The tech is there and I think the devs want to make it but its the companies holding the purse strings don't want to take the risk on it. But that's my .02 on that.