I was playing some Everspace 2 and while it sure is pretty and feels pretty good there was something lacking that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’m only 20 hours or so into it but I just felt like it wasn’t quite living up to my memories of Freelancer.
Now I last played Freelancer over 15 years ago so I was sure that I was just seeing this through a heavy mist of nostalgia, so I reinstalled the old game, installed the HD mod and a few other user made tweaks and loaded it up. The opening scenes were definitely nostalgic but once I started to fly missions properly again it became crystal clear, nope Freelancer still kicks the shit out of every other space game I’ve ever played since.
Elite Dangerous, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Everspace 2, Spacebourne 2, EVE Online, (edit adding more I’ve played here: Chorus, Star Citizen, No Mans Sky) they all have strengths but nothing feels as good as the grand daddy Freelancer.
I think it comes down to exploration.
What I mean by this is that Freelancer incorporates the ring tunnel system to allow you to quickly travel between points of interest - you can easily go from one planet to another by traveling in these tunnels. What was amazing about this is that at any time you could "leave" the tunnel and go off on your own. It felt like it was something you shouldn't really do, but if you did it, and you went far enough out where there wasn't much civilization, you could encounter stuff like a wormhole by chance and suddenly end up in a completely different solar system.
That exploration is what is missing in Everspace 2 in my opinion. Everything in Everspace 2 boils down to these small areas that you fast travel in-between.
It's like if you took the original Legend of Zelda and just had fast travel between the underground dungeons without the over-world exploration. At least that's how I see it.
Not only does this apply to trade lanes but with regards to where you could go via jump gates or with jump holes.
You could think of jump gates like a space highway, often placed at the edges of systems connected to the rest of the important spots (or at least the important/civilized/non-criminal locations) in a system with trade lanes. Want to go to another system? You used the jump gates to do so.
This works fine for a good majority of accessing the systems in the game, but once you start getting to the more undeveloped, frontier systems, your ability to travel is also affected, like if you had to drive down a rough, dirt road as opposed to a tarmac highway.
You may have to forgo the use of trade lanes entirely in some places that don't have them and some systems are not accessible via jump gates either, with you needing to find jump holes instead to reach them. In fact, to get some of the best ships in the game you'd have to access the Outcasts factions home planet which you can only do via said jump holes.
I thought it was really cool how they did that, was an effective little change in gameplay to show the development of a location and made exploring and going off the beaten track super rewarding!