I’m a massive sci fi fan and played the ever loving shit out of Star Citizen for a while there. Loved the 6 degrees of freedom and the capability to be a person or a starship.
I know Starfield is coming in September and I’m excited for what is has to offer but in the interim does anybody have a sci fi/star fighter game they can recommend? I kickstarted Everspace 2 so I can give that a go and I’m almost done with the current No Man’s Sky expedition
If you’re into colony sims, check out Space Haven.
Definitely get the Mass Effect Trilogy. You could probably play through the whole thing before starfield comes out if it hooks you like it did for me.
If you like the idea of building your ship and then using it to blast pirates into little pieces, you could give Avorion a go. It’s currently half price on Steam and is a bit Minecraft in space. It had no player view though, everything is done from space craft from mining to trading to combat.
Combat mand flying feels like The Expanse if you have seen / read that.
While not a flight sim I’ll give a recommendation for Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Spend some time salvaging old spaceships in zero-g.
If you like sandbox building, Space Engineers. There are so many good mods to give the game some life and nothing is more satisfying than building your own ship from materials you mined.
I initially though Space Engineers sounded “meh” after having played things like NMS and E:D, but … I really REALLY enjoyed it!
If space engineers were to get a more cohesive solo/coop survival mode without having to juggle fifty possibly incompatible mods it’d be a real killer app. There’s potential there, but there’s a bit too much manual scenario/server setup and once you get started there’s not really a lot of progression outside surviving long enough to get a basic smelter + dirt drill system set up.
That said, I recently had a surprisingly good time with the Wasteland Scavenger mod, which sets up a pretty unique scenario where you have to salvage a lot of components from POIs, you can’t build things like tanks or thrusters yourself, but you find them lying around in bases and wrecks.
That is the biggest thing imo, it needs a better single/multi player experience that drives you to expand and gives you some kind of story. Imagine having to start out one of the planets with that Scavenger mod only to be able to tech up and go farther. It is a game that is begging for a reason to play other than imagination.