‘Freelancer’ Was the Original Open-World Space Opera

With the release of  Elite: Dangerous and  No Man’s Sky, and the perpetual early access pseudo-release of  Star Citizen, the space sim genre is going through a bit of a revival right now. It falls well into broader open world trend in gaming, with the descendants of  Far Cry, Oblivion, Assassin’s Creed, and  Minecraft filling out a huge chunk of Steam’s storefront. Space sims are, in a way, a particularly broad and idiosyncratic iteration of the ever-present fantasy of a game where you can go anywhere and do anything.

And in the history of the space sim,  Freelancer is a key link between them and the broader open-world game genre. Delayed, misbegotten, and incomplete,  Freelancer wasn’t a big enough hit to make developers Digital Anvil sustainable. The indirect child of  Wing Commander, a distant sequel to the even more obscure  Starlancer,  Freelancer did what it did by breaking with almost every rule or expectation about space sims. Its release was then followed by a nearly decade-long hiatus in big, ambitious space sims.

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