What’s the latest in space combat games? I really enjoyed the Wing Commander games, Freespace, and most recently Darkstar One. I prefer plot-lined games to trading games (I completely ignored the trading in Darkstar One just relying on bounty-hunting), Wing Commander over Priateer, so I’m not too enthused about Evochron Renegades.
My PC is a Pentium D 3.2 with a Geforce 8600 GTS.
Have you given the X series a look? While they encourage a lot of trading you can happily make a fortune just shooting things. The latest version, X3: Terran Conflict, was definitely more balanced towards combat.
Have you tried EVE Online? It’s slow paced and you don’t have first person control over your ship but it’s quite tactical and there is a massive variety in the ships and modules you can fly. It is an MMOG though, which means a monthly fee.
I don’t know of any games like Freespace that have been released in the last few years, unfortunately.
Star Trek Online will launch in February. It looks and sounds fantastic, I’m certainly looking forward to it. The combat promises to be more like naval combat in that it’s all about positioning yourself in relation to your opponent, focusing on his weak shields while protecting yours. It’s not all in space though, a good proportion of the game will be on planets in away-teams.
I’m not really interested in the trading / making money line of play. I’d much rather have a series of missions a la Wing Commander or Freespace, all connected by a decent story.
The genre really fell out of fashion. I haven’t seen a decent one of those in a long time. I did the X thing for a while, but there was just too much money and trading stuff to keep me interested. Fun enough, but not my cup of tea.
I’ve been basically looking for the exact same thing you are for a while. If you find anything decent that is newer than wing commander on ANY platform, let me know.
Steam has something called Gratuitous Space Battles.
This doesn’t fit your definition of space combat but Shattered Horizon is kind of cool. It’s a first person shooter that takes place outside of space ships in 0 gravity. You have a jet pack type thing to help you navigate in space while you’re floating around. They had it marked down to $5 during Steam’s sale but, if you want to buy it now, you’ll have to pay full price.
I bought it, its good for an amusing 10-15 hours of play. You don’t drive, its more like a tactical sandbox. Give the ships sets of priorities and rules of engagement and let fly. It is kinda fun to watch.
Heresy War looks as if it could be interesting. I’m downloading the demo.
Not at all plot driven, but Continuum is blast, especially the Extreme Games domain:
http://www.extreme-games.net/main/
Good online/squad based teamplay. The game itself is a simple top down space shooter, but the the arenas require a lot of strategy and coordination. Easy to learn, fun to master.
Years ago Sierra was making a space combat game based around piloting a Babylon 5 starfury, which would’ve been a great great premise for a game. They restructured when the game was 90-95% done and killed the entire project. GAH that still pisses me off now that this thread reminded me of it. How is it ever a good investment to cancel something that’s 90% done?
By not throwing more good money into the “BAD” money pit. 
It is a genre that someone could do something with, and have a hit, I think. But that’s coming from a science fiction reader of about 38 years duration. 
It’ll take a really good game or two to re-invigorate the genre. Unfortunately no developer is working on one (that I know of). I say give it another 2 years. When we’re done with zombies and post-apocalyptic genres, it might make a comeback.
I’d love something like Oblivion + wing commander in space.
If you’ve never played it, Independence War 2 is a strong space game, one of the last quality games before freelancer clones took over what little remained of the market. Fairly old, obviously, but space games always did look better than their counterparts.
Just to bump the thread, I tried Evochron Renegades, which I dumped after 5 minutes when it wouldn’t save my joystick settings. I dumped Heresy War after an even shorter period when, despite the joystick being selected, it insisted on using mouse and keyboard.
I share your pain about this genre although i was a big fan of the X series at one point.
I’d buy wing commander 1-4, Elite 2 or 3, privateer all over again if they came out as professional products with even a half-decent graphics boost.
About the only thing on the horizon is Jumpgate Evolution (MMO). Played the original for a time and it held my interest. The community, if that is the correct term for what appeared to be a venomous nest of junior league sociopaths, and the community facilities let it down badly. Support was also non-existent.
Codemasters have done a reasonable job on the Euro-LOTRO so maybe there is hope.
As soon as I find my Freespace 2 CDs, I’ll be trying the make-over. It’s years since I played it, so it’ll be interesting to see if this PC is good enough to make a Sathanas move smoothly.
Unfortunately I haven’t played any of the games in the OP. However, when it comes to space combat, nothing beats Star Control 2. Its almost 20 years old, but it kicks the ass of any space-related game I’ve ever played. Great combat, fun ships, terrific storyline, lots of exploration, resource collecting, it’s got everything.
Also, I will never ever stop pushing the Master of Orion games (1 and 2, not 3, stay away from 3). Not really as much back and forth real-time space combat per say, but it is fun to build ships and send them out against other fleets.
As for other space combat, uh…how about Tie Fighter? Yeah, I know all of my games are old, sorry…BUT THEY ARE THE BEST!!! 
My absolute favourites are the Wing Commander series. Fun combat + good story = win! Particularly the romance in WC2.
In the meantime, it’s going to back to Darkstar One for me. Again, as soon as I find the CD.
*Freelancer *was a nice game, with a *Privateer *feel. The space combat itself was very shoot-em-uppy (3rd person view, mouse driven, dumb AI, extremely easy) but the universe, story and sandbox aspects made up for it. You could earn cash trading and even mining asteroid fields, but you could very much make a living shooting shit up, too. For that matter, the main storyline involves liberal amounts of shooting shit up.
Tachyon:The Fringe was in the same vein, though more simulationist. It also introduced an interesting mechanic : at any time you could “cut propulsion”, allowing your ship to fly in a straight line and at constant speed no matter what your ship heading actually is (i.e. you could fly one way, with the nose and guns pointing anywhere, including directly backwards). This allowed for very tight turns, unique multiplayer dogfights, and if you did this at the peak of your afterburner-boosted speed, you could zoom past anything 
I’ll also second CutterJohn’s suggestion : both I-War games were excellent, in no small part due to the robust space physics, and the fact that for once you’re not running a nimble starfighter, but a ponderous capital ship bristling with guns.
*Starlancer *was a more run-of-the-mill dogfighting game, which felt very much like an X-Wing clone, complete with the same kind of briefings, and of course hell missions involving shooting down torpedoes targeting your carrier coming from everyfuckingwhere. The story and setting were fairly blah, and there was no freedom or exploration whatsoever. You do mission 1, move on to mission 2, etc…
As for RTS’s, nothing can touch Homeworld. Fighting in a real 3D space (albeit with a defined “up” and “down”) really takes some gear-shifting in the brain department.
It is in the wonderful world of software developpment. As you might know, the first 90% of a given project’s code takes up 90% of the dev. time. The remaing 10% of the code accounts fot the *other *90% of dev. time
Yes. The trading side of such games leaves me cold.
Not a game I played, but this is Newtonian physics at work. They had this - sort of - in Wing Commander. They called it the ‘Shelton Slide’.
You can do this - sort of - with Darkstar One.
I played it and found it rather short. It’s as if they stopped half way through.
I never got to grips with Homeworld. Possibly because I use a 2-button trackball, and, IIRC, it really needed a scroll wheel mouse.