Elite Dangerous, it has a procedural generated Milky Way.
That's because it's a terrific game (though somewhat buggy on newer computers)

That's the one I thought about. Sure, there are "warp drives" in the IWar universe : "Linear drive" to zoom from station to station around a planet, and jump points linking planets and stars when you need to go far.
But even with those, the systems feel big. Using linear to link to neighbor planets takes a long time and is a blind frenetic run, not the usual "boosters that allow you to leasurely look the planet getting closer", and using a jump point means getting there, avoiding the militia if you're in an enemy system, waiting for your turn (there's some heavy traffic around them) or risking a collision to force your way in, making a tricky insertion manoeuver without knowing what awaits you on the other side... It's not years long, but it FEELS like serious business. Like you're doing a "real warp jump", and not a grocery run ;)
And some systems are really huge. Even the biggest space stations feel tiny out there, when you're spying it from afar in silent mode to detect your next prey.

Or go Kerbal, and play with near-real physics and year-long orbits. It's one of the best games I ever played, and even if the Kerbal system is a 1/10 scale model of ours, it still feels freakishly huge, especially when you have a guy stranded on a planet half-a-system away, and you realize you'll have to get an automated module in a 1km radius of him if you want to bring him home, "the martian" style. ^^

Within a star system, everything is just a minute or two away using warp drives. Moving through dozens upon dozens of systems with a gigantic freighter that takes a minute to shift it's mass towards the next gate however adds up quickly to hours. Also, having to slow down to keep the convoy together adds friction: One scout is one system ahead, another is one system behind making sure there are no rival player gangs stalking us. Finally, every time we did spot other people in a system, everything halts until we figure out if it is safe to move again.

Without having to maintain security the freighter pilot could probably have done it in 2 hours. A lone frigate could have done the trip in about 30 minutes if the player is well prepared and quick on all the mouse-clicking.

To be perfectly clear: Eve Online models extreme distances and planets are cleverly designed to feel nearly as big as the real thing. It is technically a perfect fit for this thread, except in general gameplay the warp drives makes it so that most gameplay takes place within 50km which can be covered quite quickly pushing 1000+ meters per second at combat speeds. The game space is HUGE, but it rarely feels that way while playing.

You seem to have perfectly understood what I'm talking about.

Out of all the suggestions in the thread I'm most excited about Kerbal.

Elite: Dangerous also seems interesting, judging from the gameplay footage you're not racing around balls floating in space but (for a game) rather large celestial bodies.

X3 is another couple of games that appear to have a sci-fi setting to my liking. Big plus for being set in the Sol system!

Elite Dangerous also has its own launcher, so don't need steam at all.

Terminus won an Independent Games Award at the Game Developer's Conference when it was first developed. The company incidentally I've nearly worked for a few times. I think, as much as it represents moral gray area, that Terminus is basically abandonware. The company has put no effort into maintaining its presence anywhere. Even their web site for it is no longer up. You can pick up physical copies on Amazon though if you must have a legit copy :

https://www.amazon.com/Terminus-PC-Mac/dp/B00004TER8

Wait. No. Shtap. Hold it. Stop the press.

X3 is nothing like Elite. It's a series of small sectors (60 x 60 km on average) connected by alien gates, the vast majority of which are extremely bland: a dozen of stations, maybe a planet or two in the background, sometimes a few asteroids and not much more. Usually everything is crammed between the gates on a flat plane, whereas beyond the gates there's absolutely nothing to see.

It is considered a huge game because yeah, sure, it does have hundreds of sectors to visits, and navigating through them takes quite some time as most ship are very slow (by the way: no Newtonian physics in X3, each ship type has its own maximum speed) but its universe is neither seamless nor particularly interesting.

There are no enviromental hazards other than (static) asteroids and nebulas (which is just a "can't see shit capt'n!" visual filter applied on the whole sector) no black holes, no radiation, no anomalies, nothing. You can't land on planets like in Elite (heck, you can't even get close to them: your ship will explode before even entering the atmosphere). You can't even enter stations anymore (it used to be possible in X2) since Egosoft had the brilliant idea of getting rid of station and ship interiors in X3 Reunion. Truth be told, there are a few interesting easter eggs and secrets to find here and there, but all in all world building simply doesn't hold a candle to Freelancer or Elite.

IMHO, this is not what you're looking for at all. But since you're getting conflicting opinions, I'd recommend watching a let's play before deciding. There's also demo of X3 Reunion on the official site that you could try, but I read just now that it's got Starforce DRM, so that's probably not the best option...

The universe is pretty darn big in The Ur-Quan Masters!

I don't know, sorry. Since I don't mind using Steam, I just stick with the platform that works best for any given game, which is almost always Steam. 1.03 was a Steam Workshop patch (though of course it added UI scaling and had some bugfixes as well) so I wouldn't hold my breath :/

Great post, thanks for the heads up! Even though I don't like Freelancer's parking lot star systems it is at least a lot of fun to spend time in them. I like that you can travel above the level design, like leaving the ecliptic of star system. I will never remember the dread I felt entering a system with a "neutron star" in the middle, radiation and minefields everywhere around it. A wonderfully hostile place to visit in a game, though of course complete nonsense super soft sci-fi (neutron stars are real but they don't look like miniature moons).

I also remember inventing my own minigame in multiplayer by coasting the atmosphere of planets trying to go a full lap around them in flames without dying.


Elite: Dangerous, which I didn't even know about until shown in this thread, looks fantastic and I agree with many of the design choices I'm reading up on. It also helps that I'm 100% on board with the ship designs, which is a rare thing indeed. Putting a pin through this suggestion until I can invest in a graphics card (Yeah, I've been running an APU for a year as I don't have any sort of budget).

Quick heads up, you can run Elite Dangerous on a fairly low spec card if want to grab one as a stop gap.
I use an ancient HD6850 & rarely drop below 60fps (i3-540 cpu, 4gig memory).

Starflight 2 old school space exploration game. I remember the universe being large and exploring worlds, interacting with aliens. Building relations to acquire better technology to upgrade your ship.

www gog.com/game/starflight_1_2

I would like to update this thread and say that Kerbal Space Program turned out to be the game I was yearning for all along. It keeps impressing the hell out of me some 30 hours in and I find myself thinking about how to build better launch vehicles and coming up with personal goals even while I'm not playing. Currently I'm very passionate about creating tiny satellites to put into different kinds of orbits around Kerbin's moons as well as exploring the Mun with remote controlled landers hopping from crater to crater.

My very first Mun landing actually turned into a bit of emergent story telling as I ended up landing with too little fuel to get my Kerbonaut back to Kerbin (plus accidental save overwrite). I first tried building primitive remote controlled landers with an empty seat but quickly abandoned that idea. Instead, I had to send my other pilot, Valentina, in a better manned lander to come pick up jebediah. I even managed to get her to touch down a couple of kilometers from jebediah's landing.

The game does not care, it's just a physics simulation, but for me it was a serious situation and funny story about a more competent woman being sent rescue the pampered male hot shot who was too leadfooted to complete the mission on his own.

I'd like to add that I'm trying not to spoil the game experience by watching too many tutorials. I'm enjoying the hell out of blindly attempting new things and discovering what works. Figuring out how to efficiently reach orbit around Kerbin has been a long project that's starting to become second nature now. My current personal goal is to put a satellite relay in a polar orbit around the Mun so that I can explore it's dark side with another remote controlled lander. I don't know if this will actually make it possible to maintain radio contact on the far side or not but in my head it seems like it could work.

You got to the Mun?

Figures.

Six months playing and all I have managed is making even bigger craters when my craft slam into the ground.

What setting are you on? I had to switch to easy when all of my parachutes kept failing, It just got to be too damn much work getting the EXACT entry angle and speed when all I was doing was barely making it into sub orbit.