Craziest thing about this, is that computers were capable of rendering great-looking space sims from around the mid 90s. The genre died out in large part because there was no point in studios spending big marketing dollars building a brand name in a genre where any 2-bit player can come along and clone it.
Space looks pretty much the same today as it did when Freelancer came out. Since then, stylised cartoon type graphics have become more acceptable, not less, so it's not like there's any particular need for better textures on the other ships, or better graphics for the planet menus. Who the fuck is going to play a space sim in order to spend hours driving around on the individual planets, instead of flying around in space trading/pirating/etc?
I was also one of those people who played Freelancer, and immediately wanted a game where you could work your way up to flying one of the massive capital ships, influencing wars between dynamic factions and so on. I got that game too, it was called Space Rangers 2, but whilst that was great, it scratched a different itch due to being in 4X perspective instead of cockpit perspective. But every bit of 'cool stuff' that you could want in a space sim can be achieved using 'space + ships + planet-menus'. Having the actual planets, towns, walking about in your ship, actual humans/aliens walking about instead of their face pop up when you open ship-to-ship communications....all of that is totally superflous.
I'm not even saying that as an anti-graphics-whore comment. Freelancer type 'space graphics' still is graphics whore 'space graphics'. How many fucking textures can you really add to 'black stuff, some round spheres, occasional rock clouds' anyway? We already know that 10 year old computers have the processing power to do the 'massive galaxy, dynamic factions/economy/etc' stuff, because we've played Space Rangers 2. Just give me that in cockpit perspective, with no advancement in graphics, and you've got everything you could want in a cutting edge space sim. People are going crazy pouring money into shit that is utterly marginal, if not wholly irrelevant, and the difference between a technologically modest 'space rangers 2 in cockpit perspective' and 'insane project that will never be completed because it's impossible without AAAAA funds' is the attempt to implement stuff that could be more conveniently handled through planet menus anyway.
hard to resist the hype on this
