No Man's Sky is a good game now. That sentence would have been laughable in 2016, when Hello Games shipped something that barely resembled its promises and walked into one of gaming's most damaging launches. But through years of free updates — Pathfinder, Next, Origins, Frontiers, and a half-dozen more — it became genuinely worth playing.
This matters for Freelancer fans, not because NMS is a replacement (it isn't), but because of what NMS's eventual success reveals about the space game market.
Players came back. In enormous numbers. When NMS became good, people returned, and new players arrived, and the player count grew in ways that defied the game's toxic launch reputation. What were they coming for? Accessible space exploration with visual spectacle and a sense of discovery. Low barrier to entry. A universe that rewards flying around in it. The same things Freelancer offered in 2003, dressed in different clothes.
But here's what NMS doesn't have, even now. The combat is thin — adequate at best, a distraction from the exploration at worst. There is no handcrafted narrative in the Freelancer sense. The game has story content now, but it's delivered through journals and databases, not through voiced characters and scripted missions. And most tellingly: the universe doesn't feel lived-in. Procedural generation produces variety but not specificity. You land on a planet and it's procedurally generated, and then you land on another one and it's also procedurally generated, and after a while the specific details stop mattering because they were calculated rather than chosen.
Freelancer's universe feels lived-in because it was. Every station, every trade route, every criminal base placement was a decision someone made. The bars exist because someone decided bars should exist. The Sigma systems feel remote because someone placed them at the end of a long chain of difficult jump holes. This specificity is what generates the feeling that you are inside something someone built, rather than inside something an algorithm produced.
NMS's success proves the appetite exists. People want accessible space exploration. They will show up for it. The question of whether anyone will build the version that includes Freelancer's specificity — the handcrafted campaign, the designed systems, the real economy — remains open.
It should be someone's business plan.