tldr; Privateer still good despite age, disappointed in how Star Citizen developed over the years.
I found out Wing Commander: Privateer is $2 CAD on gog.com so I pulled the trigger to see if it still holds up after all these years. And - I'm fully aware that I have my nostalgia goggles on - my god it still does
I think the biggest thing is that although this game came out in 1993 it is incredibly immersive. Seemingly little things like chatter between NPC pilots, taunts from enemies, locations like the bars, guilds and ship dealers on the stations and planets, is enough to convince me that the Gemini Sector is a real place. Again, nostalgia goggles are firmly in place, but I believe this game hit a sweet spot when it came to immersion. Some other recent games have not.
Take Elite Dangerous for example. Now I respect the developers for 1) actually shipping a game and 2) for the incredibly massive galaxy they built, but the whole thing feels so lifeless and dull. You never get so much as a glimpse of any of the inner workings of the stations that you visit, there's barely any audible chatter while you're flying and just... everything feels dead. Granted, the original Elite was very much the same way, but I feel it's really due to the technical limitations of that era of computers and not a deliberate choice made by the developers. I still enjoy the game, but it doesn't quite scratch the same itch. It's missing those little touches that bring the world to life for me. Same thing with EvE Online, though I have waaaay more issues with that game that I'll not get into here.
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Now with Star Citizen, I do remember reading/hearing somewhere that Chris Roberts said immersion was a top priority and he wanted to take it to the next level. But I feel like he and his development team have swung too far in the opposite direction, and I feel like it's really the driving force behind all this scope/feature creep that the game's development as been plagued with.
Sure, being able to physically walk around in the stations or planets will be pretty cool the first few times you visit a place, but eventually you'll want to be able to get from point A to point B without much hassle.
Sure, needing to eat, drink and use the bathroom is something a pilot would actually have to deal with but I know I will lose my mind if I get blown up in a space battle because I forgot to go pee before taking off
I guess what really made my interest die off was when the first person shooter component was announced. Again, very immersive and the thought of storming an enemy capital ship seems really cool.... in a different game. We're supposed to be pilots, not space marines. Why this needs to be a core component to the game instead of some sort of future spin-off/dlc is beyond me. I guess pilots in the 30th century are also very capable soldiers too. I'd be satisfied with just calling in a transport ship to board and capture a disabled craft (a la X-Wing/Tie Fighter), but maybe that's just me.
And sure, some of the large ships look really impressive. The mining ship has an insane level of detail, with stations all over the place for a group of players to pilot, mine, and... do other stuff i guess? The ship looks like it has a refinery station, so I guess one player has to push some buttons on a screen to smelt iron ore into iron bars? Again, quite immersive, but is that going to be any fun? Why can't a 30th century computer do it? You can buy pleasure craft or luxury variants of capital ships so you can.... hang out in a bar and drink with your friends? You can be the bartender too, how fun will that be? Why can't a 30th century robot do it?
Stuff like this will maybe add a couple points on the immersion scale, but likely takes hundreds (if not thousands) of hours to implement. The return on this kind of investment has diminished so much that its really not worth it. Of course, these ships raise a lot of funds when they sell it to some uber-dedicated whales, but now they're obligated to spend all that time and money on developing things that are of very limited value gameplay-wise. Yes, these environments can be used as levels for the first-person shooter game, but as I said before, that doesn't interest me very much, and is quite frankly outside of the initial pitch that was made originally.
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When I backed this game in 2013 I was really only wanting/expecting an update to the privateer/freelancer games, with maybe a few new gameplay elements sprinkled in to push the envelope a bit. Instead we're (maybe) getting a big sandbox MMO with survival elements and pretty walkable spaceships where you can shoot people, all in the name of immersion. But what came before hit that sweet spot of being immersive without being overly tedious (and at a fraction of the production cost). I find it shocking that after all this time they haven't been able to release a Minimum Viable Product and then expand from there (the alphas do not count, they're too buggy and unstable to be considered "viable" IMO).
But hey, I can always go back to Privateer, Elite Dangerous is pretty fun despite my gripes, and if I'm really dedicated I can hunt down Freelancer and get it working on a modern machine. I just lament at what could have been. This is a game I was initially so excited for and it morphed into something fundamentally way different from what I pictured seven years ago. I'm sure there are other lesser known alternatives out there, maybe I'll find what I'm looking for in those titles.