I swear, every time a new Elite-like space game shows up on the radar, the first thing everyone blathers about is Freelancer this, Freelancer that.
Freelancer was terrible. There's just no other way for me to put it. The gameplay was average and had its flaws, but the game itself was terrible for what it did to a much better, much more deserving game: Independence War 2. There was a game that also eschewed a multitude of starships and systems in favor of completely fleshing out those it had, and it did it right; The music, the sound effects, the voices, the visuals, the physics, the ship systems, all of it was fantastic. However, for reasons I still cannot figure out, Freelancer completely overshadows it in the collective mind of space gamers.

Freelancer wasn't terrible by any stretch. It was disappointing, though. So much potential left unrealised, that was the problem with Freelancer. What Freelancer did right was the atmosphere, especially in the nebulae, and the feeling of being part of a living universe. It fell down on the missions though, and the general lack of variety in gameplay.
But I agree that IW2 was better (even though it wasn't as good as the original IW) and better than 95% of space sims out there. I'd love to see them both on GoG.

I'm glad to hear about any of them, I just want to be able to buy them. LOL
I've yet to find a game with the ambiance of X3, frequent action of Freespace and varied and personal interactions of a full RPG. I'll try them all until I find it, especially at gog.com prices.
...and that runs on my netbook. ;)

Freelancer is not a bad game, I had quite a fun with it but form me it's to less 'epic' ant to much like console game. Starlancer was imo muuuch better (and in my private ranking I say it's best space sim I ever played next to X-Beyond The Frontier, I-War 2, Freespace series).