Det_Bullock: The only ones that had were the Wing Commander games from 1 to 4 and Tachyon, both had much more of a b-movie feel than Freespace, all the others (well, basically X-wing and Tie Fighter) were linear. Even open world spacesims whenever they had a story it was more or less linear.
Freespace died because it wasn't marketed properly because Interplay screwed up financially, the fact that the other big spacesim title of the time, X-wing Alliance, refused to even boot up if there wasn't a joystick plugged in didn't help the popularity of the genre either.
TheHappyFriar: I never liked the gameplay of the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games. To me they didn't feel like they should (I thought the Rogue Squadrin on GameCube was much more fun to play). Wing Commander deffinitly has a b-movie feel but that's part of what made it fun (also felt better to play to me). I know people's gameplay styles and wants change over time, and games did get a lot more serious (vs more b-movie) after HL came out, so maybe it was the lack of b-movie feel that turned players away.
I always found Interplay a real oddball in it's downfall. They had super popular franchises for the day, games were a lot of fun to play, and like Sierra they had their great genera's down pat (point and click adventure was on the way out by the end of the 90's though). Of all the old "big" game companies, I assumed they'd still exist years later (Bethesdia is one that I never expted to be as big as it is now).
You know, maybe the joystick had more to do with it then we realize. Flight games were always considered proper to play with a stick and joysticks died out in the post-hl era. "kids" these days don't even understand why there would be an "invert" option in shooters (because they've never played a fight game with a mouse, they all use controllers if they have ever played one)! If they play a flying game with a controller they don't even understand why you'd want to invert the Y on the stick!
Wing Commander works until missions are simple search and destroy, anything more complex than that and the fact that you really don't have the means (controls mostly) to deal with complex tactical situations makes, say, the occasional escort mission even worse than it should be and this is a problem that carried over to Starlancer.
I always preferred the efforts of Volition and Totally games because differently from WC they never really got boring with their mission design, made a better effort of integrating story and gameplay and gave you much better means of assessing what was going on around you with escort lists and simple "target attacker" keys.
I enjoy Rogue Squadron 3D but its arcade sensibility sometime drive me insane.
To be more precise WC has a b-movie vibe that completely lacks self-awareness, CR is basically a kid that's copying parts of movies he likes without necessarily understanding how they fit together, in 3 (once Roberts returned from Strike Commander) you can see that every nuance to the Kilrathi introduced in 2 was stripped away for the sake of making them villaisn as a race rather than as an imperial entity (in 2 there were even Kilrathi federation citizens) which probably wasn't the intention but comes off like that.
Keep in mind that an inordinate amount of people played with mouse and keyboard, even when lurking on Hard Light Productions I find people that used a joystick were still a minority, not everyone was passionate enough to buy a joystick to play flight games at the time.
