Star Control II

[Kay]

The old game "Star Control II" has been released in freeware form as "The Ur-Quan Masters." See it at SourceForge.

Though it's old, it's impressive. It's like an RPG in space, with a lot of the gameplay involving mining to gather resources to upgrade your ship, and having long, funny conversations with aliens.

I've seen other games like "Pirates!" and "Skies of Arcadia" based around free exploration of a big open "sea," but they all seem to involve a lot of aimless travel and repetition. Is there a way to have a big-open-sea type of gameplay but still have lots of local encounters with interesting events, so that there's variety and size and designers who don't have to build every event by hand? Unfortunately, random dungeons stink in almost every game I've seen them in. I would err on the side of a smaller number of better-developed locations rather than SCII's 100-or-so star systems.