This is pure speculation, clearly labeled as such. No leaks, no rumours, no sources. Just the question.
Eighteen years. Still no sequel. So: if someone were to make Freelancer today, what would it need to be?
The community has been asking this long enough that certain answers come up again and again. They're not a consensus, exactly, but they're patterns. Here's what the conversation tends to land on.
Mouse flight is non-negotiable. This comes up every time. The thing that made Freelancer accessible to people who didn't own joysticks, who had never played a space sim, who got handed a disc by a friend and booted it up on a whim — was that it controlled like a game, not like a piece of simulation software. You pointed at things and your ship turned toward them. Fights were fast and readable. A modern Freelancer without mouse flight isn't Freelancer. It's something else.
Handcrafted systems, not procedurally generated ones. Elite Dangerous is a great game on its own terms, but its galaxy is calculated, not designed. No Man's Sky is worse — the procedural generation is obvious after an hour. The Sirius sector works because someone decided where the pirate bases went and what the trade routes connected. You can feel the decisions. A modern Freelancer needs that. Every system should have a reason to exist.
A real narrative campaign. Not emergent storytelling. Not faction politics the player has to piece together from in-game journals. An actual story, with voiced characters, that happens to you over 40+ hours. Freelancer's campaign was linear and relatively short, but it was a story. That's rare in space sims. A modern version should lean into it rather than away from it.
Mod support from day one. This is less emotional and more practical. One of the main reasons Freelancer is still alive in 2021 is that the game was modifiable. Discovery, Crossfire, HD Edition, Librelancer — none of these exist if the format is locked down. A modern Freelancer that doesn't support modding will not survive the next 18 years.
Star Citizen is trying to do some of this. The results are complicated — it's still in development, the scope has become its own problem, and the accessibility that was Freelancer's defining feature has been replaced by something that takes an afternoon to learn just to launch your ship. It may eventually deliver on its promises. But it is not Freelancer.
The gap is still open. And it's not a complicated gap to describe. Approachable controls, handcrafted space, a real story, mod support. Simple as that.