No, I meant a SEQUEL to Portal and a sequel to the Freespace series (I've played FS2 many times). At least we're getting the sequel to Portal in a year or two most likely.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary/Judgment Rites. I don't know who I'd want to do the game--Telltale, maybe?
Ah, I misread your post. Apologies. I doubt we'll ever see a Freespace 3, sadly, BUT Voliton have had a lot of success with the Saints Row franchise, so much so that they've resurrected Red Faction to much critical acclaim (and it's bloody good). Red Faction 1&2 were never as well loved as Freespace, and at one time both series were equally as "dead", so we can live in hope!
Is there a particular reason why space flight-sims died out by the turn of this century? I mean, TIE Fighter was huge.
This is guesswork, *but* I think it has to do with the fact that the genre was only ever big on PC, and at some point in the late nineties, the PC platform became dominated by cookie-cutter first person shooters (a paradigm that remains to this day), RTS's and, by the middle of the decade, MMOs. Stalwarts of the market, like space flight sims and even point n' click adventure games just fell by the wayside. Those two things happened to be my favourite game genres, so it's little wonder that I fell out of touch with gaming for most of the early 2000s where I played bugger all apart from Morrowind, Freelancer (the last great space sim imho) and GTA, along with a stockpile of Lucasarts adventures. EDIT: Hmmm, did a bit of googling and this forum post seems to agree with me while actually providing some convincing reasoning.
The last point is possibly the most interesting. Joysticks are uncommon these days. Console gamers (aside from hardcore fighting game addicts) typically use pads and PC gamers are used to either using the mouse/keyboard combo or the Xbox 360 controller which is rapidly becoming the standard, expected PC game controller. Did Freelancer even support the use of a joystick ? IIRC, it had a highly unrealistic, yet still enjoyable, system of targeting an enemy ship using the mouse, with the target moving further away from the actual ship as it gained speed in order to help you lead a moving target.
I'm surprised I never got around to playing Freelancer. It was created by Chris Roberts, the man behind Wing Commander. It was also apparently a sequel to Starlancer, which I rather enjoyed.
I wouldn't call it "long" overdue, but it's been more than 3 years so it should definitely be on the horizon. I'm betting we'll see it by Christmas 2010. Well, I can dream.
Oblivion came out in March 2006. I know, I'm the same - still feels like it was released a month ago.
Add another voice to support the continuation of the Freespace series. Really enjoyed the Homeworld series and wouldn't mind a Homeworld 3. I also enjoyed Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, it looked very pretty, story wasn't bad and it was fun. Wouldn't mind a BOTF 2. Galactic Civilisation 2 was a fantastic turn base space turn-based strat, a game along those lines would probably be very good.
Here's the thing though, I think space-flight sims would actually play very well on a controller. So I don't really see the lack of joysticks (I still own one btw, lol) as a problem. You could easily release something like Wing Commander (which was never particularly realistic) on the consoles.