I keep trying to get into Elite (and similer games) but the closet ive gotten is playing way too much Freelancer on diffrent servers. I love that game!

As a space sim it is as good as freelancer, its a very streamlined (and to a certain extent stripped down I beleive) version of it. It will give you ships of various class's and styles, diffrent missions from cargo runs to more combat focused missions and then the "world" to explore. I always loved the universe though and when you go online theres "vanilla" servers but most are moded and extend the universe to be more than it is, adding diffrent ships and systems to explore to get new weapons, valuble cargo and fight more dangerous enemies.

The Single player story is supposed to be good (with some good story missions too) but for me it came alive when you went online and joined a server and perhaps even a clan. That whole system where people "owned" diffrent sectors and would defend it or grant you access (perhaps through alliances or trade) while it was essentially based on the forum of that server it made the whole thing so much more for me.

Especially when they held RP events like a Nomad Invasion (Nomads being the big alien unstoppable enemy in the game) and my clan (and a pirate faction in our area we had to begrudgingly work along side) were in charge of defending the Magellan passage. We waited together doing nothing for at least an hour while we heard people communicating in the other systems and by knowing who died we could see the passage of the Nomad's and we just had to wait until they came for us. They came for us and we fought them off but most of us were used to "policing" brittania (or avoiding the police) and werent really great combat pilots and they wasted us.

If you can find an active server its really worth playing.