There are various factions - to begin with the player is pretty much limited to mostly human space although there is limited alien contact at the boundaries of human territory. It might be pretty hard to organise and run a fleet in 3D, although I suppose escort ships could just be programmed as allies that fly with you (with formations like in Freelancer). One aspect where 2D simplicity helps is with the player being able to capture and fly a whole fleet of ships rather than just an individual craft as with Privateers 1 and 2. While I think this kind of thing might be fantastic to play in 3D, the simplicity of the mechanics also means it's relatively easy to develop and expand (I believe it started as a one-man project).
The immediate and most obvious difference is that it's 'only' a 2D game.
#ENDLESS SKY WORLD SHIP SERIES#
It bills itself as inspired by the Escape Velocity series (which I'm not familiar with), but as with any space exploration and trading game it's easy to draw comparisons with our beloved Privateer. It's available directly from GitHub, Steam, and also commonly included in Linux distributions (albeit perhaps not kept up-to-date). A search through the forums didn't seem to show anyone else has mentioned it before, so I'm making a note of it here. It's a cross-platform FOSS game that apparently has been around since late 2015, so I wish I had found it sooner. Over the last week and a half I've been having a lot of fun playing Endless Sky.