One of my fondest memories of Wing Commander Privateer is the time I was chased by a kilrathi for what felt like an hour. You can't activate a jump point when under attack in Privateer, so after I was ambushed at one by a kilrathi ship that outclassed me early on I had to flee the old-fashioned way—emptying my afterburner to gain a lead, watching my pursuer catch up as I waited for it to refill, then emptying it again. I flew like that all the way to an inhabited planet where the local Confed ships could save my bacon.
Unfortunately, that kind of thing turned out not to be possible in Starfield, a game where space exploration was mostly a bunch of loading and cutscenes. As this video from Alanah Pearce proved, you could spend seven hours flying to a planet only to find it was a hollow jpg floating in space. It just wasn't a game about freewheeling exploration.
