Oh, how I wish somebody would make a game like this today.
Privateer is the ultimate in non-linear space combat and exploration. You have your ship, and you can virtually go anywhere at any time in the frankly massive star system available to you. This is what I loved the most about Privateer; flying from system to system, making money and blasting away the occasional space pirate or Retro religious fanatic. I enjoyed just the missions and trade routes in good old Troy system so much that I played Privateer for weeks before I even bought a jump drive and learned that I could actually travel to distant and exotic worlds. In fact, I didn't even discover that the game had a plot until a month or so of playing, when I stepped into New Detroit's bar for the first time and saw a lovely young lady sitting at a table. You can literally play the game for months without even scratching the plot-line of the game, because you need to do plenty of combat and trade missions to save up for your snazzy Centurion with double missile launchers and quadruple Tachyon cannon array (best combat setup in the game, period). The game also has various different factions that you'll encounter in-flight, such as pirates, Church of Man, militia, military, Kiltrathi (a feline alien race), and merchants. By killing or not killing certain faction types, you can affect their disposition to you. If you decide to spend your time doing missions for the Mercenary's guild, blowing up merchants and tractorbeaming their cargo into yours then selling the pilots off into slavery, and delivering cargos of weapons and drugs to pirate bases hidden deep within asteroid fields, you'll eventually become a known space pirate and be attacked on-sight by militia and military forces. Alternatively, you can become a respected citizen by destroying pirates when you see them and aiding the military in its war against the evil Kilrath empire.
The space combat is truly exhilarating, even though the graphics, by today's standards, are prehisoric at best. Many's the time I engaged 3 pirates by myself; them in their Talons, me in my Centurion. I'd blast the first one to pieces with double-launched FF-locking missles, ram the second one into a fireball, then finish of the last with a few well-placed blasts into its tailpipe with my quadruple Tachyon cannons. By the time I encountered the next wave (if one was coming) my shields would have recovered from the ram and I'd be ready to do it all over again. But not everybody was as elite as I was at Privateer's space combat. Things would get really sticky when you'd fight in asteroid fields, which meant that you had to fight at lower spacecraft velocity (the average enounter you'd be going at least 500kps, up to 1000 when you'd fire your afterburners) or risk blowing your self up by ramming an asteroid. The best part about it was watching a pirate trying to attack you and going supernova on an asteroid.
The plot line gets thicker and thicker as you go on, but as long as you complete each individual mission in its entirety, you can always take a break, do some trade runs, get some mercenary contracts, or just visit a pleasure base and talk to the voluptuously well-endowed bartenders. Privateer is a gritty world, and if you fail a mission the game does not end but the plot cannot continue because the person that gave you the mission is too pissed off at you to speak to you anymore. So you need to save your game before every plot-based mission, because if you fail you simply can't actually "beat" the game anymore. The truth is, I played Privateer for a year or more without ever beating it (I did, however, beat the expansion pack Righteous Fire) and I still had more fun playing it than any other game that I've played since.
Some day a developer will realize what Privateer was and make a worthy successor to it (Privateer 2 was a dismal failure and a huge disappointment). I await that day with much anticipation.