Thought I might see if I could lend a hand in pointing out games to try.
Personally I found Eve very slow myself. While there are great ideas with Eve, being able to mine, trade, pirate, all the good stuff. The biggest fail of the game in my opinion is the control of your ship. You have to find a point in the distance, like a base or something else, click on it, and tell your ship to go there. I played the game for about a month attempting to make myself enjoy it and hoping at some point in time I would, but failed.
The only mmo game I played that seemed to feel similar to Freelancer has been Jumpgate. I beta tested that game and it was a blast. Total control over your ship, mining, pirating, trading, and an open universe. It felt quite a bit similar to how Freelancer felt.
Now there are two of these type of games coming out soon. One Jumpgate Evolution, which looks like it'll be very fun:
http://us.jumpgateevolution.com/
And Black Prophecy:
http://www.blackprophecy.com/
Now Jumpgate Evolution only has to be similar to Jumpgate and it'll just be plain fun. I had a ton of fun playing that game. I'm not sure how they'll handle PvP as it seems to be going back and forth. Black Prophecy seems to have a different take on crafting. Their idea of crafting is only ship modding, but they way they explain it, it sounds like it might be a lot of fun. Only thing that might not draw me to Black Prophecy is, from what I understand, instanced encounters instead of open space encounters. I'm not sure what that means in the long run, but still, the game might be an option people like.
The graphics for black prophecy are better than jumpgate evolution, but jumpgate seems to have more depth and mimics the freelancer universe better in my opinion.
For offline games, I've tried out X3: reunion, which after getting used to the controls wasn't too bad, but the story is rather dry and doesn't hold my interest as well as freelancer did. It almost seemed like a chore to play rather than actual fun. Though it still seems to keep people entertained, it just wasn't my cup o noodles.
One that seems to be really interesting is Evochron Legends. It's, from what I understand, a one man programming team, but seems to be well worth playing if you like a completely open, free form universe.
http://starwraith3dgames.home.att.net/evochronlegends/index.htm
There is a demo download that gives you 90 minutes of play time. The game is only 48Mb, but you'd never know it playing.
The tutorial sort've throws a HUGE amount of information at you quickly, but luckily you can replay the tutorial over and over and it wont count against your actual play time. One of the coolest things about the game is that you can fly into a planets atmosphere seemlessly and dock with a base, mine the planet, or get into a fire fight with pirates. Modifying your ship is great as well since you can actually physically alter the way parts look when you buy them or even the ones you already own. You have options of even changing the colors of your ship. The physics system for the game is interesting as well. You can use your thrusters to launch yourself in a direction, turn off ship thrusters and glide, which makes it so you can continue travel in a direction and spin your ship around. Makes fighting more interesting.
From what I understand, fighting is difficult as hell at first, but if you hit the forums, they have a LOT of tips on how to make it all work out. Not to mention once you get more experience, better equipment and so on, it's supposed to be a bit easier. They do have online play as well ran by the games creater, who is supposed to be a demon in his ship if you take him on.
Check out the list of features and you'll probably agree that $25 for the game is easily worth it. You can even mod the cockpit, which by itself is pretty cool.
For me, till Jumpgate Evolution comes out, I'll be playing around with Evochron.
Also, today is the day I found out a man's heart can be smashed to bit's for only $15 a month. (Ladies take note.)
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