I mentioned Shores of Hazeron a few pages ago. Nice to see that other people remember it too, though.My only problem with Hazeron is that it's now P2P while it was F2P for long time and
I am a poorf- I don't have money to spend on monthly payments. It really saddens me because I used to return to Hazeron every few months or so and I had really good time in it. I hazily remember the really old times that aren't even on wiki anymore. I remember how Galaxy was before Syndicate became a thing... eh...
And Hazeron could be pretty cool with it's shitty graphics too. Take note that this is all from internet, I once had a folder where I stored all the amazing screenshoots I took, but I think I lost it. Also, another note, that EVERYTHING in the Hazeron was either randomly generated (planets, animals, plants, so on) or made by players. That's right, every city was built by someone, every ship was someone's design (even the random pirates were created using the global design database), every trading ship rolling through the space had a purpose, all factions were player made (mentioned Syndicate just appeared one day and claimed literally half of the Galaxy - I was in the "Resistance" for a while though I barely saw any combat (one time I had a warp-speed chase with Staines but eh, you can't really shoot there) and we got fucked in the end. Now, as I recall, Syndicate is the rulling opressive regime for past few Galaxies... mostly because they're the only ones around willing to pay the subscription all the time.
This is how NMS should have been. The Galaxy was huge (and now it's multiple GALAXIES HOLY SHIT), but it wasn't especially hard to stumble upon some civilizations ruins and seeing another player randomly was a huge event but it was possible within one playthrough, and obviously once you get proper FTL ships, the Galaxy got much smaller (it still took like a week (IIRC, not more than a month, not less than a week) or more REAL TIME to get from one side to other at maximum, 32 TIMES SPEED OF LIGHT).