If someone other than Microsoft made FL2

[Treewyrm]

Uh. You guys are mixing up two distinctive group of companies: publishers (Microsoft, Activision, Electronic Arts, etc) and developers (Digital Anvil, Volition, etc). Occasionally publishers may develop games in-house, but not in this case. Freelancer was made by defunct Digital Anvil who was made of people from Origin Systems (of Wing Commander and Ultima series fame) in 1995 some years after OSI was sold to Electronic Arts. Microsoft was publisher for Freelancer, and if anything they were responsible for pushing the game resulting in many features dropped and game campaign cut smaller.

I want the people who made Freespace 2 to make the next one. Sadly, I heard they went outta business about 10 years ago.

Freespace series were developed by Volition (formed from Parallax Systems, developers of original Descent 1 and 2) and published by Interplay. It's Interplay who currently holds the legal rights to the series. Volition by all means ain't dead, but it's signed to THQ instead. But it's Interplay is pretty much dead long time, yes.

You can tease yourself as much as you want, but even though Freelancer did well commercially it's the genre itself that is pretty much DEAD. Sure, once in a while some space sim comes up, but that's about it. The genre itself is not attractive and not commercially interesting for those that hold the rights to the series. Besides with game development budgets getting bigger and bigger ask yourself what is better to do for them: Freelancer 2 or keep milking Gears of War? Reality bites.

But regarding "what if" OP scenario, well I'd say put back in people who made Freelancer, add folks from Volition who worked on Freespace series so their minds would make the game epically in terms of scale and story, then best engine programming minds all across the companies around to make the gears running smooth and nice, artists from CCP to create visuals. And that's it. But unfortunately we all know it ain't going to happen, so yeah. :-)