Games

SpaceBourne 2

SpaceBourne 2 is a single-player, open-universe RPG and third-person shooter game with an abundance of features, including role-playing, mining, trading, piracy, crafting, and deep exploration. The story picks up where it left off in SpaceBourne, but now the player's goal is to build a new empire in the galaxy, with the methods of doing so being completely up to the player.

Perhaps Starsector? It's a top-down sandbox rpg. I personally find the lore and world-building interesting. Has great mechanics, and you can really get into the nitty-gritty when it comes to ship and fleet builds, you can basically do anything you want, whether you want to do solo stuff or form an empire. It also has a fantastic modding community.

star trek online. you could technically warp to destinations rather than fast travel but it would be hard to keep that up and ignore them. It even has a race event where the ships have to visit major planets and locations and it even allows for transwarps but because of the race nature you at best can use it for a shortcut or two to optimize the path. They used to have events with hourly rotations and just being up and watching the space map was sorta neat as you would see all these ships trying to do the race. They switched to a format where people could choose it more whenever they want though so it lost that particular community effect.

It's loosely in the same genre but you may like Rebel Galaxy. It takes a slightly different approach to space combat making it closer to naval warfare. Very enjoyable soundtrack.

Haven't seen anyone mention Starpoint Gemini. Warlords was probably the best iteration. Kinda like Eve but single player and a half way decent story.

Not really what is looked for here in most ways, but there's Parkan.

I have little to say other than it exists.

so for something completely different and focusing solely on the "size" aspect:

the biggest, that i am aware of, game in terms of sheer SIZE involved, is Stellaris:

it's a paradox grand strategy game, not first person at all, so completely different from the other recommendations and probably nothing to do with what you asked for...but if you want something truly MASSIVE...well...can't go much larger than galaxy spanning all out war involving gigantic fleets and armies!

so if power fantasies is something you're interested in, maybe take a look! it's pretty easy to get into, but has a lot of depth (but no requirement) to master later on! and it has a lot of settings regarding game speed and difficulty to tailor it to your tastes.

and mods, god help me, the mods; play a couple hours to get to know the game, then definitely get Gigastructural Engineering from the workshop. short list of ridiculous engineering:

• Attack Moons
• Behemoth Planetcraft
• Neutronstar Gigaforge
• Matryoshka Brain
• and a bunch, even more ridiculously huge projects!

(sidenote: the new DLC subscription on steam is...kinda worth it honestly. not the worst idea, especially to just try it out for a couple hours. i was extremely skeptical, but it's kinda, surprisingly, less predatory than the previous "we'll release 2 20$ DLCs, and 1 30/40$ DLC per year" model...)

Star Citizen is the only modern game that I've got any hope for. It's still years from being a proper game, but in the meantime you can have a surprising amount of fun in the persistent universe, assuming you can run it at acceptable framerates.

It gets a ton of hate, which I think is pretty unjustified given that it's the single most ambitious gaming project ever, and the progress they've made with in-house tools is frankly amazing. Just don't go dropping hundreds on ships and you won't have anything to regret.