Star Wolves 3: Ashes of Victory in Development

No, nothing to do with Star Wolves at all. Freelancer came out in March 2003, developed by Digital Anvil and published by Microsoft.

Freelancer has some good concepts like the cruise/cruise rings, the factions and relationships between them, plenty of ships models (fighters, capital ships), and if you can get past the rather sparse equipment upgrading tree and rigid storyline, it's a good space sim. There are some huge mods for it too, like the Discovery mod, which adds literally hundreds of ships and weapons and other items. If you can find it, it should be very cheap by now.

I'm pissed at more modern space sims exactly because they're simpler than Freelancer. We don't need more mindless shooting games. Space sims aren't just "FPS in space".