14 DAY TRIAL // I've been recently playing Dark Horizon, which does a nice job of joining classic space sim mechanics with a dark back story. The problem is that, leaving aside a couple of innovations, the combat in this game is very similar to the combat in Freelancer or Freespace. I'm ready to bet that, if I pick up the new X3: The Terran Conflict, the game will also be pretty familiar. You choose a ship, a load out, and you launch into deep space, battle foes, torpedo, some capital ships, and then enjoy the sense of victory against impossible odds.
What the genre is missing is not solid gameplay. The current system really works; dogfights are interesting, getting in shots on enemies at long range is hard, taking out the turrets on big capital ships is always a nice challenge. But after Freelancer and Freespace tell their sweeping stories of intergalactic threats, there isn't much you can do in terms of story in order to draw players back. So the obvious change is to drop the story element to a minimum while creating an open world galaxy that seems more like Liberty City.
Light sims might be revived if the emptiness of space could be filled with interesting characters, nice short quests, a spot of trading, a bit of piracy, a little defense of helpless colonists. Something akin to the universe of Firefly rather than something akin to the universe of Battlestar Galactica. I think a more laid back experience, where the urgency of the universe dissolving around you does not exist, might actually attract more gamers if the universe is animated and there's a lot of stuff you can do in it. Creating planets where you can engage in entertainment, planets where you can do a bit of exploration, a la Mass Effect, a highly profitable trader route you can choose, will also help.
In other words, the industry has already narrowed flight sims towards the single goal of saving the galaxy, and some real gems were created. It might just be time for a big publisher to take a chance on a flight sim that expands the limits of the genre.