If you ask about "unique" encounters/dungeons these do exist, but mostly in random ship encounters or again random "sensor contact" or "ship" markers in systems. They're hidden behind random chance and so much copy&pasted shit (or that fucking sea shanty guy, pajeet mineral lady, starderp ships, broken down ships asking for parts show up again) that it's hard to find them.
I found:
- a derelict ship with a highly toxic atmosphere, it was basically like the scene from Chernobyl with the roof clean up crew where you race against time while the suit makes these clicking/ticking noises to loot and investigate it (it always does that sound, but besides this ship you never stay long enough in toxins to notice). It's kind of like a subnautica wreck exploration experience if you ever played that, loved it.
- satellite surrounded by a mine field, a guy wants you to recover data from the satellite, a starship flight challenge.
- a V'Ger rip-off where you need to deal with an AI ship, probably my favorite from a dialog perspective and visually I liked the pictures it displayed as you interacted with it, it really gave you this impression the thing you are interacting with is "alien". I also like the consequences for my choice
it figured out I reprogrammed it against its will and found me in another system eventually, wanting revenge.
- another was an alien rip-off where the ship was infested with xenos all over it.
- another alien rip-off, but this one was more mysterious with a large ship, where it was fairly challenging to find how to progress deeper into it and also had just one very high level alien the only enemy (it killed the crew, duh) ending up as a kind of a boss fight.
- one ship I think was lost because the engineer was addicted to TURN and ignored basic maintenance duties, relatable, but I liked the "spess is hard" theme this tried to evoke.
- another ship was a more complex technical fuck-up with cannibalism involved.
- found a legendary ecliptic battleship while jumping to an already explored high level system, probably a random/radiant boss for space battles (couldn't board it though :/), huge fucking thing with a small squadron of regular ships (which alone would be major to problem to most ships and characters). Had to pull away the escorts, kill them and then outmaneuver the battleship not to get ass-pounded by it despite already having an almost maxed out ship and points in ship-related skills (aneutronic fusion, piloting, ship design, shields...). Really liked that fight for the challenge factor and never seen another one spawn again.
So just out of curiosity (maybe off topic): how would you reward exploration in a game/RPG/open world/whatever? What constitutes a good reward?
At some later point I wanted to rant about what the game could have learned from Freelancer besides the obvious flight related things. For instance Freelancer rewarded your exploration because you found secret bases or systems (sometimes with cool stuff like the neutron star one) where you could buy unique gear/ships (once you got reputation), learn new backstory tidbits in the bar (like the sequel/expansion hook on planet Malta), find shortcuts between systems (smuggling routes) and wrecks with good loot. All the good stuff in Freelancer was hidden and required finding jumpholes or cozying up to rebel/outlaw factions (ex. best freighter by storage, best torpedo launcher, all class 10 ships, class 10 weapons).