Remember Freelancer?
- Thread starter figday
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My wife still plays it occasionally. I quit playing it when I got bored of selling as much MOX to the Irish in the Dublin system as I could to see if they'd really build a nuke and use it on New London.
Edit: I'd love to have a freelancer where your actions actually changed something about the world. You know, other than the price of the stuff you bought/sold. Hard to feel a sense of accomplishment if nothing you do seems to change anything about the world you're in.
Edit: I'd love to have a freelancer where your actions actually changed something about the world. You know, other than the price of the stuff you bought/sold. Hard to feel a sense of accomplishment if nothing you do seems to change anything about the world you're in.
That was indeed, a fantastic game. They haven't managed to make another open space game quite like it. The X games are a nightmare to learn, and everything else out there (Darkstar, Star Raiders etc.) is extremely budget and low quality.
Personally I liked Star Lancer even more. The structured missions with varying degrees of win or failure, the characters, the massive battles. So awesome. There was something great about going through the database and saying "I've killed that infamous pilot, destroyed that evil battle cruiser, blown up that station". I wish they'd make one like that on PS3
Personally I liked Star Lancer even more. The structured missions with varying degrees of win or failure, the characters, the massive battles. So awesome. There was something great about going through the database and saying "I've killed that infamous pilot, destroyed that evil battle cruiser, blown up that station". I wish they'd make one like that on PS3
They made the MMO of this game. It's called "EVE Online". It's not quite as awesome as one would think it should be.
Yeah, I remember it. Great premise, pretty good gameplay, brilliant visuals for their time and an extremely active mod community which, as I understand it, continue to produce new content to this day.
Still, as far as space sims go Freespace 2 is my personal pick as king of the genre, but Freelancer... yeah, I'd love to see another. It had promise! Sold pretty well too apparently, which is nice.
Unfortunately it was also one of the last Microsoft games developed for PC, back in yonder days when they were an active publisher of PC games. Its developer was also one of the casualties when Microsoft decided to scramble its development teams, closing down that games developer along with numerous others over the years like FASA and Ensemble Studios.
Still haven't forgiven Microsoft for that. Grumble Grumble.
Still, as far as space sims go Freespace 2 is my personal pick as king of the genre, but Freelancer... yeah, I'd love to see another. It had promise! Sold pretty well too apparently, which is nice.
Unfortunately it was also one of the last Microsoft games developed for PC, back in yonder days when they were an active publisher of PC games. Its developer was also one of the casualties when Microsoft decided to scramble its development teams, closing down that games developer along with numerous others over the years like FASA and Ensemble Studios.
Still haven't forgiven Microsoft for that. Grumble Grumble.
Freelancer is a very pretty game, and is the only space exploration / trading game in which mouse and keyboard make for an excellent control interface. All of the others I've tried so far require a joystick to be played well. (Though I hear that Darkstar One [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DarkStar_One] is worth the investment.)
The stuff I love about Freelancer [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_%28video_game%29]:
~ Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty. The layering techniques used to create a deep spacefield, so that (for example) an asteroid field at distance is appropriately represented, and bloom effects were artificed in software before the shader effect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_%28shader_effect%29] was a common hardware feature.
~ As I mentioned before, I didn't have to plug in my joystick, but rather the game provides an excellent navigation and fighting system for mouse and keyboard.
~ Unlike it's predecessor, Privateer, pirates didn't upgrade with you, rather you were capable of fighting tougher pirates. After having beaten the game, I went back into Liberty space, and found the local outlaws could only barely dent my shields. It was kinda cute and sad. [footnote]Sadder still was the effect in Privateer, where you'd get that nice new shield, only to find that every pirate in the galaxy had upgraded their weapons, making that shield relatively weaker than the predecessor. A friend of mine discovered that one could gold-mill by stripping down a ship to a spacefaring tin can, and trade locally, dodging all conflict, and that was safer than daring to actually upgrade.[/footnote]
The stuff that's weird, sometimes annoying.
~ It's really fantasy space, in which planets and moons are close enough to loom large on your starfield (and never move from their position), rather than being tiny dots in the sky along with the background stars, ones in perpetual orbit around the local star. Forgiven since it makes the game dazzlingly beautiful.[footnote]I would love to see a similar fixed-constellation game done in classic art deco [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RaygunGothic] design, in which a fixed space, including the super-highways between planets, stations and jump-points would make sense, as would ether-flight, for that matter.[/footnote]
~ As above, the game had fantasy physics, in which active controls were very atmosphere-flight based, but one could go into freefall mode (maintaining one's trajectory with a slowly deteriorating velocity) and rotate their ship around.
~ Pirates, bandits and other combatants cheat to stay on your tail. Go into freefall mode and turn around, and they quickly fall off so long as they're in the front arc of your ship. This tactic almost breaks the game, if you're simply looking to evade combat.
~ Similarly, the cruise disruptor missiles cheat. If they hit you in high-speed freefall, they re-activate your engine, slowing you to combat speed. Maybe they hack your engine controls and apply the brakes. [footnote]With cruise-disruptors, the only reason bad-guys can't catch you is the AI doesn't think to shoot one at you unless your cruise engine is on.
~ Natural wormholes are blocked if you're not authorized to go there. I get when an artificial is blocked until you get a passport, but it doesn't make sense that natural phenomena enforce the long arm of the law.
~ The planetside dialog was horrendous. I avoided talking to other characters just to steer clear of it.
~ The Dromedary class freighter is an ugly ship, and what you spend most of the campaign in, if you're playing the campaign merchant style. For want of a Millennium Falcon clone...
~ On the inverse side, in the mercenary and courier games, we spend way too little time in the British ships, which are rather pretty, being based on fish (rather than birds, as are most of the rest of the fighter designs).
~ I never figured out what to do with the wreck of the Hispania
~ I never figured out how to loot that wreck in the star's corona without burning up.
And now that I think about it, I need to go back and finish Independence War 2.
238U.
The stuff I love about Freelancer [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_%28video_game%29]:
~ Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty. The layering techniques used to create a deep spacefield, so that (for example) an asteroid field at distance is appropriately represented, and bloom effects were artificed in software before the shader effect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_%28shader_effect%29] was a common hardware feature.
~ As I mentioned before, I didn't have to plug in my joystick, but rather the game provides an excellent navigation and fighting system for mouse and keyboard.
~ Unlike it's predecessor, Privateer, pirates didn't upgrade with you, rather you were capable of fighting tougher pirates. After having beaten the game, I went back into Liberty space, and found the local outlaws could only barely dent my shields. It was kinda cute and sad. [footnote]Sadder still was the effect in Privateer, where you'd get that nice new shield, only to find that every pirate in the galaxy had upgraded their weapons, making that shield relatively weaker than the predecessor. A friend of mine discovered that one could gold-mill by stripping down a ship to a spacefaring tin can, and trade locally, dodging all conflict, and that was safer than daring to actually upgrade.[/footnote]
The stuff that's weird, sometimes annoying.
~ It's really fantasy space, in which planets and moons are close enough to loom large on your starfield (and never move from their position), rather than being tiny dots in the sky along with the background stars, ones in perpetual orbit around the local star. Forgiven since it makes the game dazzlingly beautiful.[footnote]I would love to see a similar fixed-constellation game done in classic art deco [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RaygunGothic] design, in which a fixed space, including the super-highways between planets, stations and jump-points would make sense, as would ether-flight, for that matter.[/footnote]
~ As above, the game had fantasy physics, in which active controls were very atmosphere-flight based, but one could go into freefall mode (maintaining one's trajectory with a slowly deteriorating velocity) and rotate their ship around.
~ Pirates, bandits and other combatants cheat to stay on your tail. Go into freefall mode and turn around, and they quickly fall off so long as they're in the front arc of your ship. This tactic almost breaks the game, if you're simply looking to evade combat.
~ Similarly, the cruise disruptor missiles cheat. If they hit you in high-speed freefall, they re-activate your engine, slowing you to combat speed. Maybe they hack your engine controls and apply the brakes. [footnote]With cruise-disruptors, the only reason bad-guys can't catch you is the AI doesn't think to shoot one at you unless your cruise engine is on.
~ Natural wormholes are blocked if you're not authorized to go there. I get when an artificial is blocked until you get a passport, but it doesn't make sense that natural phenomena enforce the long arm of the law.
~ The planetside dialog was horrendous. I avoided talking to other characters just to steer clear of it.
~ The Dromedary class freighter is an ugly ship, and what you spend most of the campaign in, if you're playing the campaign merchant style. For want of a Millennium Falcon clone...
~ On the inverse side, in the mercenary and courier games, we spend way too little time in the British ships, which are rather pretty, being based on fish (rather than birds, as are most of the rest of the fighter designs).
~ I never figured out what to do with the wreck of the Hispania
~ I never figured out how to loot that wreck in the star's corona without burning up.
And now that I think about it, I need to go back and finish Independence War 2.
238U.
Hated the lack of joystick support, could never get used to the mouse controls. As a direct result, I gave up bothering with Freelancer before completing my second mission.
I just WILL NOT fly a space sim that insists on keyboard/mouse-only input. And that's been all of them since SW: Alliance (with the exception of SWG's space expansion, which was just plain godawful in all other respects).
Even Freelancer fans have tried to figure a way to insert joystick support, such as by mapping mouse controls to joystick, but the results are uniformly crap.
Ah well. Maybe someday.
I just WILL NOT fly a space sim that insists on keyboard/mouse-only input. And that's been all of them since SW: Alliance (with the exception of SWG's space expansion, which was just plain godawful in all other respects).
Even Freelancer fans have tried to figure a way to insert joystick support, such as by mapping mouse controls to joystick, but the results are uniformly crap.
Ah well. Maybe someday.
