Freelancer

[professorspatula]

Apparently, though, there's better space sandbox games out there; I've heard the prime example is the Privateer series.

Privateer was just Wing Commander meets Elite, hardly spectacular but enjoyable enough despite it's age. The good thing is the last time I looked (a few years back mind) there are at least 2 remakes around.

[rajpoot]

Actually, it wasn't the flight thing that I liked in the game. I've tried my hand at a large number of realistic sims, including Freespace and MFS X, but I never really liked them much, maybe because I don't have a joystick.......but anyway, it was the story part of the game I liked........I kind of wanted to play on with the same charecters and find out how does (or can) the tale go on.....it wasn't a complete ending you know.

It was originally planned as the second game in a trilogy.

I'd be grateful if you could give me the source.....I searched for ages on the net if a sequel was ever planned, but it seemed as if they just gave up the idea after Freelancer for no apparent reason.

[Kekvit Irae]

Alas, the only story outside of Freelancer you'll find that expands the storyline is that of Starlancer, the prequel. And since Freelancer already tells you at the very beginning who won the battle between pseudo-NATO and pseudo-Warsaw, there's little need to play it except for a more detailed background story.

[TinCow]

My favorite "space sandbox" game has always been Escape Velocity: Nova. It's the third game in the Escape Velocity series and easily the best of the bunch. Despite being made by a typically Mac-only developer (Ambrosia) it has been officially ported to PC and runs great even on really, really old machines.

[Crandaeolon]

Space Rangers 2 is a great "elitelike" too - a real genre-bender. Imagine Pirates! in space with more depth and more minigames (it even has oldschool text adventures!) and you have an idea of what the game is like. SR2 took initially some reputation hits because of StarForce copy protection and a somewhat amateurish translation, but those things have since been rectified.

[Forward Observer]

Actually, it wasn't the flight thing that I liked in the game. I've tried my hand at a large number of realistic sims, including Freespace and MFS X, but I never really liked them much, maybe because I don't have a joystick.......but anyway, it was the story part of the game I liked........I kind of wanted to play on with the same charecters and find out how does (or can) the tale go on.....it wasn't a complete ending you know.



I'd be grateful if you could give me the source.....I searched for ages on the net if a sequel was ever planned, but it seemed as if they just gave up the idea after Freelancer for no apparent reason.

I read this in several early previews of Freelancer along with at least one interview with Chris Roberts back when it was first announced. Roberts was the head of Digital Anvil and had previously worked on Wing Commander: Privateer while at Origin. Digital's prequel Starlancer, which was released in 2000, simply did not do that well because at the time space sims were on a decline. I can remember seeing copies lining the shelves at EB marked down to $1.98 within 6 months of release.

Also unfortunately, due to the complexity of the open ended dynamic universe intended for the sequel Freelancer, it's development simply fell more and more behind. This is when Microsoft stepped in and bought out Digital Anvil.

Roberts, who also founded Digital Anvil and who was the real driving force behind the game left the company after the buy out. At that point, in order to still release it and salvage some of Microsoft's investment, a lot of the content and features that Robert's originally promised had to be cut.

The game did OK but was not wildly successful, and with the space sim market almost dead by the time, there was no way Microsoft was going to sink any more money into development of a sequel.

Cheers

[frogbeastegg]

Privateer was just Wing Commander meets Elite, hardly spectacular but enjoyable enough despite it's age. The good thing is the last time I looked (a few years back mind) there are at least 2 remakes around.

Just?! Just?! :spits blood: Privateer 2 is one of my most fondly remembered games from my DOS gaming days! Gah! I played through it so many times! It was also the first game I brought a strategy guide for, so I could plan the best trading routes and revel in pages of ship and upgrade stats.

Remakes?



I played freelancer, and starlancer before it. Also wing commander, and the original X: beyond the frontier, and many others. I used to be quite the space pilot. It's been years, many years. The genre slowly died out, the games which did appear didn't appeal, and old staple franchises like wing commander went awful or vanished like the x-wing/TIE fighter games. I haven't had a joystick connected to my PC since before I installed windows 98.

Freelancer was a nice game, but overall didn't leave much of an impression on me. I recall more about starlancer. The main memory I had was of some unnerving areas which had low visibility and lots of floating rocks/debris for you to navigate through. The mouse controls worked decently, although IIRC they were a bit of a struggle in heated fights.

Be warned though, it has a fairly complex learning curve and probably will require a joystick to fly combat missions properly.

How feasible is it to play the game with mouse and keyboard? The original X was very laid back, there wasn't much fighting unless you went searching for trouble.