Sun Apr 20, 2003 7:27 am
why they didnt finish it
I read a thread that came to the conclusion MS had pretty much forced DA to push out freelancer before they were done putting in all the cool stuff, and thats why theres all the extra stuff that isnt in the game, and why the game just feels like there should be so much more.
Just now i read a thread about how MS is going to release Freelancer on the Xbox this summer, and a number of people remarked about how it would really suck if MS released a "new and improved" version to only Xbox.
I put these two ideas together and came up with a scary but logical conclusion: MS knows FreeLancer is a really kickass game, so they did only a partial PC release of the game before they made their Xbox release. For those of you who dont know, the Xbox is MS's pet, in the past they've released all the games they thought were going to be really sweet to the Xbox before they made their PC release. For some of these games, the PC release had a lot more content than the Xbox release. The PC community was always annoyed each time a game was realeased to the Xbox before it was released to the PC, and freelancer's release to the PC before the Xbox may be MS trying to make the PC community happy.
I think MS is trying to do things the other way around this time: make a partial PC release and then release the completed version on the Xbox. It makes good business sense to do that: get a lot of people to like a game and spread word about it, but with the undertone that there was a lot more the game should have been, and then release the Xbox version "with content added" that's really the badass, rightful incarnation of the completed game.
Something else that supports this idea is the limited graphics of the game. PCGamer commented in their review about how the graphics seem a little dated, and attributed it to how long the game was in development for. But aren't the hardware specs just about perfect for the Xbox?
This could be the reason why MS/DA has done nothing whatsoever to support the mod community, even though the game was made in such an open fashion that it just begged to be modded. I mean, there's only two conclusions you can come up with if you look only at the file system of the install: either the game was unfinished and they never got around to putting everything into nice neat packages, or the game was designed with modding in mind. If the game was designed with modding in mind, then why is MS/DA so unsupportive?
It may be that MS plans to pretty much ignore the PC community and focus everything they have into the Xbox community, or that MS will start supporting the PC community once they release to Xbox. Regretfully, my mind leans toward the first of those two options, even though I dearly hope for the second. No matter what, we can probably expect to not hear a peep from MS until the Xbox release.
Just now i read a thread about how MS is going to release Freelancer on the Xbox this summer, and a number of people remarked about how it would really suck if MS released a "new and improved" version to only Xbox.
I put these two ideas together and came up with a scary but logical conclusion: MS knows FreeLancer is a really kickass game, so they did only a partial PC release of the game before they made their Xbox release. For those of you who dont know, the Xbox is MS's pet, in the past they've released all the games they thought were going to be really sweet to the Xbox before they made their PC release. For some of these games, the PC release had a lot more content than the Xbox release. The PC community was always annoyed each time a game was realeased to the Xbox before it was released to the PC, and freelancer's release to the PC before the Xbox may be MS trying to make the PC community happy.
I think MS is trying to do things the other way around this time: make a partial PC release and then release the completed version on the Xbox. It makes good business sense to do that: get a lot of people to like a game and spread word about it, but with the undertone that there was a lot more the game should have been, and then release the Xbox version "with content added" that's really the badass, rightful incarnation of the completed game.
Something else that supports this idea is the limited graphics of the game. PCGamer commented in their review about how the graphics seem a little dated, and attributed it to how long the game was in development for. But aren't the hardware specs just about perfect for the Xbox?
This could be the reason why MS/DA has done nothing whatsoever to support the mod community, even though the game was made in such an open fashion that it just begged to be modded. I mean, there's only two conclusions you can come up with if you look only at the file system of the install: either the game was unfinished and they never got around to putting everything into nice neat packages, or the game was designed with modding in mind. If the game was designed with modding in mind, then why is MS/DA so unsupportive?
It may be that MS plans to pretty much ignore the PC community and focus everything they have into the Xbox community, or that MS will start supporting the PC community once they release to Xbox. Regretfully, my mind leans toward the first of those two options, even though I dearly hope for the second. No matter what, we can probably expect to not hear a peep from MS until the Xbox release.
