The Perfect Game
Before I bought Freelancer; which is an extremely good game BTW; I used to play "Earth & Beyound". E&B is very like Freelancer, except it is online-playing-only, which might be a drawback. But the forced online activity created a community-feeling like no other, so there IS definitly something about massive multi-player online RPGs! But this post is not about promoting MMPORPG's, but rather to discuss The Perfect Game.
Freelancer came closs, so closs that I suspect many other player consider this TPG (The Perfect Game). Well, the perfect game would be much like Freelancer and E&B, in that you should be able to a)extract or buy pure raw ore, b)manufacture parts from this ore, and construct devices by these same parts (this is the E&B-part). The drawback of E&B which they avoided on Freelancer was that E&B wasn't "truely" 3-dimensional, and I think Freelancer has gone quite a big step in the direction of "true" 3D.
So, in essence, the perfect game would be a game you can player either as a single-player or multi-player, having "true" 3D environment and a story-plot - like Freelancer, plus the graphics in Freelancer is less cartoon-like vs E&B (more real). Not to forget the control(s), using the mouse is an excellent, I'd say brilliant way to control the ship in freeflight and combat. What I'd like to incorporate into the perfect game would be the ability to do very much what you can do in E&B, extract ore (using an ore-extractor, much like a tractor-beam), make parts, devices from parts. Basically you should in theory be able to build your own custom ship too, fuselag, "wings", engines etc. from various templates. This is done by what you call modding (modifying), and that goes directly into the files the game uses. This should be unecessary, and should be a within-game concept!
I know this might be a pipe-dream, but I hope sincerely that in the near future we will see such a game; an exciting story-line game, single or multi-player, ability to build your own custom ship(s) devices and parts, true 3D, excellent graphics.
As of E&B, I reached lvl 135, was a Terran Trader and managed to cut down travel-time from one 'end' of the galaxy to the other in 40 minutes (warp-speed 4.8K out of 5K)......
Norse Player
PS.This is NOT a letdown about Freelancer, as my 'new' ISP has stupidly insisted on hardware firewall (I used Zonealarm before I changed my ISP), so I can't play online-games When I got the game I was pleasantly surprised. Hope DA will come up with an extension-pack (continuation of the story in other words, I'd like to see the story of Edison Trent continue, hehehe!!) I know I know, DA will NOT come up with an extension of what we've got, but rather come up with a brand new game altogether.