Right....

I've sat here for 15 minutes reading all these people arguing backwards and forwards... man what a waste of time....

Before you think i'm one of those people with a permanent picket fence up my ass.. I have this to say..

To those who are, shall we say, "disappointed", you pays your money, you takes your chances. And if it does get to you that much, do something about it. I am.

Personally I think the game is what you make it. Yes it's been Micro$oftified, but the functionality is still in there, it just hasn't been implemented. The game has an untold amount of potential, it just needs unlocking.


I'm busy learning all there is to know about the modding possibilities from the editing forums, and i'm impressed with what I see...

If you just happen to be doing the same thing or already have some experience;

I'm looking for somebody that can work their magic to create some new hull designs, 3D design is not my forte, and neither is matrix multiplication, those HardPoints orientation vectors are a pain in the ass... although i'm sure here would be the best chance of finding the best people for the job.

I'm also on the lookout for some help creating new systems...

If you're up for it, mail me @:
[email protected]

Xander

If it moves, shoot it... If it doesn't, shoot it anyway.

My take: People only THINK it's "Short" because there are fewer missions, and the missions auto-save at key points. In actuality, the missions are longer per mission than most other sim games. Then add the Freelancing you do BETWEEN missions, and it's a great fV3ck of a lot longer than most other campaigns.

The SL campaign, for me, took less time to beat, because there was always a set objective, and nothing really to explore in between missions(and you sure as hell couldn't jump to Coalition HQ and blast the heck out of them every time you got the urge). Even the longest missions took less than an hour to beat(you didn't have as much time to screw around between mission objectives before your CO would get ticked off and send the squad home). Dogfights usually involve Alpha wing and about 10 enemies, most of the time with other support. One of the primary reasons it seems longer is because when you re-play a mission, you re-play it from the start, not from an autosave in the middle. In addition, you could just punch out at the beginning of a lot of missions, ending them and moving you to the next in all of about half a minute.

On the other hand, FL missions are long, and may require you to dock at several bases. There are cutscenes up the yin-yang which add to the story. Dogfights can be long and very hard; You face dozens of enemies, in superior ships, sometimes with just you and one other pilot. You must manually go out and get cash to upgrade your ship. There are more ships available. If you don't win a mission, there's no retreating or ejecting and fighting another day, you have to play it over again from the last save. Granted, many of the objective types are very similar(kill all enemies, take out capital ship, take out base, disable ship, take out shield gens, protect convoy, etc), but in FL you see every last second of your travel time...in SL it was jump in, jump out, all done...nuh-uh. You have to cruise around most of the time, and that can take a while, especially with cruise-disrupter toting enemies after you.

In all, FL IS the longer game. It just has many features that make it seem much shorter(many of which were mentioned on the SL boards pre-release -such as the auto-saves, and other details).

Reaper: $200,000,000.
Rockets: $100,000
The look on that pilot's face when you launch a full pod of screamers up his tailpipe: priceless

Edited by - NukeIt on 28-04-2003 23:04:50

I Loved the game, it's great, but... I must say, what a terrible end!!

I played about 21hours until the end, to see all the other caracters disapeer, and got frustrated because, no more story was in there. After orillion sad that he needed us in liberty to watch over, I thought "great another story like privateer" So I did a little digging and found out that that was REALLY the end...

And about exploration, trade, fighting, I must say like others X-tension is much much better. There should be more intereaction between the player and the Universe.

Freelancer with X-tension Universe should be a game for the records!!

Freelancer action and gameplay is better, it's not a so stopped game,if you know what a I mean, and as a better story (except the end, CAN'T END THAT WAY)
But X-tension as a much better intereaction with the Universe, its there were the game flaws are, not in the short story.

Why can't a freelancer become rich and have more than one ship, an empire to control, contract some wings to help him...

the game has a lot of potencial, maybe there will be an expanion (X-tension is like an expansion to X-beyond the frontier, and it was great), to creat more interaction with the Universe and finish the storyline.

---

Why can't a freelancer become rich and have more than one ship, an empire to

control, contract some wings to help him...

---

Just my $.02

Surprised nobody here mentions Tachyon: The Fringe.

It had wingman you can hire, a hanger, etc.

If Tachyon had as large a Universe and as many factions as FL, it would have
been the PERFECT space sim. IMHO


"Got anything for me?" - Trent, A.K.A. 'Mr. Eloquent'

it was a brill game but the ending was rubbish

But such a game would require a powerful computer. And not everyone has a powerful computer. Da may have just been trying to make the game accessible to everyone.

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I don't understand why people are getting bored. Things are just getting started, and SP is a joke compared to MP.

I am a veteran MechWarrior, and although I dislike M$, I have to admit that they have supported MW4 through several years of patching and expansions, mostly for the better. I still play MW4 (and host a dedicated server), even though I know every map and have stopped altering my mech configs. Once in a while, I go back to do the SP campaigns, but that's not what brings me back.

I am waiting to see what develops in terms of MP. Clans are forming, people are developing their characters, things are just getting started. I'll agree that SP gets old quickly, but MP is what makes any game exciting.

Aye, mp is definitely what keeps this game interesting. Nothing like being part of a group, taking over a system, mass battles between large groups of players are just sooooo fun.

Actually we tried it with battleship mod. 48 players, all in battleships, in 2 groups. It was absolutely mental.

Anyway, the single player I think is just leaving the story open for a possible upgrade pack to come at a later date - some extension to the storyline. I don't know how hard it is to do, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some people releasing story mods of their own as well. If an SDK is needed, DA/MS should get their a55es in gear and get it out there

the most fun i ever had in this game... was when i got completely lost. i was cruising around in my anubis after the storyline was done and knew that malta was a criminal planet, but i had no idea what i was going to face because i had not tried to change my "clean slate" rep from after the game... also i did not know about patrol routes, i was quite literally flying blind ("has to be a jumphole in that cloud over, has to be"... i got raped by corsairs, but because i am the type of player who gets angry that people shoot at me, i didnt run once, so i had lots of corsair kills... i still remember being nearly dead and out of nano's and stumbling on that red hessian base... i can see the docking animation in my mind clear as day as my "being consumed by flames" anubis limped into station...

really i wish i had known nothing. i only had a general clue that there was a massive jumphole network in the rhineland area, but it would have been a thousand times more fun if i knew absolutely nothing and just started exploring outwards from manhattan... que sera, but if you buy this game and do no internet research on it at all, its easily 100+ hours if you want to map everything and get everything as long as you arent too concerned with being uber and have to figure things out yourself...

I don't really like to play Freelancer over the Internet. I have a pretty crappy connection, so, all my games are very laggy. And we all know that lagg is no good in a game where accuracy and speed is the main necessity.
So, I have to be content with the Single-player. But after the Single-Player plot, I start getting bored and extremely power-hungry, so I start hunting for the best trade route, best gun, best shield, best everything.
But when you have everything, there is no longer any fun...
;(

When you have explored, looked around, found every wreck, every anomaly, every cloud, asteroid field, planet, jump hole, etc etc, THEN you have finished the game . I'm still finding new things even though Im not finished with the game yet.

13 hours is a bit short -- or perhaps you've beaten SL front, back and inside/out?

The design of the game seems to be:

1. Story. You need to follow the mission to gain full access to the entire Sirius system. This is a rather weak point, I think, especially as there's no mechanism for plugging jump holes.

2a. Exploration. Most of the Sirius system remains unexplored, and there are some
very nice sights out there, and at least one quite weird one.

2b. Ship upgrades. These go in lockstep with your level, which, in turn, seems to be connected to little else but your financial worth. So you need to earn money.
(I suspect this might be a late decision: it makes better sense for levels to follow
the players kill rate, but that makes the game nothing but a shoot-em-up game, which contradicts the claimed 'do what you want to' type of game. Privateer 2 suffered from levels being connected to nr of kills.)

These two depend on each other: to visit all possible parts of the Sirius system you either have to be very good pilot in a very maneuverable ship, or be able to bribe your way.

But after that, the game comes to an end, unless perhaps you collect rumours.

It's fairly easy to come up with ideas for possible improvements, but that is a bit off-topic for a spoiler forum. None of the mods I've seen address this area -- it may be that it's impossible.

if you think the game is not challenging at all but you still want to get more from it, i suggest you fly a vessel(whatever you are having) and kill anything that moves in Librety...it should be fun....do it in front of the Planet Manhatten and Kill everything that coming to and fro the planet...maybe this the final words "Find a job" mean...who knows?

Like Zero said the game was designed for patient people, and they made it open ended for little speed demons like the rest of you, and whats the big problem anyway, they give you a great MP selection too, It's one of the best MP layouts yet. I've beat the game now three times but I can still have fun playing MP or modding my SP.