Time is probably the biggest reason why certain ideas did not go into the game.

Time?

Correct me if im wrong, i thought they had something like 4 years to design this game?

We always want more and more and more... that is the biggest reason why games in development get delayed or even sacked.

So look at what we've got, and see it as a platform to build upon... Most of us hope for an expansion pack to give us great depth and varity with some of the things you mention... but don't you - if you are honost to yourself - agree that there is lots of content in Freelancer as it stands? I for one thing there is a lot to see and experience in Freelancer, and this massive universe is also one reason the game has taken this long...

Best Regards
Christian "Bargib" Koerner
Editor in Chief, The Lancers Reactor

Hopefully there is gonna be an expansion pack coming out...paying $50 for it and to get it shipped to UK is a pain in the ass when the SP missions are so short.

I can always try out the mp...

but in the mean time, i do hope they release an expansion pack....

If there's an expansion pack, it had darned well better make the ships have different speeds. As is, about 80% of the game's ships are useless once you have access to all the territories.

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

Well, you gotta understand, they can't have every ship being balanced out... you can't have a level 1 person flying something that is faster than a Titan or something... wouldn't make any sense.

Just think of the ships like cars - there's TONS of cars for your every day person, but as you get more expensive and more powerful, there are fewer and fewer, and the price skyrockets.

edit:
Also, by increasing speeds of ships, you dramatically decrease the size of the universe. The faster you go the smaller it seems. They probably wanted to maintain the feeling of being in a huge universe that takes forever to fly across. And they want to emphisize using of the trade lanes. Also, having fast ships would negate the need for cruise disruptor, as you could just boost away at 300 or whatever. I suppose making some ships have a cruise speed of 400 or something wouldn't be that bad, but I really don't see the need.

Edited by - Bacon_00 on 23-03-2003 21:41:52

the problem is that they have been rebuilding the starlancer engine, and after 4 years microsoft gets inpatient so they were forced to realeace the game.

note; just gossip

The problem would be balance in MP, not SP. It's way too easy to just go in and blast poor litte new arrivals with a high level ship. And then once you get the biggest, baddest ships, only the biggest, baddest enemies are good enough; you start to ignore the lower end enemies.

It works everywhere else. Make it so that one house's fighters are faster and lighter armored, while another's might be flying tanks but not as fast. To use such a great example for the zillionth time, you can beat a naginata with a wolverine in starlancer, and vice versa. Faster does not necessarily mean unbalanced(you can't exactly escape all that well with your thruster...it does have a time limit on it, and other people have thrusters too)

Just think: with every ship having a slightly different top speed and agility, you wind up with a ship for every player type. If you like to hit fast and run away, fine, pick one ship. If you like long, brutal battles, fine, choose another ship.

And besides, even with different speeds, the low-end guns would still suck just as much as they do now. You still wouldn't be able to kill people who have been on the server for hours or days with your little starflier, but you would have a much better chance of living long enough to get better equipment.

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 23-03-2003 23:49:00

The real bugs in the game are fairly small. Some players get a broken story mission regarding some Valkyries, there might be some kind of memory leak in the dedicated server, and there was the incompatibility with ATI cards that made text slow (did drivers fix that?).

But for me, for instance, I got through the game without encountering any significant bugs. So I'd call it ready.

ER

PS - yes, i would like to have more cruisers and battleships hanging out in the universe also.

Yea, I'd say the game was ready....
You're just nitpicking

I can't help but think the single-player campaign is just a portion of what was originally planned. Doesn't mean it wasn't "ready" though. FL is a pretty solid game.

Until after the attack on the arch, the game was good, after that all I did was launching start killers into shield genrators. That was a work of only half a minute, not really a battel I enjoyed.

Artic - Starlancer was developed by Warthog, not Digital Anvil - DA did the cinematics, and a bit of the story-design, the rest Warthog did, and it is Warthogs engine!

Freelancer is a new one from the bottom!

Best Regards
Christian "Bargib" Koerner
Editor in Chief, The Lancers Reactor

My big issue now days is the lack of a changing universe on a "persistent" server. It's become apparent over time that every event is triggered, and nothing is truely dynamic. The server doesn't track events from one sector to another, for instance. All the AI ships you see going through jumpgates just vanish rather than continuing on to some distant destination. When you exit certain ports, you are guaranteed to be attacked by an enemy that wasn't there before. If you dock and launch again, the whole scene will be reset. The only way to insure that you aren't attacked, or the fight you endured before docking ends, is to have a second player sitting outside the base. Otherwise time just stops until you launch again.

The only thing that is truely persistent is that any derelict ships or supply depots that are looted will remain so until the server is reset. In every other respect, the server is completely unchanging and unaffected. You will always be attacked by "x" faction in "x" sector. No matter how many of "x" you defeat, they'll always be back in strength the next time you return.

Once I recognized this nature in the game, I lost a lot of fascination for it all. There's nothing very complex about triggered events. How enjoyable is it to know that I will be attacked anytime I visit such-and-such base? When I got fed up with it, I simply altered my faction with the offending groups so I could have a nice quiet trade route. You can only see the same thing so many times before it becomes a boring repetition.

The depth is not there. Yes, the universe is big. Yes, there is a lot of content. Sadly, you don't need to see all that content in order to see the entire game. How long it takes for you to become bored with the reptition of the game may vary, but it'll come much sooner than it would have if the game had been truely dynamic. My hope is that there is some expansion or update planned that will change the server engine to provide the dynamic universe once promised. If we're lucky, DA has left room in the engine for this kind of change. Perhaps the groundwork is already laid, and a bit more programming will allow them to unlock such a feature.

I don't mind that these shortcuts were taken in order to get the game out, I only hope that they are not permanent.