Sat May 03, 2003 1:03 pm
My Freelancer Odyssey
This approach to the game may be familiar to those of you who have become obsessed with this game. I am a veteran of many older games that have echos in this program: Freelancer, Wing Commander and on a more subtle level, a old SSI game called ..... The Cosmic Balance, a ship building and space combat game where you build em and test em.
First time through: ignored all the logic and just played. Took on missions too quickly and zipped through the SPMs. Thought the final two missions were super lame and felt very liberated once they were over. Killed a million Xenos to fix rep with the baddies and ended up with a Sabre.
Second time through: Made my goal to get the maximum ships before taking on any of the SPMs. This was fun. Try to explore every system before making any money (which slows down the SPMs). Invest money immediately in equipment (which reduces their value and slows down the progression). The maximum level ship you can use for the final single player mission is level 13. Ended up with the Barracuda. Thought I would enjoy the final missions more, but they are heavily play balanced. At first you get hit a lot and use up your shield batteries quickly, then as you become more helpless, they AI backs off. Felt really stupid.
Phase three: Ship collection. Started a "Pirate Career" where I worked at getting early access to Pirate bases ( again, avoiding missions that would hurt rep with baddies ). After getting to level 4, I decided to go through all my saved games to that point and tried to create a saved game file for every pilotable fighter ship in the game. This is a set up for phase 4 and 5.
Phase four: Pirate Career. This is in progress. I am still experimenting with doing select missions at pirate and baddie bases, then returning to SPMs as needed to advance the levels.
Phase five: Creating Optimized Ship/Weapon combos. This is also in progress. This is much more complex and interesting than I thought it would be at first. I am currently working on the Dagger and am looking for an Advanced Stunpulse turret, if such a thing exists. You find new weapons, mount and try. You lose lots of money doing this, which is good, because the the tyranny of the single player missions is partly avoided.
I figure I can keep phases 4 anf 5 going for another 150 hours of gameplay.
First time through: ignored all the logic and just played. Took on missions too quickly and zipped through the SPMs. Thought the final two missions were super lame and felt very liberated once they were over. Killed a million Xenos to fix rep with the baddies and ended up with a Sabre.
Second time through: Made my goal to get the maximum ships before taking on any of the SPMs. This was fun. Try to explore every system before making any money (which slows down the SPMs). Invest money immediately in equipment (which reduces their value and slows down the progression). The maximum level ship you can use for the final single player mission is level 13. Ended up with the Barracuda. Thought I would enjoy the final missions more, but they are heavily play balanced. At first you get hit a lot and use up your shield batteries quickly, then as you become more helpless, they AI backs off. Felt really stupid.
Phase three: Ship collection. Started a "Pirate Career" where I worked at getting early access to Pirate bases ( again, avoiding missions that would hurt rep with baddies ). After getting to level 4, I decided to go through all my saved games to that point and tried to create a saved game file for every pilotable fighter ship in the game. This is a set up for phase 4 and 5.
Phase four: Pirate Career. This is in progress. I am still experimenting with doing select missions at pirate and baddie bases, then returning to SPMs as needed to advance the levels.
Phase five: Creating Optimized Ship/Weapon combos. This is also in progress. This is much more complex and interesting than I thought it would be at first. I am currently working on the Dagger and am looking for an Advanced Stunpulse turret, if such a thing exists. You find new weapons, mount and try. You lose lots of money doing this, which is good, because the the tyranny of the single player missions is partly avoided.
I figure I can keep phases 4 anf 5 going for another 150 hours of gameplay.
