Welcome to TLR Tuppe Hope you'll enjoy your stay !

I'm very glad that Freelancer combines a story with free-form, but to answer your question....Yes, I would still buy FL if it only had the free-form feature.

I'm not really getting Freelancer for the story. It might be fun, but I haven't really gotten into it yet. Much like in Privateer, I've just done a lot of random missions and saving. The multiplayer is where I see the most potential here.

Well, Elite was 164kb large. Freelancer is 875mb. Elite had a dynamic trading system too.



Edited by - Wolverine on 24-02-2003 12:33:35

Edited by - Wolverine on 24-02-2003 12:39:50

Wow! nice graphics!

Thought I was lookin at my colecovision talk about retro
I was gonna look for a copy of elite cause you have made it sound so much better than FL but I don't think I have the machine to run it. I also put away my spinner baseball games and magnetic football games in the closet. Their day is done.

Well... Freelancer seems to have everything that i liked about Elite and Elite II. So i'm in gamer's heaven right now.

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"In all likelihood you're going to die out there. We're all going to die out there, but none of us needs to be reminded of that fact. So you die, you never existed." - Lt. Cmdr. 'Angel' Devereaux

Hum good game you have here...

X2 is Elite. It's a full-fledged space sim with a cutscene-based storyline and a realistic economy. Emphasis is on giving the player complete freedom to interact with the game's dynamic environment.

Freelancer is Final Fantasy in space. It's a space adventure with cinema-quality storyline and RPG-like character development. Emphasis is on immersing the player in the adventures of the main character.

Privateer was a hybrid of the two.

The one you want depends on your taste, but realize X2 and Freelancer belong to completely different genres -- "apples and oranges" as the saying goes. You might as well compare "Freespace 2" with "Earth and Beyond".

Whether you're an X2'er, Freelancer, or both really depends on what you like, but if you're an Elite renegade still keeping a Commodore 64 in the spare bedroom, X2 is closer to what you're looking for and might finally free up the spare bedroom -- if only for your Atari 2600!

Edited by - Aye Capn on 25-02-2003 10:09:42

Aye:

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It's a space adventure with cinema-quality storyline and RPG-like character development. Emphasis is on immersing the player in the adventures of the main character.

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The above is true, but then what you are not saying is also true: FL has 99% of the things as well that made Privateer great. If it is Final Fantasy in Space? I tend to differ...

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

Edited by - Bargib on 25-02-2003 10:21:00

Whilst I played Elite to death, there is no comparison, technically, with FL.

It all boils down to what makes a good game.

A good game requires the player to participate, and to believe they are a part of the universe that the games designers have created.

So, in extreme circumstances, it is possible to create a 'perfect' game, but it will not be well received because of the times in which it is created.
It is also feasable to create a very imperfect game, which, due to circumstance, is well received.

Most games sit somewhere in the middle. With the game being static once it is written (barring updates of course) the variable is then the player. Each player varies even from day to day, let alone between players!

What I'm really trying to say is that Elite came along at the right time, and gave players 'enough' of a believable universe. Expectations were pretty effin low in those days.

Players these days are a much more cynical bunch (no! I hear you cry ! ) and are very hard to please.

In order for a game to compete with Elite in terms of how it makes you feel to play it, requires some input from the player. You have to suffer lows for the good bits to be good.

I recall one mission in Elite where you chased this geezer from one end of Galaxy 1 all the way through to Galaxy 8 before you could nail him. The process was appallingly boring and annoying, therefore much more satisfying when you actually nailed him. See what I mean ?

The " I want this , I want that, if I don't get it I'll scream until I turn purple and spam you to death with drivel and insults" bods that cruise forums with nothing better to do, would be better off spending their time learning how to code and becoming mates with that other anti-social git (albeit understandably sometimes) that makes the BC3000 games, Derek or something

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Aye Capn

You too playing the illegal copy of the full version of Freelancer? If not...you really should wait until you play the full version of Freelancer to make a fair judgement of it. And if your playing with a illegal copy...shame on you!

Oh..for your info..the mouse driven controls in Freelancer work great! I like it better than the joystick!

I keep seeing these "I don't like the story driven game" comments and I will again post this. Start a LAN server on your machine and then play multiplayer by yourself! Now you have the game running without any of the SP story missions. Now you ARE dropped into the middle of the universe with no direction or pre-determined course of action. Simple solution to this gripe.

Laughs! Good answer Brother Grimm

I had to do a similar thing in Baldur's Gate in order to create my own party of followers.

WhiteTiger:

Are you suggesting that the full version of the game will somehow "genre-bend" Freelancer into something else?

I played the Demo, I gave it its full due, went to the Badlands, tried all of the available ships and add-ons, worked up my reputation with as many different factions as would give me missions, and took as many different styles of missions as I could before I wrote what I wrote. I even tried to land on Maine and Ithaca, just in case something was there.

I made two full $25,000 credit run-throughs before writing about it.

I think I have the genre of this thing nailed: I know what a "movie" is, even if I don't know how the movie is going to end. It IS a movie, an interactive movie / adventure / RPG, with an arcade shooter to tie it together. That is its genre.

The demo doesn't include multiplayer; I have no idea what that's like.

Bargib:

I know what you mean about Freelancer being a lot like Privateer; there are times when it seems like I'm playing Privateer.

Those moments of deja-vu always take place on the ground. The way your character interacts, the way you make money, the way you get missions, the way you trade, all of that harkens back to Privateer; it's like old times again only better.

Once you launch into space the similarity ends. Even the "non-scripted missions" are scripted; the Mission Commander guides you through the mission and it all plays out like watching a movie. In Privateer the movie gets eclipsed by a space sim once you launch; in Freelancer space is more like a movie setting, and if you took a mission before launch, in space the movie keeps rolling. The arcade action serves kind of a "continuity" function but is definitely secondary to the game's cinematic experience.

Privateer was part Elite, part Wing Commander. The evolution of the "Wing Commander" side of the family toward interactive movie adventures and away from space flight reaches its natural conclusion in Freelancer, just as X2 evolves the "Elite" side of the family toward more realistic flight and economic models for the player to explore.

The uncanny similarities between Freelancer and Privateer are all centered around the "movie / adventure game" part of the Privateer experience. I'm not sure if that constitutes 99% of the Privateer genome or not, but there's an old saying amongst biologists: "Human DNA is 98% similar to Chimpanzee DNA -- that's some 2%."

Ive only played demo and this is my opinion.

Even with all the games around many features that ppl trully loved in Elite arent in.

What lakes in today Elite type games?(some have part of this feautures but none have all of this)

- A vast universe that is trully connected ...Thought there are jumpgates u can in theory fly all way there...
- Being able to "trully" get into planets. This is a feauture hard to implement today, basically cause graphics have evolved a lot.. and to do planets with full citys and stuff are much harder then when elite frontier came. but they could use some tricks...like making default city aspects that they could put in different parts of the planet and stuff.
- Dynamic trading.
- Corporation etc creation. A little bit like Eve and X2. Many players could be part of that corporation and do many things like creating products , building stations and stuff.
- MULTIPLAYER with all the above features... and mission creation features..like bountys, trade routes etc...(they could use a system close to the one used in nwn) ... i mean player driven servers (or not) that can have modules(addons)...
- An universe that trully interacts with u. Planets do their orbits....Comets pass by. There could be player driven servers that could add "modules" (like nwn) with their content and do some scripted missions for plays to embark. (lets say group of players must destroy pirate base..but while fighting a star explodes and they must use their warp drives to escape..i took this idea from freespace)

The thing is many of this ideas were present in Elite(orbit, planet landing, trully connected universe etc etc)..
But today its pretty hard to have all this features connected...Today games already bought many thing much better or even unique than Elite...

X2 brought Stations, Freelancer has Really well done space chat, and it has asteroid fields, nebulas, black holes and much more all changing dynamically, and at the same time it gives that "space ophera" kind of look. Its great for exploration, and space fights. Eve has the best "tools" for politics, corporations and the most dynamic market ever seen in a game. Freespace 2 had the best campaign like missions for multiplayer and it build the standard for space squads combat.

So todays games are quite unique in many ways...I agree that we gamers are getting a bit cynical, because most of use saw games "appearing" .
I love Freespace for what it brings.. And it is indeed the natural evolution for the type of game it wants to be... But I want more... And eighter in sequels or other games I want them to add some of the feautures above... Or else