Well, not being and oldskooler when it comes to these type of games, I have to say they accomplished quite a good balance between story/fighting/exploration. I come from the world of FPS's like Unreal Tournament. So, to me I enjoy fighting more than say trading, so if they had put more emphasis on that I'd probably lose interest.

Yes... your right. Freelancer is an action packed games with a good story, I like it very much. But at the same time I am also waiting for X2, which will fullfill my need for a space sim.

back to freelancer...bye.

--------------------------------
Michael"TRAPPER"Needham
The Weak Shall Perish

...Yes sir thats right... just drop your cargo or I can open your hull with my twin plasma blasters, and take the cargo for myself.......Thank you, have a nice flight.

I personally think it's a great mix of everything, I have extremely few complaints about the game. The only thing I really want is the ability to manually roll left and right at will to line up on things, not just use auto-level. Besides that, this game is like my dream game.

Yep, my feelings precisely. I'm enjoying the FL demo and have pre-ordered a US version. I love the action and exploration, as well as the range of ships and weaponry. It's fast and action packed, ideal for short sessions.

For a full-on, life consuming, open-ended space-sim I'm waiting also for X2.

Two different games for two different sets of requirements.

Danielsan,

I can say with certainty that I share your feelings. I enjoyed the game for about ten hours but things started to get stale. Static economy is a real drop for me, but more than that is the lack of the world I was expecting.

My main reason for dissapointment with this game is seeing it's potential - They could have done SO MUCH more with this game - The best games are the ones that give you options, in my opinion, and I've always enjoyed games like Privateer, Mechwarrior Mercanaries, Freelancer, etc because of the choices they allow you to make.

Freelancer offers excellent graphics, a very comfortable user interface, and an oh so pretty galaxy to fly around in.

But for the love of god, if I hear "You must be new here," one more time. If they were going to go that route, they shouldn't have even bothered with voice acting - Text would have been far less annoying in my opinion.

More mission variety is sorely lacking - All the missions play out EXACTLY the same. That is, when you are sent on an assasination mission - the only difference is the location and the name of the person you are killing.

Anyhow, I'm not going to harp too much more - I think most of us realize that there alot more things that could be added to this game - and in all honesty, I doubt it will happen. But I make this post in the hopes that perhaps they might have the time and ability to patch this game and modify some of the things mentioned above.

But if not...Well hey....Wish I could develop my own game, hehe.

*SIGH*. I feel a rant coming on, so I'll try my best to stave it off.

I'm 27, and of the 'old skool'. I was fond of Elite, amused by Privateer, entertained by Wing Commander and absolutely enthralled by Frontier.

Frontier. Yes, and even its sequel, First Encounters. No one has mentioned either of these yet, unless you are actually referring to them when you mention 'Elite' - for those who don't know, Frontier and First Encounters are Elite 2 and Elite 3.

X2? Dunno. X-Tension? Drivel. Fascinating economy though. But that's all it was - Capitalism Plus in space. The AI sucked goat. Yes, it was entertaining - for about a week. After that, determined to squeeze every ounce of worth from the product, I commenced hacking. For those who have played X-Tension, I'm the author of XTPatch. For those who don't, it was an all-in one MODding tool to edit ship stats, replace textures etc., all with a nice GUI an about 30k in size (Asm).

Anyway.

Frontier.

Every time a new 'space sim' is announced, I pour eagerly through the documentation/reviews for the magic words "Land on Planets" and "Manually dock".

Freelancer suffers from the same gripe I had with X - autodocking. Imagine the extra fun you could have if you had to manually dock your ship. Frontier nearly managed it with space stations and mastered it with planetary landings.

Frontier simulates the whole GALAXY. Every star within 50 light years (IIRC) is positioned accurately. Every planet in our solar system is positioned, moves, rotates accurately. Hell, I demo'd for a friend yesterday by landing on one of Saturn's moons and staring at the horizon.

You could mine. With mining machines. Leave them anywhere. No matter how far away you go, whether to the next continent or to the galactic core, those mining machines will still be chugging away.

You could (and I frequently do for the sheer fun) perform slingshots. This is where you use the gravity of a solar body (moon, planet, gas giant, sun) to accelerate you to enormous speeds. Voyager (the NASA one) used it.

Frontier, in its entirety, fits on a floppy disk.

Yes, the graphics are dated, but so what. Look what you can do.

I swear, when Elite 4 finally shows up, I will pay ANY amount of money to buy it. If it costs 1000 UK pounds, I will buy it, knowing that I will get at least half a year's worth of gameplay from it - and that's just from the single player.

The more hardcore Frontier fans played the game at feverish paces (ie., imagine the first couple of days of Morrowind/Freelancer/Unreal/Deus Ex whatever) for a year or more.

With a whole galaxy - or two - to play about with, imagine the possibilities. Land, go to FPS view. If you want. Etc.

End rant.



Damn. I failed.

I'm an Old-School gamer and have played these kind off games from the start. Hey, I've played the first "Elite" for crying out loud! I agree at all the things you mentioned, but I also think that you should face the fact that this isn't Elite, Privateer, etc. etc.

This is Freelancer and I must say that I like the game! I haven't seen anything that says: "The sequel to Privateer!", have you?

Another point that's worth looking at is today's gaming market. It's obvious that they tried to make a game that is much easier to play and therefore appeals to a much bigger audience. Nowadays when you create a game that doesn't do the trick for a lot of people and doesn't earn a lot of money your company is a goner!

So just face the facts. If you want to play a game like Privateer, just play that game! This is Freelancer!

Oh, don't get me wrong! I'm enjoying the FL demo and will enjoy the retail when it arrives. It just annoys me when people / adverts spew on about how open FL is when it quite frankly isn't. It's compromised on too much considering the development time. As it is, I would rate this as somewhere between X-Tension and X2. Maybe on level with X-Tension.

Combat Ai - Similar, standard.
Universe Ai - X-Tension tracks ALL ships at ALL times, FL pops them into existence where the player can't see, hence the fixed economy.
Economy - FL fixed, XT fluctuating
Bases - FL fixed, X-Tension build your own. As many as you want. And blow them up.
Ships - FL just one, X-Tension as many as you want, in squads with orders.
Cap ships - X-Tension allows for huge 'mammoth' armed roving bases. With fighter wings.
Planets - both eye candy only. Both have deadly atmosphere zones.

Yada yada.

FL, however, is a seriously kewl shoot-em-up. XT is a serious econosim.

Both suck in strategic places.

Yada.


WTF does 'Yada' mean anyway? Where did it originate?

A fair assessment Stone-D on relative merits. I've been very vocal on the X boards of the need for enemy AI in the X series to be massively improved to provide a challenging combat experience as the flight style (much slower speeds than usual in keeping with the relative smallness of gate sectors) mitigates against using the FL, speed approach to making things difficult.

I am enjoying the combat aspect of the FL demo, it's visceral and has subtle depths in terms of tactics and loadouts. It helps that my reflexes are crap I expect, so it's never as easy as others find it.

Both FL and X2 will be on my HDD, for different game experiences.

After playing the game for about 18 hours now in multiplayer I have amassed over 4 million credits and had several ships. The static economy is a bit of a let down.
If you considder what was written into the 1st edition of Elite on the BBC Micro using only 32k of code, it amazes me that they cant get the trading/economy anywhere near the same. It makes no sense that if you constantly flood a planet with 250 tonnes of diamonds the price stays the same. Half the fun of elite was flying from system to stsyem looking for a good price for your goods.

Who knows, by the look fo the editing forum someone willc ome up with a trading mod sooner or later. The way I am looking ta the game is its a very nice starting point for developing a proper game. Look what happened with Quake...


Welcome to Lave Commander Bambi.
You have 100.00 credits.

Isn't "yada" jewish or something?

Anyway, I think the keyword with Freelancer is "compromise". The game, as good as it currently is, could've been so much more. It was in development for ages, and surely long enough to add the things people have been saying should've been in it. Well, the reasonable stuff, anyway.

I've seen lots of references to Frontier during discussion of FL, and the reason for that is probably because Frontier did stuff like planetary landings, scooping gas for fuel off planets and mining, and did it 10 years ago. Yep, this October will be the 10th anniversary of Frontier's release. The game which fit on one low-density floppy disk and was created by a team that numbered less than FL's programming team alone.

It all seems like taking steps away from progress, and towards dumbing down for the masses. I realise that these days, unless you do that, your game won't make money, but, with all the talent at Digital Anvil, wasn't it possible to make a game that appeals to the mass market, but can still engage those of us who started playing space games back in the day? I refuse to believe that's impossible.

It's entirely possible to play FL for what it is and enjoy it, and I hope mods will extend it to beyond that in the future. But, unless future patches change things, FL will always be that game which, although good, could've been so much more, and is missing the little touches that send a game from "good" to "great".

Even as maybe the most avid fan around the block, running this site, I don't think that Freelancer excels on all counts. But I'm greatly enjoying the game, and
thus I think that Digital Anvil did an awesome job, considering all the things stacked against them!

By todays standards, where diverse and complex content and art is required, I think FL offers a lot. The universe is big and diverse, and there is lots to find in there.

Gameplay-wise I could have wished for a more complex random-mission system, but Freelancer has also been in development for ages, so I think the focus on getting the game out of the door from Digital Anvil is a very valid argument.

Unfortunally a lot great stuff dropped inevitable on the cutting floor. When diving into the files you see, that they had more types of equipment like power generators and engines. They also had a bunch of misc. equipment like scanners and tractor beams.

Some of the earlier designs also included more types of random missions, like transport missions (cargo, person and/or information), protection missions (cargo ship, other fighters etc.), exploration missions (map out that jumphole) and most of what else all of you could come up with...

But if there is a looming axe over your head, you decide to focus very much on shipping... Still shipping a quality product - but maybe not with all the features you wanted in the first place... This is by the way very comon in modern game development...

Also I would have loved some special MP missions, where two groups can compete, such as fight it out to the last "group life" - winner gets xxx credits, capture the flag (find some object and tractor it in, reutrn it to a certain base...) and similar.

I think some of the MP elements can be done through agreeing on some rules, but I would have loved the game to support it inherently.

A dynamic economy is not high on my wish-list, but would be fun... though you alone transporting in a certain good should not change anything, but blowing up a lot of trains might be the thing that tips the scale...

If you think about it, then Freelancer in its current form is more alive and fun than any other space game out there. People are buzzing around on their schedules and doing their jobs, actually checking things acording to some master-plan and acording to their faction. You've got the radio chatter, which IMHO is really great and adds new dimensions to a game like this. Then you have all this handplaced information - I know of no other game that has this amount without failing on several accounts... Frontier 2 did achive a lot, but was very bland in my book. And I bet you that the data used was not done by "hand".

So all in all - the core of Freelancer is very solid and fun, but yes, I think the game renders itself wonderfull to an expansion....
'
DA/MS are you listining?

Listen Danielsan

I am 58 years old and I love Freelancer. I also loved Privateer. Freelancer has most of the things in it for me that Privateer had and even more! I have played the demo for over 20 hours game play and have enjoyed every min....so do not say Freelancer is for only the young!

The only part of your negative views I agree with is the one about auto firing
Turrets.

tip: when you get lane hacked and do not want to bother fighting..just hit the cruise and wrap outa there! Oh..and you can mine...your lasers make nice mining tools.

Can you imagine what you could achieve, using the same quality to filesize ratio as Frontier, when told, "Okay mate, I reckon we should keep this down to at the most three CDs okay?"

*DROOL*