Freelancer - anyone play it yet?

Akaran_D · Post by **Akaran_D** » April 2, 2003, 8:59 am

How's it handle?

Rasspotari · Post by **Rasspotari** » April 2, 2003, 9:04 am

fun game sorta gets tired after a while , since the missions are always the same.
1)go and kill bad guys
2)go and shot bad guy boss and tractor beam his escape pod
3)go and kill stationary target which has guards around it.

handling is good and it looks very good as well imo.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 2, 2003, 9:06 am

The game is good. Single player mission has a nice story. The multiplayer is worse than Earth and Beyond was at launch(Traderoute etc..).

Crav · Post by **Crav** » April 2, 2003, 12:49 pm

Good game, finished the single player campaign last weekend. The best part are the big fights, where you have to take on battleships or take out weapons turrets. I'm disappointed with the ship selection though. In the end you end up with the Order ship because it's so cheap and better than any of the others I used. Although I didn't get a chance to use the German ships, those were tough to fight against.

Akaran_D · Post by **Akaran_D** » April 2, 2003, 1:42 pm

Controlls, visuals on par with the stuff you'd expect today? Any noticable problems with lag, framerates?

vn_Tanc · Post by **vn_Tanc** » April 2, 2003, 1:47 pm

The visuals as well as the rest of the production values are top-notch.

It's a MS game too so you can alt-tab in and out without screwing shit up.

All in all it's a lot like Dungeon Siege (another MS game) - very pretty, lavishly produced, technically almost flawless, yet somehow lacking in the end.
Just like DS I played it to death for about a week then just lost interest.

kurzweil · Post by **kurzweil** » April 2, 2003, 2:38 pm

Visuals are good, gameplay is well done. Very stable in both single and multiplayer mode. Once I got used to NOT having a joystick, the FPS type controls worked great.

Missions and barchat get repetitive very quickly. ("You new here?")
Interface could have used more hotkeys, some parts are a bit clunky. Some parts of the interface also get in the way during battle, even when they're 'minimized'.

Weaponry variety is nice, although its sometimes hard to see through your own weaponfire. Sitting in a tradelane waiting to pounce on unwary cargo haulers is fun.

Anubis (Order) ship is the lightweight in the 'very heavy fighter class'; all the other VHF have at least 2x the shields/nano/armor, not to mention being able to equip up to class 10 weaponry. mwah ha ha.

But once you get that, well...the only thing left is sightseeing.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 2, 2003, 2:53 pm

It's a MS game too

Actually, Freelancer is a Digital Anvil game.
Digital Anvil was originally founded by Chris Robers... who did some 'fairly' popular space shooters in the 90s.

All in all it's a lot like Dungeon Siege (another MS game)

Dungeon Siege is a 'Gas Powered Games' game.
Another well known 'Chris' formed this company.
Chris Taylor was the brains behind Total Annihilation.

Most of the Microsoft games you see on the shelves are not actually produced by MS. They are merely the distributor/publisher.

very pretty, lavishly produced, technically almost flawless, yet somehow lacking in the end.

If you noticed any sort of similarities between these 2 games it's purely coincidental. Microsoft had nothing to do with the design or production of these two games. The only real influence MS had on them was ensuring final QC.

kurzweil · Post by **kurzweil** » April 2, 2003, 2:56 pm

If any of you played 'Space Rogue' back in the late 1980's, this game is laid out very similiar.

kyoukan · Post by **kyoukan** » April 2, 2003, 2:57 pm

Well I think he meant MS in the fact that MS published it, and Microsoft games have to conform pretty well to Windows. Microsoft games almost never have problems with alt-tabbing out or playing in a window and usually keep save games and screenshots and shit in My Documents.

Also, Microsoft is notorious for being one of the more generous publishers who are willing to give developers more time to finish their shit if they need it, and invest a lot more money into a game than another publisher would (although in this case they bought digital anvil and fired chris roberts for masturbating over his own ego instead of designing freelancer).

miir · Post by **miir** » April 2, 2003, 3:35 pm

although in this case they bought digital anvil and fired chris roberts for masturbating over his own ego instead of designing freelancer

LOL, yeah.. how many years Freelancer delayed because of his incessant ego stroking? He had some ambitious ideas, but for some reason didn't seem very motivated to finish the game.

Crav · Post by **Crav** » April 2, 2003, 4:29 pm

I don't know about Gas Powered Games, but Digital Anvil is run by MS. As Kyoukan said MS bought them out. It's filled with MS programers, and from what I've heard, MS has a lot of pull as far as the design goes. Although the final decision is made by the studio head in Austin. Over all the final years of this games production was delayed by too many cook in the kitchen on the design team.

On the subject of lag I only saw some during two massive battles, but it was short and I barely noticed it. Using Geforce4 4400, Athlon 1.7 gigs.

Overall I enjoyed Crimson Skies more than Freelancer, although as I said I enjoyed it enough to finish it.

kyoukan · Post by **kyoukan** » April 2, 2003, 5:35 pm

Gas Powered Games is still independently owned by Chris Taylor but he has a contract with MS for a certain number of games I'm not sure how many.

Digital Anvil had a similar deal but Freelancer was taking so long to make and MS had invested so much capital into the project that it was cheaper for them to buy the company and clean out the trash than it would have been to abandon it and write off what was already spent. They got a pretty good stable of coders and artists out of the deal so it wasn't that bad for them.

Freelancer is a pretty good game, but compare it to what it was with Robert's original vision for the game (dynamic economy, intelligent faction system etc.) it's a pretty different beast. I also didn't care for the linear single player game and how you couldn't explore the game world without unlocking it bit by bit in the campaign missions instead of having a more open universe like Privateer. That is to say, I loved the single player campaign's storyline and missions but wasn't fond of the linearity of it and how restricted your progression was. Also because of the way the game progresses, you start off in the USA section of space and end up in Germany, and the linear structure of fighter upgrades makes all American fighters the weakest in the game and all German ones the strongest (besides the very heavies you can get in multiplayer).

The game was also missing a lot of other things promised like HUGE battleships (the ones in the game are pathetically small) and there were no random missions to destroy capital ships or any sort of dynamic battles between anything other than fighters.

It also annoyed me that the fucker that played Steve in Beverly Hills 90210 did the voice for the main character because all I could picture when he spoke was that annoying mop-headed dickwad every time he spoke.

I'm still waiting for a spiritual successor to Elite.. Hopefully Freelancer will sell enough copies to justify spending money on a sequel with lots of improvements and a much more open single player campaign. I wouldn't even complain if they used the same graphics engine.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 2, 2003, 6:05 pm

playing it single player now, not too far in it, have a baracuda ship atm and its kicking ass, doing some missions in the japanese place till taht bitch calls me again

EQ is the only multiplayer game il play or will ever play, after eq thats it here heh

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 2, 2003, 11:27 pm

was playin a bit more and got to the blood dragon base deal, im sposed to do missions till that bitch contacts me again for storyline...but that fucking base and that being the only fucking base there has no missions...i check out the jumpholes and they all lead to hostile ass places with 5005050505 ships on my ass...where do i go for missions!!??!

Adex_Xeda · Post by **Adex_Xeda** » April 2, 2003, 11:54 pm

I played the game well past the campaign.

There are some very powerful ships past the end of the storyline.

There's a lot of "eye candy" systems to explore. I'm still hunting the myriad of systems for a black hole that that's hinted at on some system "wallpapers"

I installed the game straight and didn't notice a single bug. Hells Bells I wish more people would produce like that.

In the end, its all open and you can go anywhere. But after a few short hours post endgame sequence you feel bored and let down.

Basically they established a beautiful setting and engine. They populated it with a lot of content, but its all shallow.

This game is ripe for 4 or 5 expansion packs that further along the main story.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 3, 2003, 12:11 am

adex, you have any idea where to go to do missions from the blood dragon japan base? theres none there and i need to do some shit heh

Adex_Xeda · Post by **Adex_Xeda** » April 3, 2003, 1:44 am

Have you finished the storyline yet?

vn_Tanc · Post by **vn_Tanc** » April 3, 2003, 7:44 am

Kyoucan summed up my own retort about "MS games". Pesky psychic canadienne. . .

Ego-tripping producers are a blight on the games industry. I have ver much h8 h8 h8 for fuckers like that. One game I worked on called for a character to pop up periodically and offer hints. This character ended up with the same name as the producer, looked like the producer apart from the loss of about 250 pounds, and the write-up of his character in the manual (guess who wrote it) described him as "really cool and really helpful". Which is diametraically opposed to the RL description of the tosser.

rant off. soz.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 3, 2003, 8:53 am

yeah, just sposed to do missions at that dragon base

Adex_Xeda · Post by **Adex_Xeda** » April 3, 2003, 11:44 am

hmm I seem to remember Kyoto 2 jumps from the new tokyo system, it was solid asteroids.

I'll have to get home to check.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 6, 2003, 10:31 pm

that attack on kyotos base is just too fuckin hard

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » April 7, 2003, 1:44 am

This is Privateer, no? If so, I must get a copy

I loved that game.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 9, 2003, 8:03 pm

once again, that tegakis arch is fucking impossible. no way in hell to beat all 4 of those asshole shield generators after that little battle before you reach it

Adex_Xeda · Post by **Adex_Xeda** » April 9, 2003, 10:52 pm

The trick if I remember correctly was to creep my ship up against the structure I"m attacking. There's some deep channels that you can back into, The body of the large base protects your ship from lines of fire.

I recall just sitting there in a cubby hole unloading on the generators.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 10, 2003, 9:49 am

Xzion wrote:once again, that tegakis arch is fucking impossible. no way in hell to beat all 4 of those asshole shield generators after that little battle before you reach it

I just ignored all the ships and concentrated on the generators. I flew and stopped very close to them and was getting very little fire. And even then I just creeped through this one. Very hard. And this isn't the worst of it either...

Biffin · Post by **Biffin** » April 10, 2003, 10:35 am

Another way to do it is to cut your power to about half and then circle strafe the generators. This can be also applied to future generator like targets you have to destroy later in the game.

You still get hit but not as much as you would otherwise.

Xzion · Post by **Xzion** » April 10, 2003, 4:22 pm

lol fuckin finally, i just unloaded the 2 ones on the opposite of the battleship, flew back down to the bottom home you come out of and fly back up and unload on 1 then return and do it for the other, was pretty damn easy that way