Freelancer

[Ian C]

Dug out an old disc of my nephew's and realized I've never played this gem. Can anyone recommend any must-have mods? Thanks in advance.

[Nefaro]

I vaguely remember there being some big "Mega Mod" for it.  As for the name, I probably lost those brain cells awhile back.

[Tpek]

When will they finally make Freelancer 2 ?!  :-[

[Nefaro]

When will they finally make Freelancer 2 ?!  :-[

When someone's ready to F it up and include fewer features & content.  :P

[Gusington]

Freelancer 2 = Elite: Dangerous? In spirit and intent, at least?

[Philippe]

Freelancer is one of the few old games that I kept out of storage, mostly because when I played it through to the end way back when my computer hadn't been quite powerful enough to play the ending battles at a decent framerate.  The game worked fine on my old XP machine, but my current system has a wide screen that wasn't one of the options back when the game was originally made.

I had a few complaints about the game, far outweighed by its strong points.  I couldn't understand why the economies in those star systems didn't collapse from all of the piracy.  You fly anywhere for any length of time and you'll get attacked at least once. If you were an ordinary trader (or cargo hauler) the loss of one ship would obliterate your profit margins. 

I also had a problem with accents.  The lead character should have had an English accent because he came from Leeds (or someplace like that in the British system).  And the accents of the ground controllers, while they didn't have to be exclusively linked to the systems they were working in, should usually have been American in the American system, British in the British system, Japanese in the Japanese system, and so forth.

There was one that didn't make any sense to me, but I chocked it up to military stupidity.  A minefield in the middle of a warzone separating two planets.  And you supposedly have to fly through it to get from planet A to planet B where you need to go.  It took me all of about half a second to shrug my shoulders and decide to simply fly around it.  I seem to recall that there was also a line of rather pointless defense towers somewhere in the British system.  Somebody wasn't thinking in three dimensions.

Apart from the few negative points, I still remember gasping the first time I started flying around the Japanes system because the planets were so beautiful.  For that reason alone I decided that I would want to play the game again someday, though it's not a short game.

[Ssnake]

It's not just the looks, it's also the music score. They did a really good job there, blending the battle music into the, well, spaced out space music.

If I were to criticize design decisions, it'd be primarily the decision to explicitly NOT support joysticks. I mean, WTF?
Microsoft had their own joystick division at the time, they are making a game that just begs for joystick input, and then they explicitly exclude joystick support? (And a few years later the joystick division would be closed due to a lack of demand... makes sense).

As a direct consequence, the distinct lack of 3D thinking in all design. Everything's laid out in the same plane in each system, you're never expected to think in more than two dimensions. But if you can look past that, and the washed out textures, it's still quite playable. The Freelancer Wiki is still a helpful resource.

And yes, the economy still doesn't make any sense.

[Philippe]

The lack of joystick support never really bothered me all that much, since I would assume that in that advanced an environment you wouldn't need or use them anyway.

But the two-dimensional tactical thinking really bothered me. 

When you're playing with jet fighters there's an up and a down and gravity to worry about.  But inspace, apart from the occasional gravitational field, there is no up, down, or sideways.

So anyone pretending to be professional military in that kind of environment would learn to think accordingly.

But in Freelancer, for the most part they don't.

[AndyBrown]

Attached (hopefully) is a file I've found invaluable with Freelancer.  It opens all jumpgates right from the start and deletes the campaign storyline.  You're left with a sandbox and total freedom of action.

Andy Brown

[Ssnake]

The problem still is, once that you got that fancy Titan, the no-energy consuming Alien cannons, and a million credits in surplus cash, there isn't anything left to do. Part of the problem is that the Titan simply is the best all-round ship you can get. It has ample of stowage room, the best armor, supports the biggest guns ... and the trade ships all suck.

Now, if they had bothered to create ship branches that were superior in one, but not all categories, and if they had bothered to add automatic defense turrets to trade ships, and if you could actually fly one of those train ships, or own a full-fledged asteroid miner, and if the economy would react dynamically to your trade activities...