Freelancer:
Trent - “Have anything for me?”
Any fucking NPC - “we don’t own this place…. But we have an understanding with the people who do”
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Gaming
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We just had a discussion about Star Citizen the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there's been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
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Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it's kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
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X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn't add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
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Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it's a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman -- an indie fighter combat game (not space -- atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat -- did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I'm thinking that maybe there's room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of "Hollywood space" -- fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around -- were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don't have that around any more.
There's a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it's that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn't handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you've got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it's just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we're past that point.
Have you played Everspace and Everspace 2? They're more arcade-y but they scratch the same itch for me. The core gameplay is just fast paced space dogfights
I think what you're noticing about on foot sections in modern space games is because merging that sort of experience with a space sim is truly the space sim's "final frontier", so to speak. It's the only part of an immersive gameplay experience that is yet to be executed as cleanly as the in-ship portion of a deep systems driven sci Fi space exploration game.
It's why Starfield is the way it is, they tried to conquer that frontier as well, and had to make a lot of concessions to do so and didn't have any prior experience in that sort of genre. I think it is safe to say that Starfield didn't succeed well enough or deep enough to be the definitive shining example of a space sim with equally executed space and ground gameplay styles (partially because it's not truly a space sim at all, more like an arcadey take on it )
One day a game will, and it'll be awesome, but it'll probably still be a while. Starfield showed that even if you throw lots of money and a professional team at it it's not a sort of game you can easily make.
Project Wingman
"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time..."
Hell yeah! I don't play it very often, but Freelancer gets installed on every (Windows) computer I own. I'll have to check this out.
Can I host my own server of this, or is only the client mod released?
You can host your own server too, although there's a few steps you need to follow to get FLServer working properly. There's instructions on the Discovery forums for that.
Wow, they're still releasing new versions of Discovery? That's crazy! I can't believe it's been 20 years of Freelancer modding now.
Yep! Discovery alone has been going since 2006, and has had a 24/7 multiplayer server running consistently that entire time (barring minor outages from faults and attacks). Pretty incredible really.
I also don't like thinking about it because I first registered an account on their forum in 2007... really puts the inexorable march of time into perspective.
Shit I used to love Freelancer years and years ago. Can you even buy it for legally anywhere anymore?
Nope! Download away! In 2012, Microsoft used to even have a self hosted download link acknowledgment of its abandonware status but it’s gone. So it here
Do you know where that link happened to be? I'm wondering if it could be dredged up with the Wayback machine.
I can’t seem to find it but I remember it was offered
How did I not know about this? Thank you!
We've got a Discord server if you want to drop by and take a look around. :)
Looks cool! This reminds me of Freespace, another beautiful space fighter game