Freelancer 2 (?)
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Its already been a decade.
There won’t be a Freelancer 2Sad, but that’s the truth.
Yeah Bob, the gaming industry doesn’t cares about the space simulators anymore. They are all busy making their own “Modern Warfare” copies.
Could be worse… The MMORPGs got stuck with the generic “World of Warcraft” system. The RTS have decayed too, leaving less to strategy and more to “pew pewing”. RPGs…
Imo, today if you are looking for quality… go Indie.
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Yeah. What is it with this last decade and maybe getting one decent game a year. And I don’t mean one per genre, I mean one total. There have been so many craptastic remakes of battlefield, and the mmo genre is over saturated too.
Looks like certain companies have been trying to make something to compete with Freelancer, but with no obvious success. I even tryed Eve. And yes, I know, they are as opposite as day and night as far as space sims go. I just wish a new CCP type company would surface that put that kind of effort into a new Freelancer.
Eve had the unrivaled scale, much like Sins of a Solar Empire does. The thing that I didn’t like about it, that I’m sure all freelancer players don’t like, is the impersonal relationship between player and ship, and in my case, the hugeness of the systems. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy large maps, and I know they were trying to aim for the realism that space is huge and vast, but it’s a game. Keep it interesting. Which is why after a couple months (litterally, 2 months) I just went back to freelancer. The maps might not be as huge, but there’s more content per map. Do have to say, I miss Concord when pvp’ers try killing me in the start system.
So I guess what we really need to do, is find out/make a large detailed list of everything we know and love from Freelancer, and list off everything that it didn’t do that we wish it did do, and all the extra support features, then, see what can be done about them. Game engines are becoming less and less costly. And since FL has survived this many years on just modding alone, you’d think the community would just step in and agree to work on developing their own open source version of Freelancer 2. Hate to say it, but that’s the only way it’s going to happen.
I’m sure if half of the community would dedicate to putting down $10 a month for the next year or two, that could help cover the expenses for coders and content developers to work on the project. I wonder if enough people would read this and take it seriously enough to really give it some thought. I know we all want a new, modder friendly, up to date Freelancer engine to work with.
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Truth is there’s lot’s of quality games out there, it’s just that the bar is raised so high now that something exceptional has to be made to stand out from the crowd. Plus the large amount of cash spent on marketing hype for the big games like COD drown out the whispers generated by others.
It’s all about the numbers. Tried and tested models that generate cash are all investors are willing to pump money into. You need money up front to fund a game that’s going to take 2 years or more to produce, the people making it have to be paid and you need a budget for marketing the product once it’s finished.
I read an article the other day on Bit-Tech that I found interesting, it questioned the need to build every game from scratch when there’s already so many game worlds out there. It is surprising that with all the models and maps out there that have already been made, none of it is recycled. They spend all that time constructing a huge environment, islands and cities etc, then do it all over again for every game that gets made.
Time taken to produce a game could be slashed massively if perfectly good worlds could be used to tell a different story. Imagine how impressive some of these worlds would be by now if rather than knocking it all down and starting again they simply added more to each world and gave the old town a face lift.
That said, there’s no point knocking games like EVE and Black Prophecy, they’re perfectly good games in their own right, they’re just not to everyones liking, same as freelancer is not to everyones liking. If microsoft decided to make a freelancer 2 then I’d bet it would be made as an MMO in exactly the same fashion as Black Prophecy, and I doubt it would be all that much better than it either. BP is a very good looking game if you’ve got the hardware for it.
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Hehe, thanks Griff, still working on it
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Sci-fi in general is on the backburner at the moment, if you hadn’t noticed. It’s a matter of cycles; hopefully some time in the future we’ll see the pendulum swing the other way and give us a bit more space sims. Surely the market that was there 10 years ago hasn’t disappeared into the aether, right?
Timmy’s right, though, there are a lot of fantastic games being made, you just have to dig a little deeper. AAA was never the market with the best games ever, merely the market with the flashiest and prettiest ones. Take a look at indie titles and smaller devs and you find gems like Minecraft, Magicka, Terraria, R.U.S.E., etc. Some big devs make good games (Ubisoft, DICE, Irrational, BioWare, etc.), but they’re far from the only place to go.
I’ll just disagree on the point of BP, it’s a terrible game even with a good machine
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FriendlyFire wrote:
I’ll just disagree on the point of BP, it’s a terrible game even with a good machineQFT
On the bandwagon note - yeah, there are many great titles if you know where to look for them. Sword of the Stars by Kerberos Productions and Paradox Interactive is a fantastic franchise, and SOTS 2 is just around the corner. (its a hybrid 4X, btw) http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/sword-of-the-stars-ii
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That’s awesome. BP’s graphics can be good, ofcourse, as said with the correct machine. Mine is rather old already. Although, it plays Freelancer better than my last machine, lol. CCP did an amazing job with Eve. Parts of Eve I did like. It was just the absolute vastness with nothing in it that I didn’t much enjoy. Well, that and when you die, you loose your ship. That was annoying, but for the direction they wanted to go with the game, it worked.
As far as indie game developers versus blatent cash in games by big name companies? Yeah. I’m against that entirely. Cause it floods the market with cheap knockoffs and it just wastes everyones time, money, and patience.
What was said about lots of decent indie games being made and being over shadowed by the above mentioned games? I’ve been feeling that for some time now too. I’ve been hoping and praying for another game that can surpass what I loved in Warzone 2100, as I am for Freelancer. That’s not to say there aren’t games out there that aren’t any good. There are, but they are not Freelancer by any shape of the imagination. I know I shouldn’t really be using FL as my benchmark about what makes a game good or bad, but I want to play something that game me the same level of satisfaction as FL did. I’m sure alot of people feel the same way, since this game hasn’t died over the last ten years. Well, soon to be ten years, my disk says 2003 on it.
I think the most indie game I’ve played in the last 2 years is probably Alien Shooter Vengeance. They did reuse a lot of their own material when it came to making other games and dequals. Like Zombie Shooter 2, Alien Shooter 2: Conscription. I still liked Alien Shooter Vengeance over the other two. Conscription felt more like a beta then an actual final release though. I ended up getting caught in walls, hung up on nothing, all kinds of weird stuff like that. I do like that as mentioned, they are reusing old worlds/maps even “modding” their own material to make new games (though I’m sure for them it’s not modding, since they own the source).
I stated before that the community here on TSP has put out a magnificent amout of content, and still wonder why it hasn’t gotten the spit-shine and dropped into an engine that could better facilitate the current communities needs. I don’t want to sound pushy about this point. “Damn lazy modder community isn’t doing a damn thing to move ahead with a new engine when there’s many to choose from”. That’s not the case at all. Every time I pop by TSP and Mod DB it’s always a treasure chest opening for me. There’s so much good coming from everyone here. I can’t help but want more for everyone. May be greedy of me, but Freelancer will eventually reach it’s limit and that’s going to be a sad day for everyone. Really like what’s happening with FLHook though. That’ll keep it going for a good while yet.
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New Engine is the way to go.
And yes, at first just make a basic freelancer with vanilla features and only then expand.
Kinda this?
new freelancer fan projectAnd yes, I am ready to pay for my favourite game to be alive.
And waiting for galaxy empire ofcourse.
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FriendlyFire wrote:
I’ll just disagree on the point of BP, it’s a terrible game even with a good machineHey, if I’d had to pay for it I’d agree. I just can’t knock all that fun for free.
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It all looks good and just goes to show you all that could and can be done for Freelancer but, it’s just getting the codes to get it started. I would love to see something brand new happen with Freelancer to make it look and have more of the realistic look as some of the newer space sims out today without a drastic change of game play, leaving it as it is now. Nothing is a playable a the Freelancer we know today.
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Grif and Tim,
It is hard to move onto a new game and find it is not as good as Freelancer or the Stalker series.
2 games paid for this year! Nuff said!I have said before I only play SP and the biggest letdown for me is that a storyline for the continuation of Trent isn’t thought out.
If games were added to to make an original game like Freelancer, with a longer story, I’d be willing to pay $100 for it. That is close to most games in Aussie.
And it isn’t the “Pretty” that makes a game good. It’s the re-playability. -
Mirkha wrote:
have you seen this one ? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW6vHgRgTe8About a year or two back I had extensive correspondence with Vice, the creator of Evochron. I helped beta test the latest Legends (before Mercenary). I tried to impress on him that there is a large space sim gaming community that is hungry for something more. I explained that the secret to breaking in is serverability. At the time all the player files were stored on the client PC. He had a decent multiplayer server app, but players could sign on with their existing characters (and all the riches they had accumulated). There was nothing stopping someone from running a server, logging on and enriching themselves through various means, or hacking their player files, then logging on to a community multiplayer server. It would make the idea of a formal persistent MP server unmanageable. He saw my point and made several improvements including encrypting the player files and adding a flag that characters could only be used on the server they were created on. I’m not sure where it all led because my RL issue that separated me from Uber also separated me from Evochron (and no, I wasn’t in jail as Baene has suggested).
I think Mercenary is worth another look. I’m confident that the talent that the Freelancer community has in modding can make Evochron a pretty damn good imitation of Freelancer 2. I’m also certain Vice wouldn’t mind a bit if we modded the crap out of his game, as long we paid for our copies….
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Sledge wrote:
Mirkha wrote:
have you seen this one ? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW6vHgRgTe8About a year or two back I had extensive correspondence with Vice, the creator of Evochron. I helped beta test the latest Legends (before Mercenary). I tried to impress on him that there is a large space sim gaming community that is hungry for something more. I explained that the secret to breaking in is serverability. At the time all the player files were stored on the client PC. He had a decent multiplayer server app, but players could sign on with their existing characters (and all the riches they had accumulated). There was nothing stopping someone from running ….
If Evochron will support custom server and custom mod like Freelancer (To make my change the world LOL), that will be my next turn.
Also LS’s engine and the Unity Fans project.
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No.
you all forget one important fact, Freelancer is awesome because WE MADE IT AWESOME… our memory’s… our clans… our servers… our Community as a whole (yes…even the bad parts)
No game can capture/replace that… EVER
Oh and of course… our Mods… them nifty things that still continue to add to the awesome
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Why485 wrote:
I’m glad I made this. I get to use it anytime there is a Freelancer 2 thread.
I wasn’t really sad about Freelancer 2, but now I am. ;~;
So cute. -
Why would everyone even want a Freelancer 2?
I’d rather see a remake of the original FL.
