Freelancer - Abandoned-ware?
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Has anyone here read anything about this yet? I was just sent a message on Steam that he found it listed as abandoned-ware on the Internet and is now free to download. I replied to him and am waiting for him to send me a link to this site or, w/e it was he got the info from.
If this is true, I wonder if MS will release the source codes for it, as well?
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Here the link to the site where my friend found it at.
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We’ve had that conversation many times already. “Abandonware” is not a legal term. The copyright on Freelancer will not expire for decades. Microsoft simply doesn’t care to sue people for sharing such an old game that wasn’t even that popular in the first place.
At this point, I don’t really care if people share links to download the game. It’s a pain in the ass to find a physical copy and it’s not available online legally. Just don’t interpret this to mean that it’s suddenly legal to download the game. If we’re ever contacted by Microsoft to pull the links, we will do so immediately.
It also of course has absolutely no bearing on whether Microsoft will do anything with the game. They won’t.
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The “Installer provided by Ra7en” version is, very likely, the first version I had of this game! I only bought the official version later, when I had fallen in love with the game and decided that it warranted an official purchase (I still maintain this ‘ethics’, or lack of them, with audio cds).
Back in the days, I had this friend (he still is!) who was into downloading, burning .ISOs etc. and he convinced me this game was cool. So, he installed it for me. A third mate joined in. We played at some server called DPIOS (Dutch People in Outer Space) run by a guy with the nick Tanaka (or was it Takana? Or Katana?).
I learned my first steps of modding in this time, and in hindsight I feel bad because I lost contact with Tanaka, and never could apologize for the fact that I crashed the server a few times because of modifications, which were also cheating, technically.
My mates and I took residence at Freeport 6 in Tau-29. It took me a while to figure how to locally add a shipdealer, with the virtual room thing. Because, Katana had made some very cool ship available, but only at the other place of the know universe, and I wanted it before we had to make the dangerous journey through Outcast and Corsair terri Nowadays it feels asshole-ish, but back then I was amazed that it worked, after about three times or so (and every time that it didn’t work caused a global server crash
Still, those were the days my friends, those were the days.
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The only problem with Freelancer, is that only 1 language was included on the installation disk. Now you can generally choose between english and the language from the country you bought the game, and oftenly even more. So when you search for it somewhere, that is generally only english.
Shame there wasn’t a pack made with all different languages.
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Maybe, providing the exe files plus the DLLs files containing text and also files for audio dialogs can do the job.
The french community is almost dead since Sirius Hegemonia was shut down in 2012-2013 but if anyone interested by this, it could be useful.
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Moonhead wrote:
The “Installer provided by Ra7en” version is, very likely, the first version I had of this game! I only bought the official version later, when I had fallen in love with the game and decided that it warranted an official purchase (I still maintain this ‘ethics’, or lack of them, with audio cds).Ditto. I remember the game was leaked several months before it was officially released and I pre-ordered the game based on playing the pirated version.
As for abandonware, it’s surprising how many people outside this small community want to play it still. Take a look at the GOG requests page: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/freelancer There are people adding to the wishlist every couple of days.
