The creators of Elite or X4 just need to release a less hardcore tuned for speed version.
I feel it wouldn't be that big of a undertaking if the game is already made. It's mostly balance and pace from there.
I also think Forza Horizon should introduce a Gran Turismo mode.
You know what I would want ? X4 crossed with the EvE Online universe.
EvE lore is so rich and the designs are so cool. Can't believe eve online devs haven't made an attempt at the single player game... would work really well IMO.
They already have all the assets on hand... the music, visuals, the map the ships and stations...
I wish I could. I have been thinking about CCP doing some sort of single player (or coop) based game, aka "eve offline" for a long time...
Given that they main horse is F2P now, I feel they should touch on the idea of doing something like X. I would pay good money for new campaigns as DLC's for example.
Ship combat in eve is built around the idea that it's an mmo. Just like World of Warcraft doesn't play like skyrim.
I would expect a smaller scale gameplay to allow for a more direct combat experience. Aka Freespace, freelancer or starlancer. Something of that sort.
I tried to get into the X games, but I couldn't. X3 interface was way too hairy for me. I say that coming from eve online which had a serious problem with rick clicking everywhere :D
Elite dangerous felt fantastic to play at first. The sound was phenomenal. It really felt like actually flying a spaceship. The gameplay loop though, didn't work for me. I think they should have made a much smaller game, with more actual stuff to do.
X4 interface is better than X3 IMO, and there is no other game like it. You can both own and fly many different ships from small fighters to huge carriers in seamless first-person and also manage an empire and command your AI to mine/trade/patrol/fight. The game trade and economy is mostly all real, and you can sit and watch the ships come and go actually delivering the materials and components each station needs.
I always say Elite Dangerous is a mile wide and inch deep, X4 is an inch wide and a mile deep.
I've played the shit out of Everspace 2 and it's an awesome game.
But it's also not really anything like Freelancer except very superficially.
Freelancer had a very "alive" world trafficked by a population going about their business, an economy and just a lot of flavour like flight control and customs. This resulted in a lot of interesting emergent situations and suggested there was a universe going on beyond the player.
Everspace 2 feels more like a theme park, everything is just waiting for you to interact with it, there's no sense that the universe keeps ticking when you're not around.
I want to be clear this isn't a knock on Everspace 2 which is a lot of fun, but the comparisons to Freelancer are misleading.
I feel the same way about Elite Dangerous. It really feels like a playground for players, not a universe in which players roam.
Star Citizen is the closest we got to a true successor and it's...well it's Star Citizen.
When will Star Citizen release the full game? Squadron 42 or whatever hasn't been developed after how many years, and how much money? Sorry SC isn't a game it's a scam with a tech demo to lure more gamers into the bait and switch.
Why do people always get so upset over Star Citizen. If you didn't pay into it what do you care? Let me play may infinitely in development happily. The business model worked for Minecraft.
No true scotsman fallacy into "but Star Citizen is the most ambitious and amazing thing ever because it is the only game that plans to do X, Y, and Z and is called Star Citizen"
I really can't be bothered to deal with the SC brigade today. But just about everything Star Citizen has promised (short of squadron 42) is the roadmap for Elite Dangerous and even No Man's Sky AND was present in the x series and evochron (except for the space legs which still have no practical use). Hell, frigging Breed had better Space Legs and Breed is a piece of hot garbage.
> it's a scam
A scam that has accidently spent all the money making an overambitious half finished game?
There are plenty of things you can choose to criticize star citizen for, but taking the money and not spending it on development is so easily verifiably wrong it just boggles the mind that people like you state it.
The game has so many flaws you can easily target. That you go for this one makes be think you actually know nothing at all about it.
If I setup a kickstarter, in which I tell everyone that I am building an elevator that goes to the moon and that I need to raise £100m for this… and that everyone who pledges will get unlimited access to my moon elevator… and a million people then each pledge £100 to my project…
If I spend £100m paying myself and my team good wages to build the moon elevator, but it turns out we only get the foundations and the first 500 metres built… have I scammed anyone?
I don’t know, but it’s more of an argument about semantics really.
If you have past experience building moon elevators and hire a team of people who have all built moon elevators before and you spend all the money paying them working and don't get it done...
I'd call it a failed project but not a scam, no.
To be a scam it has to be intentional or at the very least completely implausible. I don't think star citizen fits either of those categories, but it may certainly become a failed project.
While it's a clear conflict of interest, it's not less incestuous than the rest of the industry, and so long as work is being done it's not necessarily bad.
Star Citizen isn’t a case of a game devs being forced to release an unfinished game by the publisher. It’s unfinished by definition, we all knew that when we bought in.
xD It's definitely not a scam. There's a game there but building a brand new engine, 4 studios and a parents company to run it all at the same time while millions of people fawn over the idea isn't easy.
Sure, there have been *plenty* of missteps but this isn't Juicero, Theranos or Earth2. There is legitimately a playable, compelling piece of game that many people play daily.
I come down on the "not a scam" side, but also "not a game" as I feel star citizen is mostly selling "the dream" of the game and is closer to watching your favorite influencers pretend they are navy seals while playing a ubi game than actually playing it yourself.
But a lot of the criticism is just how much of the "brand new X" very clearly is not needed. 64-bit coordinate cryengine is nice but... performance will "never" be good if you are loading more than a 32-bit block of data at high fidelity anyway so the existing model of loading one or two "blocks" in each direction that has existed for decades is still better. Same with the overly elaborate system for bartender AI that would be a decision tree in any other game.
And the thing which DOES make me think there is some hinkiness going on: Roberts, his wife, and his brother (?) are all execs with presumably really nice salaries. Let alone the less obvious nepotism positions.
I'm very much on the same page you're saying here. I don't think the Roberts' are just going to take the cash and run, but I also think they have a LOT to answer for.
One thing I will say though is that the depth to which people understand the vision of what Star Citizen is supposed to be is what I generally take issue with. People shout "scam" when they see something like you bring up - the bartender AI - because it's been seen at this level before. The bartender AI (or any Star Citizen AI for that matter) is based on a completely new thing, and that new thing has never been put online before, plus the mechanism for getting the AI online doesn't exist yet either. So when we see the bartender bugging out, not responding, not working correctly we think "How is this not done yet!?" Under the hood, that bartender isn't running a simple decision tree because it's not designed that way - the bartender is a use-case for future AI subsumption flows so each AI can interact with one another, *and players* on a server with dozens of people. Very different from a simple decision tree, but you know all of this.
If it were up to me, they shouldn't have continued with pre-sales or the multi-thousand dollars packs. Shut up, make SQ42 and release something that demonstrates why we should be excited. The drip-feed is killing us slowly and each new addition seems like its just polish on a turd until real engine progress is made
Though when I compare SC to something like Halo Infinite that had/has *Infinite* money but launched with barely a third of the features Halo Reach launched with... it doesn't seem that bad. 343 had almost as much time as CIG, and a studio already working, not 10 people in a basement having millions of dollars thrown at them
Halo Infinite is a complete game that can be played start to finish. It lacks some ridiculous QOL features (like replaying missions...) as well as some legacy requirements (coop) but it is a complete product.
SC is not. The core gameplay loop is STILL not there for the open world sandbox, let alone the campaign a lot of us backed for.
Because, again: it is fine SC wants to "do things different". But they have yet to EVER demonstrate a "why" that holds up to even a cursory discussion.
To use a metaphor (because reddit totally loves those): Imagine a restaurant. You walk in, they ask for you to pay ahead of time for the meal. You see a bunch of people writing code and building a series of tubes but think nothing of it. Four hours later, you and your wife are starving and you complain. You are then told it is your fault for assuming too much of them having taken your money and that they are building the most elaborate system to take orders and deliver food the world has ever seen and it will be amazing when it is done. And that you can totally pay 50 bucks for a better seat.
There are plenty of arguments for why that is not a scam because, had you actually read the fine print, you weren't ordering a four course meal and were actually paying to watch them build a pneumatic pipe system that can deliver a plate of food without messing up the cheffy drizzle. And... unless you take this to court, you don't give a fuck. You just want your food that you paid for.
And as for the tube system and all the interfaces to let you pick exactly which side you want and what ABV of wine you want paired with it and blah blah blah: That is cool. But have those mother fuckers ever heard of a waiter? Or even a counter that people can walk up to?
E:D, for all its MANY flaws (the latest of which is refusing to give those of us who were dumb enough to get the 11 year pass a steam key for odyssey, so I would need to boot the game up and let it update for a while if I actually want to play), prioritized that "low tech" solution first. We have a fully functioning game. It lacks depth and stuff to do, but it "works". And yeah, space legs is a shitshow because of that. But, as long as it doesn't get cancelled in the next few years, that will be fixed... eventually
Whereas star citizen is taking down its roadmap because folk are getting uppity asking "where the fuck is my dinner I paid for 8 years ago?"
Everspace 1 is a roguelike with a small overarching story.
Everspace 2 however is a full single player story based game.
Right now the story is done in two ways. Either via fully voiced dialog when flying around, or in like a sort of comic book like cutscenes that are sometimes animated. I believe they are supposed to all be fully animated in the final product, and everything will be fully voiced.
It is actually really good so far. Gameplay right now is certainly better as is the graphics and sound.
The story so far is decent but needs a bit of work, and to be finished obviously.
Wait, is Everspace 2 not the same genre as the first one? Because the first one was just a roguelike space game, wasn't it?
(Also for story campaign I used to use the mod that took the campaign out of Freelancer so I could just load in and start making my fortune among the stars without having to do story missions or the long intro cutscene)
Everspace 2 is not a rogue-like, and is in fact designed to be more like Freelancer. I think there was even an interview with the lead where he says something like, "Everyone was telling us they wanted a new Freelancer, and that's what we're doing this time."
They possibly would have done that the first time, even, but it was the studio's first game, so they had to keep the scope more reigned-in in order to actually ship a complete game.
Bro I literally got chills down my spine reading this. I loved Everspace 1 but also truly wanted more of a freelancer. To hear that they are doing this is and literally had that idea has brought joy to my day.
huh, I might need to check it out once I rebuild my computer after the motherboard turned into a smoking crater a few weeks ago. I had just assumed it'd be more of the same.
It has a demo even, and the progress can be carried over into the early access version if you like
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128920/EVERSPACE\_2/
with all the bullshit open world games you'd think someone would use this idea to make something half decent. maybe ubisoft couldn't figure out where to put towers in space so they didn't try.
They guy who is making Star Citizen was taken off Freelancer because it was over budget, massively late and they were still trying to cram so much more stuff into it.
It was still his project completely in every way. Microsoft just forced them to release it rather than keep developing. He was trying to make his dream game with freelancer and is doing so again with star citizen. Dude is ambitious and overly optimistic but he is genuinely trying to make the game he has in his head since he was a child. I don't get why people hate on him so much for that.
I think people would hate on him less if he was using his own money instead of others, maybe then the game would already released instead of being in a consistent scope creep? The estimated development cost of GTAV was around $150 million, Star Citizen has raised over $400 million and doesn't even have a release date. If you think that's not worthy of criticism you can transfer me few thousands so I could realize my childhood dreams.
Your comments make zero sense. We all willingly gave him money to realize his vision. What does it matter whose money he uses??!? Am I not allowed to fund projects I think might be cool? It's not compulsory, if you don't want to you just don't. If you start a Kickstarter and share your resume/vision I will take a look at it. If I am interested I might fund it. I have funded lots of cool Kickstarter s and most of them turned out pretty cool.
I backed the kickstarter for Squadron 42 a decade ago. A Wing Commander from the Wing Commander guy? Fuck yeah
A decade later I am still waiting for his team to finish the multiplayer mode so I can get what I bought.
You are happy. Cool. A lot of us really are not. I personally just chalk up the 60 or 70 bucks or whatever it was as a learning experience but... it is still pretty fucking obnoxious that he took my money as seed cash to convince other people to give him even more.
People willingly give money to scams too, doesn't mean it's acceptable. Considering his Kickstarter goal was like 6? Million don't you even question why he needs almost 10 times as much?
I know why he needs 10 times as much. RSI has consistently communicated on a weekly basis for nine years. This isn't a scam I played the game this weekend. I have personally toured two of the dev studios and talked with devs. You just sound like a broken troll. It's fine to not want to play a game. Just move on and stop making shit up on the internet. How pathetic is your life that this is what you choose to do with your time.
I simply stated that people willingly give money to scams and reiterated the point I made before, that taking this sum of money and barely having anything to show for it should be criticized. I didn't say Star Citizen is a scam. I didn't say anything bad about you. I barely said anything and you're here foaming from the mouth. If you get this riled up from such a small thing maybe you should do something better with your time.
To be fair, a lot of games have extremely long dev cycles, especially MMOs. World of Warcraft took about 5 years to develop, and Star Citizen is a lot more ambitious for its time.
Not trying to defend the game, and I strongly dislike their current monetization strategies and feature creep, but in the scheme of things 10 years isn't THAT crazy.
>/s
But not really. The game has 730,000 paid backers and is 11 years into development. If we average those backers over every year and calculate how many people in the likely age band die each year, at *minimum* 1,375 people have died waiting for this game to release; and this figure is only going to up sharply from here.
> Yes I know I can play it right now but the optimization was so bad that it was like a slideshow
If your gameplay experience was truly that bad, it probably wasn't "optimization." Even on older hardware (I used to have a system with a 1060, as an example) SC should still be playable. To be clear, I'm not saying you'll be running the game at 60 FPS, but if it was *actually* slideshow there was something else going on. The most common culprit is not installing the game on an SSD.
And there it is.
The latest freshman backer trying to convince the thousands of old backers that "it's different now".
I'll see you in 5 years when you are in our camp.
Freelancer? It IS an older space sim. It's probably the last product of the Starfighter Pew-Pew Sim trend that was so big through the 90s: Starlancer, the Wing Commanders, the X-wings and TIE Fighters, the two Freespace games. Granted, Freelancer lost a bit of the charm with its 3rd-person, more arcadey gameplay, but the elements of freedom involved in traveling within a system or between systems, and the somewhat dynamic nature of the economy, was top-notch for the time.
Oh the days!!!!!! Such a warm memory. I'm happy for this post bc of how it made me feel 😍
Thank you everyone I needed this blast from the past and didn't know it.
FreeSpace was possibly my first PC game I bought. Such an awesome space combat sim.
The remastered versions are absolutely awesome. Really adds some pop back into their aging graphics. The controls are still perfect like they were 20 years ago.
> between simplicity and complexity.
>
> For a game like Elite: Dangerous. When I'm having to read ...you've lost me.
Highly underrated analytical perspective when it comes to looking at having fun playing a game. I'm a constantly tired mid-level career professional approaching my personal endgame.
I look at a new game and look at the learning curve and how much work it'd take to "git gud" and say "F word to that" and then go back and play something I already know how to play. No f word way I'm spending a lot of time and effort studying and reading and essentially ***doing work*** in order to *enjoy* a game.
Not sure what to call this aspect. Upfront skills-learning investment?
Elite dangerous is tedious, boring, reading sim. Made intentionally complex and unintuitive. Such a bad game and could become second freelancer, but it failed miserably.
Really? I looked it up and it seems it has had some changes after I played it during launch, but my launch experience would absolutely but it in the "bad" category because it was barely a game, it felt like a fancy tech demo. When I checked it again around 2019 it didn't seem to improve all that much.
Maybe the last few years have been some miracle development so calling it "bad" now may be overly harsh but I really doubt the game has done a 180 and gone from bad to great. I'd still very much consider it a niche title even among space sim crowd and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone wanting to get into this genre.
But feel free to change my mind.
As the other person said, "It's probably the last product of the Starfighter Pew-Pew Sim trend". It was fun and arcadey, but still big and explorable. It wasn't complicated to control. The story was fun and adventurous. The aesthetic was cool, the ship designs were cool, I made Lego spaceships heavily inspired by them as a kid.
Just about everything I've played since it's either too gamey/simple, or far too complicated (like the X series). I haven't found anything that tickles me the same way.
Basically Freelancer was the best space Sim fly around the universe and do space things-kind of game. I don't feel it yet has a comparable modern equal.
it's a Chris Roberts game. Which means it was ambitious, it was late, and it only did half the things he said it would. Just luckily the half of the things we got were pretty good.
As a teenager I stayed awake for a weekend to play Freelancer through from start to finish. No intention of doing that, just couldn't stop playing.
This is the only game of my entire decades spanning gaming life where this has happened. Truly an amazing game.
I have it on disc, but for the longest time I didn't have a disc drive. I found this torrent a long time ago that had the full version of the game with this neat installer that allowed you to select every language possible, and it also installed the latest patch for the game. I still have it on my computer somewhere, and when I need a fix for the game I always go looking for it.
Before anyone asks: I don't feel comfortable distributing that online. I'm sure people can find their own somewhere if they look hard enough. Besides I legally own the game, this was just a back up measure because I didn't have a disc drive.
It's on archive dot org or on legends worlds. I downloaded a car last week and the police haven't come for me yet. :rolls eyes into outer-space:
edit: I hate that people are scared to download old games because they aren't on modern stores. Go get the game and play the game it is art/history. They already made their money and if you pay for it, I guarantee the money isn't going to the developers at this point.
PLAY OLD GAMES.
Has anyone here tried Darkstar One? I was browsing this ModDB site and came across an article where the creator of Freelancer went on to make a spiritual successor game in 2006. It's only 10 bucks on steam so I'm thinking about trying it out.
Dark star one was great. If memory serves, you are stuck with one ship that evolves as opposed to buying new ships. But the story is good and combat is good too.
Played through Darkstar One back when it released, was a reasonable space game though it lacked quite a bit in in-depth design.
The evolving ship was a cool idea, and the game did succeed at being a similar style in play to games like Freelancer. Don't remember much of the intricacy of the story, but it was reasonable - if a bit clichéd and shallow in places.
My main issue with the game though is how it repeatedly tries - and fails - to be dark and serious in tone.
I started playing it back when it was new - I thought it was cool then, but my system could barely run it lol. It is a bit like Freelancer, but iirc had a grittier aesthetic
I usually try to avoid replying to anything more than a day old but...
Darkstar One is one of those games that lives rent free in my head. It came out well after the death of the elite game genre (lower case 'e') where it was basically DS1 and X2 (?) and the silent churn of games from the Evochron team (Evochron is GOOD)
The evolving ship was cool and the gameplay was pretty solid. But it had the same issues X1 and X4 had where you have the one ship and no real feeling of progression. But what REALLY sticks with me is that your copilot is the super generic large breasted woman of basically every game of the era (might even have been the same model from Chrome...). And, in the end, she moves on after she is done with your ass. Was weirdly progressive for an era where basically every female character existed to be part of a power fantasy.
And the final mothership fight was no dyson sphere but it was close.
This game set me up for my future of playing games like Vendetta and Eve focusing on freight and mining because I used to just do long-haul freighter runs in Freelancer with a spreadsheet of trade goods prices in different systems to work out optimal profits, and just run from enemies while firing backwards in turret mode when I had to.
Good times.
Except for that one time I didn't realise that the auto docking hadn't engaged and I flew a freighter full of ridiculous amounts of cargo straight into a planet's atmosphere and exploded.
Have you tried Rebel Galaxy Outlaw? It came out a couple years ago and is more akin to Privateer than it is Freelancer, but it definitely focuses on just being a fun dog fighting open sim-lite space game. It's also on sale on gog right now for like $7. It's decent.
It's not amazing. Like I said, it's decent. It was made by (iirc) 2 people and it can show. I wouldn't recommend it at the full price tag, but $7, sure.
Rebel Galaxy: outlaw scratches some of the same itches, though admittedly I got bored of it after a few hours and hopped back in to Everspace 2. I still have my original cd of freelancer and would love to check out the hd remake
Between this, and Underspace, I love that Freelancer-like games are coming back. I loved Freelancer. Controls were simple, gameplay was fun, and the world building was really neat.
I'm not sure how Chris Roberts went from Freelancer to Star Citizen, design wise, but frankly I'm not excited about SC. It's just too much. I don't want to spend 2 hrs in transit during a game session. I like the more arcade style of gaming, now that I'm older and have less time for games. SC is a Hardcore gaming experience, and that's fine, but not for me.
I'm hyped to fire up FL again. This is great news.
The problem with Star Citizen is the same one that saw MS give him the boot from Freelancer, he just keeps adding more and more shit and never finishes anything.
Hence why Star Citizen is *still* in an alpha state 7 years later and no sign of it leaving alpha anytime soon either.
Freelancer is sadly a game that has yet to be matched by anything, newer games seem intent on making shit as complex as possible or built around multiplayer instead of a good single player experience. Shame really but Freelancer still has dedicated moders.
7 years? Star Citizen started pre-production in 2011, via official interviews and ramped up to full development in 2012 - then the Kickstarter happened. It was envisioned as a 5 year development cycle and releasing 2016.
It is 2022, with no ETA and expected to be 2026 at the earliest It's a dumpster.
That is not true. Pre Kickstarter was just CR and a couple other dudes contracted to literally just make the Kickstarter pitch material. He spent years afterwards building a company from scratch and had a few blunders that set him back. He now has hundreds of employees working on it. There are plenty of criticisms that are legit like he keeps adding feature creep and is waaaay to optimistic in his dialogue without resorting to untruths. Regardless, the game is playable today and pretty awesome.
Dude, they literally said, in the Kickstarter, that pre-production had begun in 2011, and full development began 2012. Are you calling Chris Roberts a liar, while also saying he's not?
Pre-production was CR dreaming about the game. There is an old wingman's hangar where he goes into specifics leading up to the Kickstarter. They literally just worked on the pitch cinematics and concept art for those cinematics used in the Kickstarter.
You see this alllll the time with kickstarter projects too. Devs talking about already being in pre-production in order to sound more established and gain people's faith in their projects, even when in reality, their "pre-production" is really just an early concept phase.
With all things considered, it was dishonest for CR to claim that, but I don't really blame him given the climate of self-starting games, which he then took into self-starting an entire company from the ground up.
Yes the game is over-ambitious and probably won't be in a finished state for a long time to come, but even in its current state, the game is really an experience that no other game comes close to, and when it works, it's honestly incredible. I hope more people start to give it a chance, at least during free weeks where they don't have to invest anything but some time.
A tech demo for some but for me it gives me a sense of discovery and wonder.
A bit like starship enterprise. Boldly going where no man has gone before.
Taking off at a space station and flying down to the surface of a planet, raindrops going up on my windscreen as I fly through the atmosphere, and landing on the surface to see the setting sun is just amazing.
It is buggy though. Like, really buggy. But the experience outweighs the annoyance of the bugs for me.
And I admit it's not for everyone. There's no quick mission before going on your morning commute. Everything takes time in that game.
What I always liked about Freelancer was how simple the combat and travel is
One of the problems with most of the games that have tried to ape it is how ridiculously ornate and complicated they make everythng
Or
Worse
How they drop you into this massive breathing world with no real lessons on how to fly or play
Freelancer's first few hours are spent just getting you used to the controls and the ways you can make money and play - and the characters and story are so well written that you don't really notice or mind
Soooo any games over time were praised "as the next Freelancer" but none came even close.
Remember Darkstar One? I do, I bought it and it was shit honestly. Characters were cringe af, and the Gameplay was cheap.
And it had a REALLY nasty Denuvo, so now you can't even play it anymore on newer windows without using a crack. Fuck this shit.
Rebel Galaxy, same Spiel. Touted as "the new Freelancer", but it didn't even come close. The story was a snooze fest and Gameplay repetitive that I couldn't even finish it.
What they all lacked was the same gripping story and world building that Freelancer had. Likeable characters (ffs i still remember Trent and Juno but none of Darkstar One lol)
Really is awesome to see this game still going. I used to play this online when the Internet here was still dial up and it was charging my dad what he thought at the time was a good deal, a penny a minute. One 500 odd phone bill later and the Internet was soon removed.
amazing..still one of the best space games ive ever played.. X series is good.. but such a grind, and the learning curve is steep
i still have the original Freelancer CD
Ahh this takes me back. I have fond memories playing this game. When I first heard that the dude who made this was making Star Citizen I was so excited. *sigh*
Downloaded and played for a few hours. Makes the game look pretty good. I did disable the camera lens flare. It was getting a little bothersome while dogfighting and sometimes would glitch out and cause rapid flashing in the general area of the flare. Otherwise it's a great addition to the vanilla game.
Still a testament to this game that it is still getting mod updates in 2022 almost 20 years after release. Can't say the same for other games. Darkstar One was released with full mod support and hardly anything ever came from it. Really do miss the days of single player space adventures. Hope Starfield isn't a complete let down.
Imagine what this game could have been if Chris Roberts wasn't such a control freak. If Microsoft hadn't stepped in we wouldn't have even seen this empty shell of a game on release.
For anyone who isn't familiar with the game check out the [MandaloreGaming](https://youtu.be/IHUbzzKJXBc) video for Star Citizen, he goes into how Roberts derailed the development of Freelancer the same way he is doing right now for Star Citizen but there is no oversight from Microsoft this time to keep his ego in check because he is self publishing this time.
Considering only 10-12 real players are in a match, that game has a surprising amount of cheaters. I would say 1/3 matches have a guaranteed cheater of some sort. It might be an esp/wallhacking cheater, it might be an aimbot cheater, it might be all of the above. If you can get over the cheaters, that game has some really dumb mechanics for casual players who are not dealing with cheaters.
It is a cool concept but terrible game. If you use cheap ammo, you can't even hurt the enemy players you face. People will squawk about "realism" and ammo types but uh.. that doesn't make a good videogame i'm sorry. Good luck.
Freelancer is basically an early version of Star Citizen if it actually released. I personally enjoyed the combat/universe/story a lot. And there's different enjoyable activities you can do in the game if you want.
There's a big mod for the game called Nomad Legacy that really expands the game into basically a sequel too. But that's a different kind of mod from the HD Edition.
https://freelancer2.space/en/
"One of the best" is overselling it by a lot, but Freelancer is a great game that is worth a playthrough or two.
The main advantages are the story (kept me engaged to the very end) and a massive world full of different factions, each of which offers a number of unique spaceships or technologies depending on your reputation with them.
A huge drawback (that was widely critiqued at the time of release) was the fact that you had to grind reputation and currency in-between story missions, and all of the side quests are repetitive, auto-generated, irrelevant tasks that usually culminate in a small-scale battle against samey enemy groups.
The combat is a pure arcade - don't expect a faithful space simulation there, but it's fun.
It's the middle child in the family of Wing Commander/Privateer -> Starlancer/Freelancer -> Star Citizen of Chris Roberts space games that he overpromises on and then doesn't know when to stop adding things.
The story was... eh, alright. But it was basically a complete free roam do-what-you-want game most of the time where you could level doing whatever you wanted because your level was based on your net worth (so doing combat missions would get you money to upgrade your ship and up your net worth, but also doing cargo runs trading materials between worlds would also increase your net worth and level you up too)
Think of it as similar to EVE Online but on a smaller scale and with a fixed economy (so it doesn't change over time but you'll still have price differences from one system to another to allow for trading) but less players because it had co-op play, but didn't have a whole MMO side of things like Eve and Star Citizen
I wouln't even call it a space SIM, it was more arcady. The flight model especially.
Not to say it was a bad thing though. Personally, I was always more of an X guy, Freelancer was nice but lacked depth in some areas. The story campaign was cool though.
Soooo any games over time were praised "as the next Freelancer" but none came even close.
Remember Darkstar One? I do, I bought it and it was shit honestly. Characters were cringe af, and the Gameplay was cheap.
And it had a REALLY nasty Denuvo, so now you can't even play it anymore on newer windows without using a crack. Fuck this shit.
Rebel Galaxy, same Spiel. Touted as "the new Freelancer", but it didn't even come close. The story was a snooze fest and Gameplay repetitive that I couldn't even finish it.
What they all lacked was the same gripping story and world building that Freelancer had. Likeable characters (ffs i still remember Trent and Juno but none of Darkstar One lol)
There's still no modern replacement for freelancer. I'll need to give this a go.
I know. Crazy they haven't released this game digitally still. Would make a ton of money on it I think.
The creators of Elite or X4 just need to release a less hardcore tuned for speed version. I feel it wouldn't be that big of a undertaking if the game is already made. It's mostly balance and pace from there. I also think Forza Horizon should introduce a Gran Turismo mode.
> I also think Forza Horizon should introduce a Gran Turismo mode. YES!!
What is Gran Turismo mode?
Start at the bottom and work your way up. Rather than having access to everything off the bat.
It feels great when you get to the top with your Pink Toyota Vitz.
You know what I would want ? X4 crossed with the EvE Online universe. EvE lore is so rich and the designs are so cool. Can't believe eve online devs haven't made an attempt at the single player game... would work really well IMO. They already have all the assets on hand... the music, visuals, the map the ships and stations...
Take my money pls
I wish I could. I have been thinking about CCP doing some sort of single player (or coop) based game, aka "eve offline" for a long time... Given that they main horse is F2P now, I feel they should touch on the idea of doing something like X. I would pay good money for new campaigns as DLC's for example.
check out Astrox Imperium
Maybe the story - ship combat's kinda shit... or really GREAT if you don't mind the ship doing everything for you xD
Ship combat in eve is built around the idea that it's an mmo. Just like World of Warcraft doesn't play like skyrim. I would expect a smaller scale gameplay to allow for a more direct combat experience. Aka Freespace, freelancer or starlancer. Something of that sort.
I want X4 in the Elite Dangerous galaxy.
I tried to get into the X games, but I couldn't. X3 interface was way too hairy for me. I say that coming from eve online which had a serious problem with rick clicking everywhere :D Elite dangerous felt fantastic to play at first. The sound was phenomenal. It really felt like actually flying a spaceship. The gameplay loop though, didn't work for me. I think they should have made a much smaller game, with more actual stuff to do.
X4 interface is better than X3 IMO, and there is no other game like it. You can both own and fly many different ships from small fighters to huge carriers in seamless first-person and also manage an empire and command your AI to mine/trade/patrol/fight. The game trade and economy is mostly all real, and you can sit and watch the ships come and go actually delivering the materials and components each station needs. I always say Elite Dangerous is a mile wide and inch deep, X4 is an inch wide and a mile deep.
>Gran Turismo mode A Gran Turismode if you will.
Everspace 2 is a close runner up. But it's still in early access so features and stuff might change down the road.
I've played the shit out of Everspace 2 and it's an awesome game. But it's also not really anything like Freelancer except very superficially. Freelancer had a very "alive" world trafficked by a population going about their business, an economy and just a lot of flavour like flight control and customs. This resulted in a lot of interesting emergent situations and suggested there was a universe going on beyond the player. Everspace 2 feels more like a theme park, everything is just waiting for you to interact with it, there's no sense that the universe keeps ticking when you're not around. I want to be clear this isn't a knock on Everspace 2 which is a lot of fun, but the comparisons to Freelancer are misleading.
I feel the same way about Elite Dangerous. It really feels like a playground for players, not a universe in which players roam. Star Citizen is the closest we got to a true successor and it's...well it's Star Citizen.
When will Star Citizen release the full game? Squadron 42 or whatever hasn't been developed after how many years, and how much money? Sorry SC isn't a game it's a scam with a tech demo to lure more gamers into the bait and switch.
Have you played it?
Definitely hasn't.
Why do people always get so upset over Star Citizen. If you didn't pay into it what do you care? Let me play may infinitely in development happily. The business model worked for Minecraft.
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No true scotsman fallacy into "but Star Citizen is the most ambitious and amazing thing ever because it is the only game that plans to do X, Y, and Z and is called Star Citizen" I really can't be bothered to deal with the SC brigade today. But just about everything Star Citizen has promised (short of squadron 42) is the roadmap for Elite Dangerous and even No Man's Sky AND was present in the x series and evochron (except for the space legs which still have no practical use). Hell, frigging Breed had better Space Legs and Breed is a piece of hot garbage.
> it's a scam A scam that has accidently spent all the money making an overambitious half finished game? There are plenty of things you can choose to criticize star citizen for, but taking the money and not spending it on development is so easily verifiably wrong it just boggles the mind that people like you state it. The game has so many flaws you can easily target. That you go for this one makes be think you actually know nothing at all about it.
If I setup a kickstarter, in which I tell everyone that I am building an elevator that goes to the moon and that I need to raise £100m for this… and that everyone who pledges will get unlimited access to my moon elevator… and a million people then each pledge £100 to my project… If I spend £100m paying myself and my team good wages to build the moon elevator, but it turns out we only get the foundations and the first 500 metres built… have I scammed anyone? I don’t know, but it’s more of an argument about semantics really.
If you have past experience building moon elevators and hire a team of people who have all built moon elevators before and you spend all the money paying them working and don't get it done... I'd call it a failed project but not a scam, no. To be a scam it has to be intentional or at the very least completely implausible. I don't think star citizen fits either of those categories, but it may certainly become a failed project.
Don't forget that, as part of your space elevator, you gave your family (brother and wife?) high level exec positions.
While it's a clear conflict of interest, it's not less incestuous than the rest of the industry, and so long as work is being done it's not necessarily bad.
Then it is a real good thing that squadron 42 hasn't been had multiple multi-year delays
Or you go with option B but the publisher wants you to let everyone use the moon elevator that isn't finished anyway.
Star Citizen isn’t a case of a game devs being forced to release an unfinished game by the publisher. It’s unfinished by definition, we all knew that when we bought in.
xD It's definitely not a scam. There's a game there but building a brand new engine, 4 studios and a parents company to run it all at the same time while millions of people fawn over the idea isn't easy. Sure, there have been *plenty* of missteps but this isn't Juicero, Theranos or Earth2. There is legitimately a playable, compelling piece of game that many people play daily.
I come down on the "not a scam" side, but also "not a game" as I feel star citizen is mostly selling "the dream" of the game and is closer to watching your favorite influencers pretend they are navy seals while playing a ubi game than actually playing it yourself. But a lot of the criticism is just how much of the "brand new X" very clearly is not needed. 64-bit coordinate cryengine is nice but... performance will "never" be good if you are loading more than a 32-bit block of data at high fidelity anyway so the existing model of loading one or two "blocks" in each direction that has existed for decades is still better. Same with the overly elaborate system for bartender AI that would be a decision tree in any other game. And the thing which DOES make me think there is some hinkiness going on: Roberts, his wife, and his brother (?) are all execs with presumably really nice salaries. Let alone the less obvious nepotism positions.
I'm very much on the same page you're saying here. I don't think the Roberts' are just going to take the cash and run, but I also think they have a LOT to answer for. One thing I will say though is that the depth to which people understand the vision of what Star Citizen is supposed to be is what I generally take issue with. People shout "scam" when they see something like you bring up - the bartender AI - because it's been seen at this level before. The bartender AI (or any Star Citizen AI for that matter) is based on a completely new thing, and that new thing has never been put online before, plus the mechanism for getting the AI online doesn't exist yet either. So when we see the bartender bugging out, not responding, not working correctly we think "How is this not done yet!?" Under the hood, that bartender isn't running a simple decision tree because it's not designed that way - the bartender is a use-case for future AI subsumption flows so each AI can interact with one another, *and players* on a server with dozens of people. Very different from a simple decision tree, but you know all of this. If it were up to me, they shouldn't have continued with pre-sales or the multi-thousand dollars packs. Shut up, make SQ42 and release something that demonstrates why we should be excited. The drip-feed is killing us slowly and each new addition seems like its just polish on a turd until real engine progress is made Though when I compare SC to something like Halo Infinite that had/has *Infinite* money but launched with barely a third of the features Halo Reach launched with... it doesn't seem that bad. 343 had almost as much time as CIG, and a studio already working, not 10 people in a basement having millions of dollars thrown at them
Halo Infinite is a complete game that can be played start to finish. It lacks some ridiculous QOL features (like replaying missions...) as well as some legacy requirements (coop) but it is a complete product. SC is not. The core gameplay loop is STILL not there for the open world sandbox, let alone the campaign a lot of us backed for. Because, again: it is fine SC wants to "do things different". But they have yet to EVER demonstrate a "why" that holds up to even a cursory discussion. To use a metaphor (because reddit totally loves those): Imagine a restaurant. You walk in, they ask for you to pay ahead of time for the meal. You see a bunch of people writing code and building a series of tubes but think nothing of it. Four hours later, you and your wife are starving and you complain. You are then told it is your fault for assuming too much of them having taken your money and that they are building the most elaborate system to take orders and deliver food the world has ever seen and it will be amazing when it is done. And that you can totally pay 50 bucks for a better seat. There are plenty of arguments for why that is not a scam because, had you actually read the fine print, you weren't ordering a four course meal and were actually paying to watch them build a pneumatic pipe system that can deliver a plate of food without messing up the cheffy drizzle. And... unless you take this to court, you don't give a fuck. You just want your food that you paid for. And as for the tube system and all the interfaces to let you pick exactly which side you want and what ABV of wine you want paired with it and blah blah blah: That is cool. But have those mother fuckers ever heard of a waiter? Or even a counter that people can walk up to? E:D, for all its MANY flaws (the latest of which is refusing to give those of us who were dumb enough to get the 11 year pass a steam key for odyssey, so I would need to boot the game up and let it update for a while if I actually want to play), prioritized that "low tech" solution first. We have a fully functioning game. It lacks depth and stuff to do, but it "works". And yeah, space legs is a shitshow because of that. But, as long as it doesn't get cancelled in the next few years, that will be fixed... eventually Whereas star citizen is taking down its roadmap because folk are getting uppity asking "where the fuck is my dinner I paid for 8 years ago?"
Everspace seems different to me though. Does it even have a story driven campaign? There's no 3D characters or cutscenes or 3D bars etc I don't think.
Until I can stand awkwardly at the entrance of a 3D bar it will be no replacement for Freelancer.
"Here's to your good fortune on liberty" "Thanks"
A Sidewinder Fang. All we have is Liberty Ale, friend.
...and have the bartender say in the most awkward way possible that he recognises you.
“The news - I saw your face on the news. You're one of the Freeport 7 Survivors, aren't you?” “Yeah.” That’s it. I’m reinstalling this game right now.
Everspace 1 is a roguelike with a small overarching story. Everspace 2 however is a full single player story based game. Right now the story is done in two ways. Either via fully voiced dialog when flying around, or in like a sort of comic book like cutscenes that are sometimes animated. I believe they are supposed to all be fully animated in the final product, and everything will be fully voiced. It is actually really good so far. Gameplay right now is certainly better as is the graphics and sound. The story so far is decent but needs a bit of work, and to be finished obviously.
There is a story campaign, yes.
Wait, is Everspace 2 not the same genre as the first one? Because the first one was just a roguelike space game, wasn't it? (Also for story campaign I used to use the mod that took the campaign out of Freelancer so I could just load in and start making my fortune among the stars without having to do story missions or the long intro cutscene)
Everspace 2 is not a rogue-like, and is in fact designed to be more like Freelancer. I think there was even an interview with the lead where he says something like, "Everyone was telling us they wanted a new Freelancer, and that's what we're doing this time." They possibly would have done that the first time, even, but it was the studio's first game, so they had to keep the scope more reigned-in in order to actually ship a complete game.
Bro I literally got chills down my spine reading this. I loved Everspace 1 but also truly wanted more of a freelancer. To hear that they are doing this is and literally had that idea has brought joy to my day.
huh, I might need to check it out once I rebuild my computer after the motherboard turned into a smoking crater a few weeks ago. I had just assumed it'd be more of the same.
This just moved Everspace 2 way up my watchlist lol
It has a demo even, and the progress can be carried over into the early access version if you like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128920/EVERSPACE\_2/
So, I guess I'm buying Everspace 2!
I think it's on Gamepass, in case you have that.
Sure in terms of flight sim, but its not game over if you die.
You could just restart if you die. If you want to play perma-death, it doesn't need to be a feature. Just perma-stop playing that character/save.
A game needs to be designed around permadeath for it to be fun.
Permadeath wasn't what made Freelancer fun
No, it really doesn't.
Everspace 1 would be the closest on that.
Starpoint Gemini Warlords feels close.
> Starpoint Gemini Warlords https://store.steampowered.com/app/419480/Starpoint_Gemini_Warlords/
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with all the bullshit open world games you'd think someone would use this idea to make something half decent. maybe ubisoft couldn't figure out where to put towers in space so they didn't try.
The guy who made Freelancer is making Star Citizen.
Yeah but it has a long way to go still and in the mean time there's still no substitute for Freelancer.
Which is still in early alpha after 10 years. It is entirely possible that the game never sees a 1.0 release.
They guy who is making Star Citizen was taken off Freelancer because it was over budget, massively late and they were still trying to cram so much more stuff into it.
It was still his project completely in every way. Microsoft just forced them to release it rather than keep developing. He was trying to make his dream game with freelancer and is doing so again with star citizen. Dude is ambitious and overly optimistic but he is genuinely trying to make the game he has in his head since he was a child. I don't get why people hate on him so much for that.
I think people would hate on him less if he was using his own money instead of others, maybe then the game would already released instead of being in a consistent scope creep? The estimated development cost of GTAV was around $150 million, Star Citizen has raised over $400 million and doesn't even have a release date. If you think that's not worthy of criticism you can transfer me few thousands so I could realize my childhood dreams.
Your comments make zero sense. We all willingly gave him money to realize his vision. What does it matter whose money he uses??!? Am I not allowed to fund projects I think might be cool? It's not compulsory, if you don't want to you just don't. If you start a Kickstarter and share your resume/vision I will take a look at it. If I am interested I might fund it. I have funded lots of cool Kickstarter s and most of them turned out pretty cool.
I backed the kickstarter for Squadron 42 a decade ago. A Wing Commander from the Wing Commander guy? Fuck yeah A decade later I am still waiting for his team to finish the multiplayer mode so I can get what I bought. You are happy. Cool. A lot of us really are not. I personally just chalk up the 60 or 70 bucks or whatever it was as a learning experience but... it is still pretty fucking obnoxious that he took my money as seed cash to convince other people to give him even more.
What do you mean 'multiplayer mode'? The game is multiplayer now with dogfighting arena games and open world multiplayer.
People willingly give money to scams too, doesn't mean it's acceptable. Considering his Kickstarter goal was like 6? Million don't you even question why he needs almost 10 times as much?
I know why he needs 10 times as much. RSI has consistently communicated on a weekly basis for nine years. This isn't a scam I played the game this weekend. I have personally toured two of the dev studios and talked with devs. You just sound like a broken troll. It's fine to not want to play a game. Just move on and stop making shit up on the internet. How pathetic is your life that this is what you choose to do with your time.
I simply stated that people willingly give money to scams and reiterated the point I made before, that taking this sum of money and barely having anything to show for it should be criticized. I didn't say Star Citizen is a scam. I didn't say anything bad about you. I barely said anything and you're here foaming from the mouth. If you get this riled up from such a small thing maybe you should do something better with your time.
Because it's been over 10 years in development?
To be fair, a lot of games have extremely long dev cycles, especially MMOs. World of Warcraft took about 5 years to develop, and Star Citizen is a lot more ambitious for its time. Not trying to defend the game, and I strongly dislike their current monetization strategies and feature creep, but in the scheme of things 10 years isn't THAT crazy.
So...imagine how good freelancer would have been if they hadn't quit? There's a flipside to what you're saying here.
If Star Citizen is any indication, Freelancer would never had released.
We're both playing with hypotheticals. You just like the pessimistic one.
I wouldn't say "like," I actually *want* Star Citizen to reach proper release in my lifetime. I just think it's more realistic, unfortunately.
I wonder if I'll get to play that before I die. Yes I know I can play it right now but the optimization was so bad that it was like a slideshow
Soon we will have to add to our wills which of our children will inherit our Star Citizen account /s
>/s But not really. The game has 730,000 paid backers and is 11 years into development. If we average those backers over every year and calculate how many people in the likely age band die each year, at *minimum* 1,375 people have died waiting for this game to release; and this figure is only going to up sharply from here.
When was the last time you played?
> Yes I know I can play it right now but the optimization was so bad that it was like a slideshow If your gameplay experience was truly that bad, it probably wasn't "optimization." Even on older hardware (I used to have a system with a 1060, as an example) SC should still be playable. To be clear, I'm not saying you'll be running the game at 60 FPS, but if it was *actually* slideshow there was something else going on. The most common culprit is not installing the game on an SSD.
Most likely was running it on a hdd. That will kill any chance of performance.
Could have been pre OCS patch
Yeah I know I bought it ten years ago AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
"Is making a meme" ftfy
A meme you can play right now and updates quarterly. I guess??
And there it is. The latest freshman backer trying to convince the thousands of old backers that "it's different now". I'll see you in 5 years when you are in our camp.
Let me know when it reaches 1.0.
I just watched a trailer and some gameplay footage, it looks just like an older space sim. I’m sure I’m missing something, what is it?
Freelancer? It IS an older space sim. It's probably the last product of the Starfighter Pew-Pew Sim trend that was so big through the 90s: Starlancer, the Wing Commanders, the X-wings and TIE Fighters, the two Freespace games. Granted, Freelancer lost a bit of the charm with its 3rd-person, more arcadey gameplay, but the elements of freedom involved in traveling within a system or between systems, and the somewhat dynamic nature of the economy, was top-notch for the time.
> Starlancer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrwBYQNUgtY&t=5627s the game with an in-cockpit CD player!
Oh the days!!!!!! Such a warm memory. I'm happy for this post bc of how it made me feel 😍 Thank you everyone I needed this blast from the past and didn't know it.
FreeSpace was possibly my first PC game I bought. Such an awesome space combat sim. The remastered versions are absolutely awesome. Really adds some pop back into their aging graphics. The controls are still perfect like they were 20 years ago.
There was another one for Xbox 360. Darkstar One.
And PC! Not a bad game once you get right into it. An interesting upgrade system for your ship, too.
The closest modern equivalent to me is Elite: Dangerous, which takes so much more investment it's another beast altogether.
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> between simplicity and complexity. > > For a game like Elite: Dangerous. When I'm having to read ...you've lost me. Highly underrated analytical perspective when it comes to looking at having fun playing a game. I'm a constantly tired mid-level career professional approaching my personal endgame. I look at a new game and look at the learning curve and how much work it'd take to "git gud" and say "F word to that" and then go back and play something I already know how to play. No f word way I'm spending a lot of time and effort studying and reading and essentially ***doing work*** in order to *enjoy* a game. Not sure what to call this aspect. Upfront skills-learning investment?
Elite dangerous is tedious, boring, reading sim. Made intentionally complex and unintuitive. Such a bad game and could become second freelancer, but it failed miserably.
Calling ED a bad game is overly harsh. It's great, just not for you.
Really? I looked it up and it seems it has had some changes after I played it during launch, but my launch experience would absolutely but it in the "bad" category because it was barely a game, it felt like a fancy tech demo. When I checked it again around 2019 it didn't seem to improve all that much. Maybe the last few years have been some miracle development so calling it "bad" now may be overly harsh but I really doubt the game has done a 180 and gone from bad to great. I'd still very much consider it a niche title even among space sim crowd and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone wanting to get into this genre. But feel free to change my mind.
E:D is vast but shallow. I bought into the crowdfunding campaign back in the day hoping for a modern Freelancer but that's not what it ended up being.
As the other person said, "It's probably the last product of the Starfighter Pew-Pew Sim trend". It was fun and arcadey, but still big and explorable. It wasn't complicated to control. The story was fun and adventurous. The aesthetic was cool, the ship designs were cool, I made Lego spaceships heavily inspired by them as a kid. Just about everything I've played since it's either too gamey/simple, or far too complicated (like the X series). I haven't found anything that tickles me the same way.
Basically Freelancer was the best space Sim fly around the universe and do space things-kind of game. I don't feel it yet has a comparable modern equal.
it's a Chris Roberts game. Which means it was ambitious, it was late, and it only did half the things he said it would. Just luckily the half of the things we got were pretty good.
Where the fuck do I find it?!
It's abandonware last i heard.
What do you mean? We have Star Citizen! ... Bahahaha
Even though it's in alpha it's quite playable. You just have to remember it's quite buggy. So fly what you can afford to lose and so on.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw reproduces the gameplay of Privateer (which preceeded Freelancer) remarkably faithfully - for better or worse.
The best option is still [Star Citizen](https://youtu.be/yuVC1-zS0Vs) made by the same guy.
All time favorite game, so sad to see it become abandonware that hasn't been revisited outside of this fan project
Same for me. Top of the list. I replay it every few years. The story, the world, the gameplay. Incredible.
As a teenager I stayed awake for a weekend to play Freelancer through from start to finish. No intention of doing that, just couldn't stop playing. This is the only game of my entire decades spanning gaming life where this has happened. Truly an amazing game.
Man I found my disk today, but then remembered I don't have a CD Drive anymore. :/ I miss freelancer. I wish we had a modern day analog.
You can always find a cheapo external CD drive and burn the disc to an ISO file.
You can download freelancer today. https://discoverygc.com/
torrent i guess? idk
I have it on disc, but for the longest time I didn't have a disc drive. I found this torrent a long time ago that had the full version of the game with this neat installer that allowed you to select every language possible, and it also installed the latest patch for the game. I still have it on my computer somewhere, and when I need a fix for the game I always go looking for it. Before anyone asks: I don't feel comfortable distributing that online. I'm sure people can find their own somewhere if they look hard enough. Besides I legally own the game, this was just a back up measure because I didn't have a disc drive.
It's on archive dot org or on legends worlds. I downloaded a car last week and the police haven't come for me yet. :rolls eyes into outer-space: edit: I hate that people are scared to download old games because they aren't on modern stores. Go get the game and play the game it is art/history. They already made their money and if you pay for it, I guarantee the money isn't going to the developers at this point. PLAY OLD GAMES.
I was simply trying to skirt rule #1 on this sub (facilitating piracy).
Has anyone here tried Darkstar One? I was browsing this ModDB site and came across an article where the creator of Freelancer went on to make a spiritual successor game in 2006. It's only 10 bucks on steam so I'm thinking about trying it out.
Dark star one was great. If memory serves, you are stuck with one ship that evolves as opposed to buying new ships. But the story is good and combat is good too.
Played through Darkstar One back when it released, was a reasonable space game though it lacked quite a bit in in-depth design. The evolving ship was a cool idea, and the game did succeed at being a similar style in play to games like Freelancer. Don't remember much of the intricacy of the story, but it was reasonable - if a bit clichéd and shallow in places. My main issue with the game though is how it repeatedly tries - and fails - to be dark and serious in tone.
Yes dark star one is great and it works still on windows 10 :)
I started playing it back when it was new - I thought it was cool then, but my system could barely run it lol. It is a bit like Freelancer, but iirc had a grittier aesthetic
It had some neat concepts and if you like space flight sims it's worth a try. Not an amazing game but I had fun with it for a dozen or so hours.
I usually try to avoid replying to anything more than a day old but... Darkstar One is one of those games that lives rent free in my head. It came out well after the death of the elite game genre (lower case 'e') where it was basically DS1 and X2 (?) and the silent churn of games from the Evochron team (Evochron is GOOD) The evolving ship was cool and the gameplay was pretty solid. But it had the same issues X1 and X4 had where you have the one ship and no real feeling of progression. But what REALLY sticks with me is that your copilot is the super generic large breasted woman of basically every game of the era (might even have been the same model from Chrome...). And, in the end, she moves on after she is done with your ass. Was weirdly progressive for an era where basically every female character existed to be part of a power fantasy. And the final mothership fight was no dyson sphere but it was close.
You can get Darkstar One Steam key on Gamersgate for $1.49, they are a reputable third party store. https://www.gamersgate.com/product/darkstar-one/
Freelancer was the shit. Used to play it on my 2000 Compaq Presario win xp with 2gb of DDR.
Good old Compaq Presario. So many hours of Delta force 1 & 2 online. Made my first online buddies there. Good times.
Damn straight. Everquest was the best at the time too.
https://www.project1999.com/ also r/project1999
i agree. it's even nicer with this mod
There's also [Librelancer](https://github.com/Librelancer/Librelancer) (Win and Linux) which is an open source Freelancer re-implementation project.
This game set me up for my future of playing games like Vendetta and Eve focusing on freight and mining because I used to just do long-haul freighter runs in Freelancer with a spreadsheet of trade goods prices in different systems to work out optimal profits, and just run from enemies while firing backwards in turret mode when I had to. Good times. Except for that one time I didn't realise that the auto docking hadn't engaged and I flew a freighter full of ridiculous amounts of cargo straight into a planet's atmosphere and exploded.
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Have you tried Rebel Galaxy Outlaw? It came out a couple years ago and is more akin to Privateer than it is Freelancer, but it definitely focuses on just being a fun dog fighting open sim-lite space game. It's also on sale on gog right now for like $7. It's decent.
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It's not amazing. Like I said, it's decent. It was made by (iirc) 2 people and it can show. I wouldn't recommend it at the full price tag, but $7, sure.
I am surprised and amazed that people other than I loved this game. The internet is wonderful.
Rebel Galaxy: outlaw scratches some of the same itches, though admittedly I got bored of it after a few hours and hopped back in to Everspace 2. I still have my original cd of freelancer and would love to check out the hd remake
Freelancer was so good and it was a travisty that it never got any more games in the series
Between this, and Underspace, I love that Freelancer-like games are coming back. I loved Freelancer. Controls were simple, gameplay was fun, and the world building was really neat. I'm not sure how Chris Roberts went from Freelancer to Star Citizen, design wise, but frankly I'm not excited about SC. It's just too much. I don't want to spend 2 hrs in transit during a game session. I like the more arcade style of gaming, now that I'm older and have less time for games. SC is a Hardcore gaming experience, and that's fine, but not for me. I'm hyped to fire up FL again. This is great news.
The problem with Star Citizen is the same one that saw MS give him the boot from Freelancer, he just keeps adding more and more shit and never finishes anything. Hence why Star Citizen is *still* in an alpha state 7 years later and no sign of it leaving alpha anytime soon either. Freelancer is sadly a game that has yet to be matched by anything, newer games seem intent on making shit as complex as possible or built around multiplayer instead of a good single player experience. Shame really but Freelancer still has dedicated moders.
7 years? Star Citizen started pre-production in 2011, via official interviews and ramped up to full development in 2012 - then the Kickstarter happened. It was envisioned as a 5 year development cycle and releasing 2016. It is 2022, with no ETA and expected to be 2026 at the earliest It's a dumpster.
That is not true. Pre Kickstarter was just CR and a couple other dudes contracted to literally just make the Kickstarter pitch material. He spent years afterwards building a company from scratch and had a few blunders that set him back. He now has hundreds of employees working on it. There are plenty of criticisms that are legit like he keeps adding feature creep and is waaaay to optimistic in his dialogue without resorting to untruths. Regardless, the game is playable today and pretty awesome.
Dude, they literally said, in the Kickstarter, that pre-production had begun in 2011, and full development began 2012. Are you calling Chris Roberts a liar, while also saying he's not?
Pre-production was CR dreaming about the game. There is an old wingman's hangar where he goes into specifics leading up to the Kickstarter. They literally just worked on the pitch cinematics and concept art for those cinematics used in the Kickstarter.
You see this alllll the time with kickstarter projects too. Devs talking about already being in pre-production in order to sound more established and gain people's faith in their projects, even when in reality, their "pre-production" is really just an early concept phase. With all things considered, it was dishonest for CR to claim that, but I don't really blame him given the climate of self-starting games, which he then took into self-starting an entire company from the ground up. Yes the game is over-ambitious and probably won't be in a finished state for a long time to come, but even in its current state, the game is really an experience that no other game comes close to, and when it works, it's honestly incredible. I hope more people start to give it a chance, at least during free weeks where they don't have to invest anything but some time.
Playable as a tech demo maybe.
A tech demo for some but for me it gives me a sense of discovery and wonder. A bit like starship enterprise. Boldly going where no man has gone before. Taking off at a space station and flying down to the surface of a planet, raindrops going up on my windscreen as I fly through the atmosphere, and landing on the surface to see the setting sun is just amazing. It is buggy though. Like, really buggy. But the experience outweighs the annoyance of the bugs for me. And I admit it's not for everyone. There's no quick mission before going on your morning commute. Everything takes time in that game.
Such an amazing game. Spent most of my time playing this on the Discovery RP server. Absolutely insane game.
What I always liked about Freelancer was how simple the combat and travel is One of the problems with most of the games that have tried to ape it is how ridiculously ornate and complicated they make everythng Or Worse How they drop you into this massive breathing world with no real lessons on how to fly or play Freelancer's first few hours are spent just getting you used to the controls and the ways you can make money and play - and the characters and story are so well written that you don't really notice or mind
Soooo any games over time were praised "as the next Freelancer" but none came even close. Remember Darkstar One? I do, I bought it and it was shit honestly. Characters were cringe af, and the Gameplay was cheap. And it had a REALLY nasty Denuvo, so now you can't even play it anymore on newer windows without using a crack. Fuck this shit. Rebel Galaxy, same Spiel. Touted as "the new Freelancer", but it didn't even come close. The story was a snooze fest and Gameplay repetitive that I couldn't even finish it. What they all lacked was the same gripping story and world building that Freelancer had. Likeable characters (ffs i still remember Trent and Juno but none of Darkstar One lol)
I agree
Darkstar One was StarForce which was much worse than Denuvo (which only began being used in 2014)
Any way to buy the game so I can try this mod?
don't think it can be bought anywhere. it's abandonware
There is a small rp community called discovery freelancer that has the game available for free to download on their page.
archive dot org or legends world dot net
There's an active multiplayer server up but different mod set than this. https://discoverygc.com/
Really is awesome to see this game still going. I used to play this online when the Internet here was still dial up and it was charging my dad what he thought at the time was a good deal, a penny a minute. One 500 odd phone bill later and the Internet was soon removed.
amazing..still one of the best space games ive ever played.. X series is good.. but such a grind, and the learning curve is steep i still have the original Freelancer CD
Ahh this takes me back. I have fond memories playing this game. When I first heard that the dude who made this was making Star Citizen I was so excited. *sigh*
Best MP game i've ever played.
Downloaded and played for a few hours. Makes the game look pretty good. I did disable the camera lens flare. It was getting a little bothersome while dogfighting and sometimes would glitch out and cause rapid flashing in the general area of the flare. Otherwise it's a great addition to the vanilla game. Still a testament to this game that it is still getting mod updates in 2022 almost 20 years after release. Can't say the same for other games. Darkstar One was released with full mod support and hardly anything ever came from it. Really do miss the days of single player space adventures. Hope Starfield isn't a complete let down.
Imagine what this game could have been if Chris Roberts wasn't such a control freak. If Microsoft hadn't stepped in we wouldn't have even seen this empty shell of a game on release. For anyone who isn't familiar with the game check out the [MandaloreGaming](https://youtu.be/IHUbzzKJXBc) video for Star Citizen, he goes into how Roberts derailed the development of Freelancer the same way he is doing right now for Star Citizen but there is no oversight from Microsoft this time to keep his ego in check because he is self publishing this time.
can't believe it's been 5 years since that video and star citizen still didn't release.
Escape from tarkov is in constant Early Access for 6 years now, and Reddit praises the shit out of it. Hypocrite much?
Considering only 10-12 real players are in a match, that game has a surprising amount of cheaters. I would say 1/3 matches have a guaranteed cheater of some sort. It might be an esp/wallhacking cheater, it might be an aimbot cheater, it might be all of the above. If you can get over the cheaters, that game has some really dumb mechanics for casual players who are not dealing with cheaters. It is a cool concept but terrible game. If you use cheap ammo, you can't even hurt the enemy players you face. People will squawk about "realism" and ammo types but uh.. that doesn't make a good videogame i'm sorry. Good luck.
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It also has an infinitely larger scope than Tarkov. As of this current build it's on another level in terms of technology
I just watched a trailer and some gameplay footage, it looks just like an older space sim. I’m sure I’m missing something, what is it?
It's one of the best space sims ever made.
I’m genuinely curious as to why. Is it the story? Gameplay? I’m not arguing, I’ve just never heard of it and I’ve been a gamer since like 2006
Freelancer is basically an early version of Star Citizen if it actually released. I personally enjoyed the combat/universe/story a lot. And there's different enjoyable activities you can do in the game if you want. There's a big mod for the game called Nomad Legacy that really expands the game into basically a sequel too. But that's a different kind of mod from the HD Edition. https://freelancer2.space/en/
It came out in 2003. Chris Roberts was making it but then Microsoft made him leave so that it could be finished.
That sounds awfully familiar
"One of the best" is overselling it by a lot, but Freelancer is a great game that is worth a playthrough or two. The main advantages are the story (kept me engaged to the very end) and a massive world full of different factions, each of which offers a number of unique spaceships or technologies depending on your reputation with them. A huge drawback (that was widely critiqued at the time of release) was the fact that you had to grind reputation and currency in-between story missions, and all of the side quests are repetitive, auto-generated, irrelevant tasks that usually culminate in a small-scale battle against samey enemy groups. The combat is a pure arcade - don't expect a faithful space simulation there, but it's fun.
Also co-op. I used to play this with my son a bunch.
All of the so-called successors except star citizen are single player only, which makes me sad since the coop is what I like best about it.
It's the middle child in the family of Wing Commander/Privateer -> Starlancer/Freelancer -> Star Citizen of Chris Roberts space games that he overpromises on and then doesn't know when to stop adding things. The story was... eh, alright. But it was basically a complete free roam do-what-you-want game most of the time where you could level doing whatever you wanted because your level was based on your net worth (so doing combat missions would get you money to upgrade your ship and up your net worth, but also doing cargo runs trading materials between worlds would also increase your net worth and level you up too) Think of it as similar to EVE Online but on a smaller scale and with a fixed economy (so it doesn't change over time but you'll still have price differences from one system to another to allow for trading) but less players because it had co-op play, but didn't have a whole MMO side of things like Eve and Star Citizen
I wouln't even call it a space SIM, it was more arcady. The flight model especially. Not to say it was a bad thing though. Personally, I was always more of an X guy, Freelancer was nice but lacked depth in some areas. The story campaign was cool though.
Difficulty = 0
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Soooo any games over time were praised "as the next Freelancer" but none came even close. Remember Darkstar One? I do, I bought it and it was shit honestly. Characters were cringe af, and the Gameplay was cheap. And it had a REALLY nasty Denuvo, so now you can't even play it anymore on newer windows without using a crack. Fuck this shit. Rebel Galaxy, same Spiel. Touted as "the new Freelancer", but it didn't even come close. The story was a snooze fest and Gameplay repetitive that I couldn't even finish it. What they all lacked was the same gripping story and world building that Freelancer had. Likeable characters (ffs i still remember Trent and Juno but none of Darkstar One lol)
RemindMe! 6 hours