Why is Freelancer considered good?

[IDtenT]

Back when cinematic games were still made with you being a Chad.

 

[GaelicVigil]

Freelancer was to space gamers as Final Fantasy 7 was for role-playing gamers. It was the first space game to get dumbed down enough to finally grab a mass audience of stupid people. That's why so many people love it.

I've never seen its appeal at all.

 

[normie]

Freelancer was to space gamers as Final Fantasy 7 was for role-playing gamers. It was the first space game to get dumbed down enough to finally grab a mass audience of stupid people. That's why so many people love it.

I've never seen its appeal at all.

maybe it was the first one to finally do it well, you know, not be shit like the games before it

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

privateer, elite, freespace, wing commander... yeah, space games truly suffered from shit series.

 

[normie]

privateer, elite, freespace, wing commander... yeah, space games truly suffered from shit series.

yeah, and it trumped all those series by having greater sense of roaming and agency, compared to the unwieldy sims that gave you combat scenarios one after the other with no freedom, while having a greater level of fidelity compared to games that tried to have an open world with trade, simplified physics be damned

I mean, it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out why it's remembered fondly, some old men are just crotchety

 

[Shadowfang]

Freelancer was to space gamers as Final Fantasy 7 was for role-playing gamers. It was the first space game to get dumbed down enough to finally grab a mass audience of stupid people. That's why so many people love it.

I've never seen its appeal at all.

maybe it was the first one to finally do it well, you know, not be shit like the games before it

Freelancer was a space game made for normies.

 

[normie]

Freelancer was to space gamers as Final Fantasy 7 was for role-playing gamers. It was the first space game to get dumbed down enough to finally grab a mass audience of stupid people. That's why so many people love it.

I've never seen its appeal at all.

maybe it was the first one to finally do it well, you know, not be shit like the games before it

Freelancer was a space game made for normies.

Freelancer's only sin is that the ships are fuck ugly

 

[Shadowfang]

Freelancer was to space gamers as Final Fantasy 7 was for role-playing gamers. It was the first space game to get dumbed down enough to finally grab a mass audience of stupid people. That's why so many people love it.

I've never seen its appeal at all.

maybe it was the first one to finally do it well, you know, not be shit like the games before it

Freelancer was a space game made for normies.

Freelancer's only sin is that the ships are fuck ugly

No, its that its shallow.

There are actually many cool looking ships.
I, for example, liked the look for
Liberty - Patriot and Defender
Bounty Hunters - Barracuda
Kusari - Drake and Dragon
Borders - Dagger
Order - Anubis

 

[CyberWhale]

Always liked the idea of it, but was never able to get immersed and actually play it more than an hour or two. The issue was not with the arcade-y and simplified mechanics, but rather with extremely boring quests and characters. I was expecting an interactive Star Trek/Babylon 5 RPG with interesting side-quests, factions, lore and so on. Maybe I've just had too high of expectations, dunno.

Might give it another try (and try to stick with it longer) eventually, but I doubt my opinion is gonna change.

I do agree with Hellraiser - the problem with a lot of autistic space simulators (which I, as an outsider, am not necessarily more of a fan than the dumbed down arcade-y approach) isn't (even) the atempt to provide realistic simulation of the most mundane and repetitive tasks, but the lack of optional automation/skipping such parts of the gameplay. Especially in the single player, where those things would not in any way affect other players. Imagine having an army/shooting simulator where you have to clean the rifle in realtime by moving the sponge with a mouse or inserting each bullet one by one - nobody sane wants to do that shit.

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[gurugeorge]

I remember at the time, for me, it was more that it was the first slick attempt at an Everything Game. There you were as an avatar, not just as a spaceship - walking around and everything. Granted it was very basic, but it had that feel for the first time I can remember, realized in 3-d visuals. Living universes with factions had been done before, cool space combat had been done before, but I don't recall that being connected to the player as a human player avatar, at least not with such a big budget and then-decent graphics.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

It's worth trying to put Freelancer into historical context maybe. I'll give it a go:

Both of the grand-daddy space sim franchises, "Elite" and "Wing Commander" (the Ultima and Wizardry of space), tried space trading. "Elite", "Frontier: Elite II", "Frontier: First Encounters", "Wing Commander: Privateer", and "Privateer 2: The Darkening" tried to do the open-universe space trading games quite early in PC history, from 1984 to 1996. They used static screens or talking heads to represent the ground element; but to unite *open space* and *open ground* was the dream of all nerds. Maybe I'm missing some early 3D ones, or should count 2D attempts too like "Star Control". David Braben and Chris Roberts, like a lot of nerds, must have really wanted to play a game where you could finally just explore space like a frontiersman, like Han Solo or John Crichton, and come across exotic worlds/cultures. It's the Holy Grail game of our kind; few of our people now search for the Grail, or believe in it, but it exists my brothers. The older ones were considered fugly or complicated, if they were known at all, by the time of "Freelancer". "Freelancer" came out in 2003, but apparently the first X game, "X: Beyond the Frontier", a series I didn't play much, came out earlier in 1999 too.

It seems to me "Freelancer" didn't add anything notable, but made a genre more playable, was easy to get running on modern Windows, and polished the space sim experience. It was also released in a relative void of space trading games, at a time when science fiction was heavily on TV, with Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Babylon 5, Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond, Dune, Children of Dune, Star Wars prequels, etc, all airing around then (the best time to be a geek in history). You never lacked for some new TV episode to watch each week. People remember "Star Trek: Bridge Commander" over "Star Trek: Klingon Academy" (the better game arguably), because it was easier to run on a modern Windows PC; that was probably a big help to "Freelancer" too. It was a simple install; not six discs of cutscenes, no editing .ini files, no installer.exe that no longer worked on Windows 98, etc.

Certain things like landing a ship, had been quite complicated, or dangerous, or could be unfair, in some prior space games, so "Freelancer" did things like making docking with a planet, a task of flying through a docking ring, where your ship would do the rest on automation - a classic piece of gamified design. The aspect of automation of the ship, automated landing, etc, will have appealed to people who booted up a previous sim, and wreaked their ship simply trying to touch it down. There were also solid waypoints, markers, etc, which you would expect from a far-future computer, GUI and HUD.

Something I quickly realised playing space games (and wishing they gave me more of the feeling of a *living world*), is that you can't just have an empty world staffed by static vendors, you would need to essentially make an RPG, with crafted dialogue, or the sense that these were real people with real lives, would quickly be lost, like talking to an NPC in some MMO. Most action in Star Trek, Star Wars, etc, actually takes place on the ground; 90% of these franchises is talking and character interaction. I think Chris Roberts knew this, which is why he tried to humanise his games, adding animations to static ground elements, or getting actors like Clive Owen to star in "Privateer 2". It's why KOTOR or Mass Effect succeeds in creating a living world a lot better than say "Elite: Dangerous", even though you cannot actually fly your ship, it's essentially just a travel device for getting to another ground location.

However I found "Freelancer" a bit disappointing in some ways at the time. It had quite a lot of contraints, which I noticed. I didn't feel it had created a fully living world. Some of them were good game design choices. Constraining the game to just a few systems, with each section having different cultural character, allowed them to craft a more interesting Star Wars-type world, rather than a big procedural canvas like Elite. However I remember being a little disappointed that planet surfaces (the thing that for me really brought human character to a game like this, where you could see your character wasn't just a ship), was essentially just a series of static screens, as nice as they were.

I would say that we are finally getting better games than "Freelancer" now, perhaps because indie devs have the resources finally, or because "Star Citizen" demonstrated the space sim (once one of the core genres of PC gaming with stuff like RTS), is still highly desired. Things like "Elite: Dangerous", "Empyrion: Galactic Survival", "SpaceBourne" and "EverSpace". The Grail of uniting the world-building of something like KOTOR or Mass Effect with the space element of something like Elite or Freelancer, is still unfound however.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

BTW, it wouldn't have been hard to unite space sims with grid-based dungeon crawlers, so you had a nice low-budget dungeon crawling layer.

- Layer 01: Space trading game, dogfighting, mining, etc, which turns into Layer 02...

- Layer 02: Grid-based dungeon crawling, when landing on planets or boarding ships...

You could have one Space Sim team develop the sim, and an RPG team develop the ground. Origin Systems could have tried it out.

 

[LanciaArdita]

Freelancer was a victim of Microsoft's acquirement of Digital Anvil, Inc. in the late 2000.

What followed soon after was typical BS corporate involvement with the nuts and bolts of the development cycle, clamping down on game design etc. with some key people working on the project outright leaving, including lead designer and co-founder.

Many of the features promised by the Devs before release were subject to severe niggerfiddling and dumbing down due to MS imposing stricter deadlines and reassigning personnel.

Initially the game was supposed to feature factions in-figthing and changing their territory without player input (which would have been huge back in the early 2000) but that feature got completely eviscerated.

I presume the issue of only one type of non-plot mission (i.e. go to X, kill Y) also traced its roots to the aforementioned developments.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

BTW, it wouldn't have been hard to unite space sims with grid-based dungeon crawlers, so you had a nice low-budget dungeon crawling layer.

whale's voyage. the perfect game. unfortunately it sucked at everything it did.

 

[KeAShizuku]

Adventure and action is more popular than turbo space autism. Who would have thought.

To be fair although autists are the minority (thank god) they are LOYAL and spend MONEY.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I do agree with @Hellraiser - the problem with a lot of autistic space simulators (which I, as an outsider, am not necessarily more of a fan than the dumbed down arcade-y approach) isn't (even) the atempt to provide realistic simulation of the most mundane and repetitive tasks, but the lack of optional automation/skipping such parts of the gameplay. Especially in the single player, where those things would not in any way affect other players. Imagine having an army/shooting simulator where you have to clean the rifle in realtime by moving the sponge with a mouse or inserting each bullet one by one - nobody sane wants to do that shit.

If you want a prime example of this, you can play No Man's Sky with an XBox controller and use it for every single aspect of the game. Meanwhile, Elite Dangerous has more bindings than a Thrustmaster VG with the Throttle can handle without doubling button functionality. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky seems to offer more things to do than Elite Dangerous does, and due to it being so heavy in to the whole space flight system, it'll never do anything else very well.

However I found "Freelancer" a bit disappointing in some ways at the time. It had quite a lot of contraints, which I noticed. I didn't feel it had created a fully living world. Some of them were good game design choices. Constraining the game to just a few systems, with each section having different cultural character, allowed them to craft a more interesting Star Wars-type world, rather than a big procedural canvas like Elite.

Honestly, my biggest beef with Freelancer is that when you moved on to the next chapter, you were locked out of the previous areas. Once I figured that out, I wound up doing some of the story, then stopping to grind trade routes to have enough money for the next chapter. It really killed the pace of the game. You could find a good trade route in a region, but you could never use it again once you advanced to the next area. It was really, really annoying.

If you want a significantly better game, and I actually do like Freelancer, but Hardwar beats the crap out of it even though you're stuck in the City of Misplaced Optimism for the entire game.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

You could find a good trade route in a region, but you could never use it again once you advanced to the next area. It was really, really annoying.

It forced you to look for new ones though. If all you're going to do is one trade route forever, you might as well stick to the tutorial area.

Plus, I think you could come back and trade between all areas after the endgame.

Hardwar

I tried to get into this, but it's not actually a space game.

Eh. The best space game is still Frontier anyway.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

If all you're going to do is one trade route forever, you might as well stick to the tutorial area.

It actually has the opposite effect. I typically find a few good trade routes in this type of game and switch between them when I get bored running one. Instead, with Freelancer, I'd stick with one per area.

The best space game is still Frontier anyway.

Frontier and Elite probably had the most simple yet effective ways of doing trade routes, honestly. All you had to do was look at the planet you were on, notice what that type of planet sells pretty cheap, then find a nearby planet that is a different type and had the resources to buy a lot of that item. You didn't really have to find routes so much as just figure out the next planet to go to.

I tried to get into this, but it's not actually a space game.

Well, it is and it isn't. There aren't planets and systems to travel between, but you traveled around in a series of connected craters that were colonized. Hardwar actually had an interesting little trade computer which gave you the information "right now", but those prices could change by the time you got to your destination since there were also other ships traveling around, doing what you're doing. All the prices were based on how much the destination had of the resource you wanted to sell but also how much they wanted that resource. You could also set up shops in the game that bought and sold resources, and even made things from those resources to sell. It was pretty well done for it's day.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

If you want a prime example of this, you can play No Man's Sky with an XBox controller and use it for every single aspect of the game. Meanwhile, Elite Dangerous has more bindings than a Thrustmaster VG with the Throttle can handle without doubling button functionality. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky seems to offer more things to do than Elite Dangerous does, and due to it being so heavy in to the whole space flight system, it'll never do anything else very well.

there's just one detail: nms had a lot of useless, pointless, meaningless stuff poured on top, elite is pretty much the very same wasteland since launch. in a minute i could come up with 15 features the game would desperately need and that it'd take 1 minute each to implement, but instead the game has been adamant in not wanting to move an inch.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Once I figured that out, I wound up doing some of the story, then stopping to grind trade routes to have enough money for the next chapter.

Maybe game balance changed, but I never needed to grind before the chapter transitions. The game supplies enough money to buy the heavy fighter for each chapter and it takes just one or two missions in the new chapter to update your guns.