Mad Over FREELANCER!!!!

Hmmm...Looks like I stumbled onto this forum a little late...oh well. Yeah I have to agree that Freelancer has no soul whatsoever. I tried and tried to like this game, but the shit story, bad physics, monotonous independent missions and ultra-unrealistic universe made it damn impossible. That and when I found out that, after completing the whole game, you couldn't go back and fly around in the Dyson Sphere, which was the coolest part of the whole entire thing. It's like they took a good idea, made a lot of promises and then cut as many corners as they could. What garbage. Can you tell I'm getting angry just writing this?

Oh, and here was when I quit the game for the final time: I was finished the story, and trying to enjoy carving out a life for myself as a freelancer, although I was already disappointed that I couldn't destroy things like battleships, and I was starting to feel like I didn't care a rat's ass about which faction I belonged to because once you have the most powerful ship in the universe nobody else can say squat to you. Anyways, I decided just for kicks to dive down below the solar plain and see what I could see. I dove for a good five minutes and then turned around and started heading back up, and that's when I saw that all the areas like garbage dumps and asteroid fields were all just 2d circular areas randomly plonked down throughout the system. No coherency or sense of aesthetic whatsoever. It was just such a MICROSOFT moment.

Oh, and I have to say that the screen shots for X3 look damn amazing.

Anyone who took a look at the starmap could easily see that "garbage dumps and asteroid fields were all just 2D circular areas randomly plonked down throughout the system" without having to jump through hoops like that. I personally think Freelancer is a beautiful game with excellent "pick up and go" gameplay. If you go into it expecting it's going to be some sort of incredible space simulation, you're definitely looking in the wrong place. It's not a game intended for hardcore simmers. Freelancer is an action game, not a simulation game, and it's a damned shame that everyone always compares it to space simulations when it's completely apples and oranges. "Freelancer sucks because it's not a realistic space simulation!" is like complaining that "Halo sucks because it's not a realistic economy building game!" People can be perfectly entitled not to like Freelancer for what it is, but they should really not dislike Freelancer for what it isn't. After all, Freelancer has more in common with Diablo II than it does with I-War! That's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but I like Diablo II and I like Freelancer. Go figure.

I'm kinda wondering what the basis of the "MICROSOFT moment" comment is... it's as if you're using "Microsoft" as an invective without even understanding what Microsoft is or what Microsoft does. "Oh no, the big corporation makes a lot of money, even though they give most of it to charity; they must be evil." Microsoft does sell shoddy operating systems, but their hardware, peripherals, development software, and just about everything else about them are actually quite good.

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Surgeon-General's Warning: Early test cases of Torn Stars have resulted in fatalities. The errors in the software should be gone by now. Hopefully.

Ok, JT, I'm sorry if someone in your family works for microsoft or something, and I hear you about accepting Freelancer for what it is and not for what it isn't. I don't even profess to know that much about microsoft itself. What I have seen is a trend to try to pack as many features and functions into products as possible, even when the number of elements is so great that it affects the performance of each element in and of itself. The result is a product that promises a lot and technically has a lot of frills, but lacks the grace and simple aesthetic of a well thought-out and developed product. In other words it gets in its own way, it trips over itself in trying to impress. I mean obviously a lot of "thought" goes into microsoft's products, but they lack the simple elegance of products (such as macs) that are developed as a unified whole. How this applies to Freelancer is that there are a lot of different aspects of the game, which is a good thing, but not enough work is done on any of them to make it stand out. Yeah, there's a story, a dynamic faction system, and a trade system, but the story is brittle, the dynamic faction system is boring, and the trade system is static. No one aspect is special enough to keep me from playing the game. In brief, the game is less than the sum of its parts.

Oh, and about your "accepting Freelancer for what it is" point. I'm not even condemning Freelancer for being a shoddy space sim, I'm condemning it for being a bland and homogenous game. Period. If your idea of a good action game is zipping around various cramped (although I admit sometimes quite beautiful) star systems fighting the same bad guys again and again with the same weapons, and defeating them with the same old maneuvers in a universe where nothing ever changes, then by all means go ahead and play it until your girlfriend dumps you. Everyone looks for different things in computer games and I guess I can't justifiably judge your taste. However, if how good a computer game is is purely subjective, then I am also allowed to assert my opinion, which is that Freelancer promises way more than it delivers, was obviously a good idea that was shaved down by a committee, and defeats itself by doing too many things shallowly instead of only a few things well.