I know that this topic has most probably been discussed in and out of extinction.
But I was digging through my old games and came across Freelancer and tried to play it on my new system, and low and behold it worked with the Evo 3 mod.

And although the campaign was cool, but the one thing i really missed the online battles, the huge amounts of cash and large clans taking domain over the space out side of liberty.

So i ask is there any FPS space game out that would hold a light to Freelancer???

EVE?

But it's more like Freelancer crossed with Homeworld.

Sort of.

:P

Freelancer was awesome. MS should finance another iteration.

Nearest thing I can think of offhand is Project Freedom - and that sucked.

As a matter of fact, I'm still playing Freelancer and I absolutely love it but as far as Project Freedom goes, its just your average game. I don't see any reason why it would suck.

You're kidding, right? There's no heading bug, there's no FoF functionality in the targeting reticule, the mission goals are poorly defined... The 'radar' - maybe the entire HUD - is a static image. "Painted" on the screen, ffs!

I tried to play that game. I tried to like it. It was easy enough to be enjoyable... But by the time I'd reached the mission flying through canyons to hit concealed bases, I'd had more than enough.

X3 anyone?

/hides in corner

I heard rumblings that someone, somewhere was developing a Freelancer styled MMO... with "proper" space combat, combined with a rich universe to explore and trade in.

That said, LAG appears to be the death of all these projects, as they can't seem to get the raw numbers down the wire quick enough to deal with the *insane* load that having a 100 players in one place generates.

One day perhaps... when we've all got fibre to the door ;)

I'd love to see another Freelancer, even though the scaling of planets and ships erked me a bit, it just worked. It was one of those games that had the 'x-factor' unlike piles of elephant dung like Project Freedom! Wow you'd have to be having a few cones to make that game. EVE is probably the only game that's at the pinnicle of a space sim but I would love to see antoher game like Freespace or Wing Commander. Those titles had playability, great stories and it sucked you in. I'm playing the original Wing Commander on the work computer sometimes lol.

/hugs PIII case

Still gotta go through the whole series but goddamn the graphics are old!!!! It's amazing how things look so much more crappy after a few more years go by.

By the way neowulf, go live in Sandhurst in Victoria, I did work at the 2000 home FTTH test program there for a company I can't name here. Telstra had no hand in that.

Download speeds are around 300Mbp/s peak lol

I've been waiting a long time for a new Freelancer. Missed out on trying the multiplayer aspect when I did get into Freelancer. Would be a different tale this time around now that I'm broadband equipped.

I don't see any reason why they couldn't accommodate a large number of players - I think the netcode would be easier to resolve than a large scale FPS because inaccurate sync would be a lot harder to detect with everything 'floating' in freeform, in space. Especially when you get shot at from behind 90% of the time - the 'reality' of the situation being controlled by the shooter regardless of exact sync would be undetectable by the recipient.

Does anyone know if the game was actually successful?

Makes me curious if there's a reason why there doesn't seem to be another one in the pipeline.

/weaps tears of joy

Perhaps it's time to consider a change of location... ;)

/goes off to look at Job adds for the Sandhurst region...

Part of the reason is also cross-genre culture of gamers.

In other words, the people who love MMO's are a very different bunch to those that love FPS.

The worry is that if you build a fully "twitch" based MMO, you'll scare off the MMO fanboi's, while lacking enough "Action" for the FPS crowd.

So, in the end no one wins.

Personally, I *dream* of the day I can play an MMO with twitch like mechanics. The closest I've come was GuildWars and I *loved* the whole skill system in that.

If only their PvE stuff had been a little more realised, I think it could have given WoW a run for it's money.

I think my Ideal MMO would blend a skills system from GuildWars, World of Warcrafts *awesome* PVE content and some brilliant skill based mechanism (hopefully).

Whether or not anyone can actually swing it remains to be seen.

I think symbiotically integrating the two camps would be the best way to go...

For example, the stat loving tech/skill tree monger has a large battleship. It took a lot of cunning and hard work through trading and strategy to get it. He doesn't like twitch-skills, but he's in a battleship - nothing twitchy there. On his payroll however is a squad of twitch-skill loving fighter pilots which form the mainstay of battleship's defense. Those fighter pilots either launch from bays in the battleship or are otherwise just part of the fleet. The vessels carry completely polar opposite gameplay.

A fighter pilot should be a persistent character with pilot skills that they've levelled up - speed/accuracy/weapon licenses, but essentially death results in a relatively inexpensive new fighter ship, either self funded or provided by the faction.

A non-twitch loving character would focus on different skills such as command, diplomacy, etc. They would also put greater stock in accumulating masses of wealth to buy larger ships with automated weapon systems requiring no real-time skill.

I would sure as hell play that game.

Not that I've ever played EVE. Is that what EVE is like?

Playing/discovering EVE has always seemed like a dangerously bad idea to me.

Well, take out the "twitch" and you've basically got EVE.

Problem is those two systems have to interact with one another. That's easier said than done.

Either you make the battleships uber and no one wants to play a "fighter" because they're so gimped (MUCH harder to play) compared to a "Battleship".

Or you allow the sheer skill of the fligher pilots to rule over the "automated" defences and suddenly, Battleships feel gimp.

Merging "Twitch" and "spreadsheet" is a very very difficult thing to manage in an MMO.

Welcome to the world of Min/Maxers!

Seriously, why would I be kidding especially when I play any game, (except for EA's offerings) enjoyable or not with passion. It helps me understand the game from the developer's perspective. Theres no doubt the good and bad parts will go unnoticed but at least the developers make an effort and I will respect them for that. As for publishers, its a different story altogther.

On the other hand, there was a prequel called Starlancer before Freelancer so if you haven't played it yet, there is good chance you'll find it on eBay for about 20 bucks. Hopefully a Freelancer 2 will show up. :)

I think the trick would be to make Battleship vs Fighter non existent in practical terms. Basically, your fighter ship IS gimped compared with a battleship. It bloody well should be. You can't take out a battleship with a single fighter. You could, however, pimp out your skills the next time your faction wants to launch a raid targeting an enemy battleship or fleet. If you and your twitch skill buddies amass a small army, THEN you could take on a battleship. What you do have to offer the small-vessel owners as incentive though is abilities and gameplay not available elsewhere, and some sort of system of reputation where the most elite fighter pilots will become prized and sought after. It should be an important role within the game, not just an underpowered "lowbie" ship.

The whole reason behind acquiring and owning a battleship would be for the gamer who's either power hungry or doesn't like FPS style gameplay - you should be able to cruise around in a battleship and laugh off a lone fighter. If it belongs to an enemy faction, it better get the fuck outa town when it spots you.

But say there was a quest to locate and retrieve a person, or an item, and it turned out to be deep inside a dense asteroid field. five people from faction A decide to embark on the quest, and an unknown number of enemies is also interested in the same quest. It's a race for the item. So...the first person in faction A has a battleship, a giant bastard of a thing that can withstand all but the largest attacks, but something you could never take into a dense asteroid field. His friends all have smaller vessels, so he'll escort them to the field, and guard the area while they go in. <-- If that were an instanced quest, the server/A.I. could easily keep the battleship busy with a challenging battle while the smaller ships cruise through asteroids relying on excellent piloting skills - and have their own fight inside.

I'm not saying it would be easy...at all. But I don't think it would be impossible to build a game that offered a mix of complimentary gameplay styles in a sensible, functional way.

I think Total War is actually a good example - imagine if Total War became an MMO where the Civ-loving crowd ran a constant slow paced but real-time map campaign and employed a bunch of RTS-loving players as their army generals to fight the battles. That would rock.

wow was just thinking about this the other day. I would love to see a new version of Freelancer. Loved that game.

Does anyone know if it works on Vista as I have just put Vista on my game PC. I am bit relauctant to intsall older games on Vista because of potential probs. Also of course Freelancer is not widescreen.

If Freelancer works on XP, I'm sure it'll work on Vista as well. Give it a try anyway. ;)

Also if anyone is interested, this is worth a read through.
http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/freelancer/index.html

I'd thought I should post a few screenies. :)







I'm currently at Omicron Alpha near the Outcasts base Planet Malta.

i *love* X3. but i dont understand anything about it. i kinda just dick around for hours on end.

I loved Freelancer intensely. I travelled everywhere, did everything, found the Monkey planet, the Robot planet, the empty Nomad system, the wreck of the Hispania, and all the level 10 guns.

Dying for more.

That was quite a trip.

Thanks for the thread, made me remember how much I love this game. Installed it on my break and have been playing for the last 4 hours, it's still fucking awesome :D

I flew almost every sector of every system, methodically searching for that sweet, sweet loot.

I love nebulas so much. Charting them was an exercise in patience and anticipation, that was almost always rewarded.

This is one of those games I wish I could go back and play again for the first time. Now that I've seen it all, it's just not the same any more.

Agreed. I still remember some of the coords for the wrecks. I spent many an hour in that game when I didn't have the internet.

Just finished the main story, now I can concentrate on trade and space piracy.

I've been playing Freelancer on and off for years.

Just recently, if you want to call late last year recently, I found out that a Freelancer Mod I used to play not only had a server up and running, but was also considerably more advanced than it had been.

I've been playing there for a while now and have a number of ships, 5 to be exact, the maximum you can have per account on the server.

These are the ships in question, note that a few of them are peculiar to this mod I believe;

Liberty Assault Battle Cruiser. Think a little smaller than a Liberty Dread, but bigger than a Cruiser and more powerful.
Praetor Cruiser. Corsair beast.
Large Train. 4500 unit cargo hold, for when you need to move a LOT of stuff.
Borderworld Transport. 3600 unit cargo.
Kusari "Ahoudori" Explorer. The poor mans Gunboat.

There are many, many more superb (and not so great) ships available to fly.

The other thing the long time players of Freelancer here might enjoy, is that the universe has been expanded.... there are now more than twice the normal number of systems to try and get to.
The server itself is set up as a RP server, some some RP skills are useful.

Personally, I reckon this mod is just about as close as we are going to get to 'Freelancer 2'.

Yea Freelancer 2 was cancelled some time in late 2009 or early 2010.
here is a video which showed early game footage.
http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/fre...gameplay/306298

Hmm...

"Press X to garage
Press O to <illegible>"

They console'd it. I would not play that on principle, even if it had been released.

I believe it was going to be Xbox 360 and PC.

Considering it was a Mricrosft game it is no surprise that they would support their in house hardware.

For me a console release could have been ok, Freelancer was always on the more action side of space sim which would go well on console. If you want more of a sin I think the X series is superior.

Was just looking at the thread and realized that I didn't mention the name of the mod I was talking about..... shows you what happens when you post at "OMG it's early in the morning".

This link --> Discovery 4.85 Ships should take you to some pictures of the ships in the mod.

This link --> Freelancer: Discovery will take you to the download page the mod itself.

Currently, the Discovery mod is up to version 4.85 and the Dev team is working hard on the next version as we speak.

I fucking loved freelancer to death. I did everything I could in the game and have been hoping for more for a long time.

I tried Crossfire mod, but I couldn't really get into it. A graphical update to it would be awesome though.

What would be awesome is for MS to release the sourcecode, as happened with Freespace. The FSO project is gorgeous.

Various people have tried to get MS to release the source code for Freelancer several times, but it appears that MS just doesn't want to know.

It's a pity, because the head bloke in the Discovery Mod (Igiss) has said that if he could get his hands on it, things would be far more awesome than they already are.

I loved Freelancer to DEATH!!!

Used to greatly enjoy installing the Millennium Falcon mod and playing network games with my mates or just playing through the campaign.

Never got the chance to play it online.

Dig out your Freelancer disk and re-install it, then get the Discovery Mod.

You won't regret it.

Ok, maybe you will, depends on what OS you are running, setting up Freelancer on Win 7 can be a bit of a trial if you don't know what you are doing, but the Disco Forums have a full set of 'how to' instructions to help you out.

Anyone want in game pics/video?

Youtube for the win. Search "Freelancer Discovery 4.85" for in-game video footage. Some good, some bad, some awesome!

TBH Mickk, what I can see on the vids I saw was not that different from what I remember of the base game. Well, apart from a few new ship models - and people have been releasing those since I got the game in the first place. I gather it plays somewhat different from the clips.

Another Freelancer fan here. Would love to see another one with a completely massive game world. Daggerfall scale would be acceptable.

For the last few months, I've been working on my own restoration mod which basically adds a shipyard to the robot and monkey planets plus I've already added a few ships which weren't originally available and added a few jumpholes which one gives me access to Omicron Minor (The Order's homeworld) and with some help from Jadoxa, I managed to change the intro sequence which lets me see my modified Eagle instead of the Starflier, so it's looking good.

Hmm, I never did check out mods for Freelancer.

Are there any 'total conversion' mods or ones that add heaps of new planets, ships etc?

You can check out the ones that were mentioned earlier,

Crossfire,
http://www.moddb.com/mods/crossfire

Discovery,
http://www.moddb.com/mods/discovery-freelancer

Freeworlds: Tides Of War (Star Wars conversion),
http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow

Universe map for Discovery 4.85

Put this in as a link because the picture is pretty big.

It's not a total conversion mod and there are a number of ships that have been 'imported' from other mods, games and movies, but the Devs are slowly weeding those out.

Most of the ships in the mod are either from Freelancer originally or specifically made for Discovery 4.85.

As a for instance, there have been 'Bombers' added to the mod, small craft specifically built to deal serious amounts of damage to capital ships.

There is a new 'House', Gallia, with it's own set of ship lines.

A few interesting tweaks have been added.
When you are 'mining' materials (gold, silver, niobium etc), instead of having to press a button to tractor in the mined items, it goes directly to your cargo hold.
This puts a stop to those people who like to 'fly by tractor' your hard earned loot.

There is a bunch of other stuff that has been done as well.

Ship Posters -- Note some of these are pretty big!

edit: fixed link to ship posters in earlier post and added the same link here.

Thanks for the links guys, will have to reinstall FReelancer and give them a go.

Ironically, Galaxy On Fire 2 is the iPad/iPhone version of Freelancer and a pretty good imitation too!

Shame on you Microsoft, shaaaaaaaaaaaame!!!

... ?

In what way is that ironic?

I am guessing the 2 on the end of it.

Actually, it isn't Microsoft, it's a Germany based company called Fishlabs.