In response to a company (EA) wide email annoucing the re-branding of "The Darkening" as "Priv2".. I replied (to the EA WORLD e-mail addy) "BULLSHIT!!" in 64point, red, bold faced font.. and proceed to express my thoughts on the matter.. not realzing that I had hit "Reply All"..
My computer has 512 shades of red!
That's hilarious, though. Is that why you didn't get credited?
(And what did the Origin guys who *were* credited do? I see a bunch of really smart Wing Commander veterans credited with erratta type stuff... asommers, Billy Cain, J. Allen Brack, the guy who runs Ultima Online now...)
Thoughts on PrivDark, eight years later: On one hand, the style and the art design is absolutely amazing. It's weird, it's atmospheric, it does a really incredible job of creating this universe... and the FMV is amazingly well done and really unique.
On the other hand, the game is horribly unbalanced in really, really big ways. There's all sorts of huge, game-breaking elements... and it's things that should have been really obvious and really easy to fix (and by all rights should have simply been copied from the original Privateer). I don't understand how they managed to design three hundred individual missions, but never figure out that the game needed a reputation system. And didn't someone try to play the game and realize that the game falls apart simply because you can't jump out when there are enemy targets around?
I'm not a game developer, so maybe there's a bigger picture that I'm not seeing -- but from where I'm sitting, just the ability to jump away from random encounters would have made the game fun instead of really tedious.
Yep, no matter how much I read about the alleged connection between the WC Universe and the Priv 2 Universe, I still don't buy it. Especially after seeing the "The Darkening" add in my WC IV edition, without any reference to Wing Commander.
Hmm, didn't it start out development as 'Privateer: The Darkening'... and then become 'The Darkening'... and then 'Privateer 2: The Darkening'? It's really only that last change that's terrible... the idea that it was a privateer spinoff of some sort seems great -- another story about another privateer.
(Conversely, I can't see selling it the other way around, as just "The Darkening" -- here's another game from Erin Roberts that's about a space pilot who has to make money to upgrade his ship and he chooses missions and makes alliances and fights pirates and ships cargo... but it's not Privateer!)