Wing Commander vs Freelancer

Originally posted by Delance
It's an oversimplification. It takes the same skill of every shooter. On WC, the "cursor" is the ship crosshair. In Counterstrike, it's the weapon crosshair.

The simple fact that weapons on Freelancer are not locked at fixed angle doesn’t affect the flying at all. If anything, it allows for more maneuvering since you don’t have to be heading the exact same directing you are firing. Just because the weapons have an arc doesn’t make it less of a combat sim than WC.

Sure, if you wanna get really technical about it there will be plenty of Freelancer veterans out there pulling crazy acrobatics and flight stunts with their mouse while swiveling their guns' firing arcs, but you better believe its flying doesn't hold a candle to WC. It's not supposed to. The entire point of making it mouse driven was to make it easy and accessible to the mass market. It's not supposed to be a space/flight sim like Wing Comander, Jane's or even Starlancer. Sure, when you get good you can do all sorts of snazzy stuff, but at its heart it's easy to beat the game just putting the cursor loosely over the enemy ship and holding down both buttons. You don't need to think about speed/strafing/maneuvers/sides and you'll beat the game just fine. Can you imagine being able to ignore all that stuff in a WC game?
 
Originally posted by ChrisReid
Sure, if you wanna get really technical about it there will be plenty of Freelancer veterans out there pulling crazy acrobatics and flight stunts with their mouse while swiveling their guns' firing arcs, but you better believe its flying doesn't hold a candle to WC. It's not supposed to. The entire point of making it mouse driven was to make it easy and accessible to the mass market. It's not supposed to be a space/flight sim like Wing Comander, Jane's or even Starlancer. Sure, when you get good you can do all sorts of snazzy stuff, but at its heart it's easy to beat the game just putting the cursor loosely over the enemy ship and holding down both buttons. You don't need to think about speed/strafing/maneuvers/sides and you'll beat the game just fine. Can you imagine being able to ignore all that stuff in a WC game?

Well, this is a long reply. I hope people like it. :D

I think the point was that very few people actually was to not restrict the sales of the game to people who own joysticks. A great market problem this days is to expand your demographics. You don't want to sell games just to the hard core fans. Hard core fans of Space Combat Sims and Elite/Privateer games are highly likely to buy Freelancer regardless of such details.

You are right when you say they made it more accessible. That's exactly what they did, the game is much easier to play. But more because of the weapons arc than the mouse system. Without the weapons arc, it would be just like WC with a mouse.

The so-criticized nanobots and shield batteries are actually just a normal game convention. Even FPS regarded as very realistic often have “medkits”. I think they should take a few seconds to work, to make it feel more "realistic", the fact that they work immediately is making it harder to accept. But make no mistake, Freelancer is not a simplistic shooter because of that. For example, if you pick a new weapon, it isn't an automatic power-up. You have to land on a base and have some servicemen to install it on a compatible slot. You can pick up items by running into them, you must tractor them in – even if it’s a really fast tractor. When you jettison cargo, you lower your shields. Those nice details make the difference.

So yeah, FL is easier to new users because of the weapons arc. But when you think about it, it's very reasonable to believe that space fighters of the future could have weapons arc for energy guns. Seriously, even the crappiest capships of space combat sims have turrets, and it's unrealistic to think that fighter’s weapons are supposed to have a fixed angle straight ahead.

The fact is that there was no easy way to control both the weapons and the ship's heading with the joystick. Guns that automatically track the targets are terrible, because it's very had to "lead" the targets. The Freelancer control scheme is the best way found so far to control both the ships direction and the weapons.

Another factor that makes Freelancer an easy game is game balance. Freelancer could really benefit from a difficulty setting. Most Wing Commander games could either easier or much harder than Freelancer depending on the settings. If you could made FL more difficult, people would not still be able to win by, as you correctly described, put the cursor loosely over the enemy ship and press fire.

In conclusion, I think FL is easy because of the game balance, not because of the control scheme. I'd like to see both developed into a more complex simulation. It looks promising, and I hope it works. There surely is room for a lot of improvement, but it was the first attempt at this kind of thing, so let’s give it some credit. The game community should be more open to change. X-Com had the best turn-based combat of its era. Mythos decided to experiment a real time engine for X-Com III, but people complained so much that they end up putting an alternative turn based engine there. The turn-based engine was even better than the one on the original X-Com, but the real time was vastly superior. It was also very unique, since no game that I know of has used a really similar one. Perhaps the same would happen to the control scheme of FL, but it would be a shame, since it could be a chance for the revival of the space combat genre.
 
good points. The difficulty level means you can beat Freelancer without too much skill, but this doesn't mean that some people can't do it better than others.

Example: when strafing you have to adjust your aim to account for your sideways motion. Sure, the lead indicator will tell you how much to adjust by. With higher skill though you'll react to it faster, and even anticipate it, adjusting your aim as you hit the strafe buttin, without a tiny pause as you react to the lead indicator.

I do think it could have been done with a joystick though. Anyone remember the old Star Wars arcade game? The levels on the surface of the death star were like Freelancer with a joystick (or flight yoke) You controlled where on the screen the 'cursor' was with the stick, and the ship followed. It could have been done.

Sure it's easier with the mouse than it would be with a stick. Again though it doesn't mean it takes no skill, just that you can spend less effort on aim and worry more about maneuvering or whatever.

In the end, though I wish it could be flown with a stick, the control scheme does work. Freelancer could have been a lot more interesting if the enemies recharged their shields, or used nanobots, or used more than one of their guns at a time, or if missiles weren't useless, or any number of things..
 
Originally posted by MamiyaOtaru
Freelancer could have been a lot more interesting if the enemies recharged their shields, or used nanobots, or used more than one of their guns at a time, or if missiles weren't useless, or any number of things..

I miss having separate armored and shielded sections. I can kinda understand one shield for the whole ship, but I really miss having independent armor plates for each side. It's mindnumbing to pummel the ship from one side, then fire one shot on the other side and have it blow up. Obviously it's not a technical hurdle.. Wing Commander 1 did this.. but yet another attempt to simplify the game for the masses.
 
Originally posted by ChrisReid
I miss having separate armored and shielded sections. I can kinda understand one shield for the whole ship, but I really miss having independent armor plates for each side. It's mindnumbing to pummel the ship from one side, then fire one shot on the other side and have it blow up. Obviously it's not a technical hurdle.. Wing Commander 1 did this.. but yet another attempt to simplify the game for the masses.

While agree with you, I must say that even WC had basically 2D sections. If the fighter takes heavy damage from above it will still blow up with a single shot from bellow.

What bugs me in FreeLancer is how useless the shields batteries are in the later mission or after the plot. If you get hit with the shields low, it can take lots of batteries at once. If you have 25 batteries, you use 3. It just negates the whole concept of the thing.
 
Originally posted by Delance
While agree with you, I must say that even WC had basically 2D sections. If the fighter takes heavy damage from above it will still blow up with a single shot from bellow.

To a certain limited extent.. However nursing injured sides and presenting sides that have full armor/shields is an essential part of all WC games.
 
Originally posted by ChrisReid
To a certain limited extent.. However nursing injured sides and presenting sides that have full armor/shields is an essential part of all WC games.

Yes, same thing with shields. It's much better indeed.
 
Originally posted by Delance

What bugs me in FreeLancer is how useless the shields batteries are in the later mission or after the plot. If you get hit with the shields low, it can take lots of batteries at once. If you have 25 batteries, you use 3. It just negates the whole concept of the thing.

That was made so you can replenish like 3 times your shield with the batteries in each ship. (that is if you buy a decent shield for the ship)
Each batery replenish like 200 shield units.
 
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