I don't understand the running animosity towards FreeSpace around here. I've never played it, but I loved all the previous Descent games. Was FreeSpace that bad of a game? Didn't some of the fan mods around here revolve around converting FreeSpace into a Wing Commander theme?
What where the issues with FreeSpace that makes so many folks around here hate it? From everything I heard about it, it seems like the kind of game that Wing Commander fans should like. Was it badly executed? Buggy? Bad game engine? Just a competitor of Wing Commander and therefore to be hated?
Descent and 'Descent: FreeSpace' aren't really related in gameplay or practical setting. Interplay, which owned the rights to the Descent IP, added it to a Wing Commander clone that another one of their development houses did in the hopes of boosting sales. I think there was some back-of-the-envelope fiction about how this was the *future* of Descent-the-FPS and a little advertising campaign about how it was Descent but 'free' (because you were playing a space game and not a game where you fly around in tunnels).
I don't think anyone here has a problem with the original Descent games or the folks who made them... they're neat games and are a cool and different take on their genre -- they're just not connected. When someone here makes a point of saying 'Descent Freespace' it's just a little jab at the scenario that lead to Volition's space shooter being tied to the tunnel-shooting robot game (and Freespace fans' adamant-and-weirdly-explained denials that this ever happened in the first place--their mantra was, for years, that it was because of a "copyright issue" and not a money grab. This amuses us. Or me, at least.)
Anyway, I have a few problems with Freespace:
- The horrible sales of FreeSpace 2 were *one of* the things EA cited in dropping Wing Commander. Sales were down across the board, StarLancer and Tachyon were also disasters (Wing Commander Prophecy, surprisingly, was not). Freespace may have been
- Freespace is in no way clever or original. Each game is a more polished version of the previous Wing Commander release with all the stuff that costs money (ie, cinematics) removed. There have been a million Wing Commander clones... some did an amazing job of figuring out how to do the same type of game in a unique way (the Lucas games, Mantis) and others were just tastefully shameless about it (Star Crusader!). Freespace is the only one that's literally Wing Commander with the serial numbers rubber out, but whose developers and fans insist is an entirely original and wonderful thing.
- Their Chris Roberts 'face behind the game' game designer was a dick. FS2's whole ad campaign was based around him grinning in magazine ads with a quote about how *his* game's capital ships were *really* big.
- Now it's one of those goofy Slashdot "Open Source" deals that everyone on the internet used to care about.
- It's an amusing 'bit' and fanning ot occasionally keeps the community together. I know we all objectively want to say that everyone should be nice to each other no matter what they think/feel/say/do/believe/etc... but in practice that isn't true. Communities need a bad guy -- and all the better in a case like this where it's a goofy rivalry with the occasional good joke instead of a bunch of dudes fighting about everything all the time.
- Also, they told me you guys look like dorks.