FredDude32
Rear Admiral
FS2 is up for grabs!
https://www.gog.com/game/freespace_2
https://www.gog.com/game/freespace_2
Oh nice, saves me the trouble to find the CDs if I want to play it again.
Freespace itself is a Horror game thinking that is a Space Sim.While I'll always love WC, I think Freespace did a lot of good by using a slightly different format.
WC had essentially become - Launch > Auto to nav point > fight > Auto to nav point > Auto to nav point > Fight >Auto to carrier > Land.
Not saying I didn't enjoy this, but with Prophecy and the utter swarms of enemies it became a bit more pronounced and very slightly stale.
Freespace having missions where events tended to unfold suddenly and drastically in one area of space, was a refreshing change.
To be totally honest with you (and myself I guess), whilst I would LOVE a new (and good) WC game to come out, if I had to choose between that and Freespace 3, I'd likely choose Freespace.
WC had essentially become - Launch > Auto to nav point > fight > Auto to nav point > Auto to nav point > Fight >Auto to carrier > Land.
Not saying I didn't enjoy this, but with Prophecy and the utter swarms of enemies it became a bit more pronounced and very slightly stale.
Freespace having missions where events tended to unfold suddenly and drastically in one area of space, was a refreshing change.
just got my copy, off-line installer, it includes wallpapers, reference card , in-game soundtrack and a manualFS2 is up for grabs!
https://www.gog.com/game/freespace_2
You may be right.I think this is more of a critique of Prophecy/Secret Ops than an 'evolution of the series' type of thing. I would say WC2-4 all expanded what they did in terms of unique events that caused missions to unfold in new ways. From WC2 with in-flight refueling and jumping outsystem to WC4's limited scenarios where alternate wings flew concurrent missions, they were clearly trying to be more dynamic. WC3 probably the most of all, but all WC2-4 had their handful of magnum launch-style scrambles and stuff like that. I keep going back to WC3 with missions like the one where the jump point gets cloaked, where the Behemoth gets destroyed and where Thrakhath transmits the Angel death - to me it seemed like there were quite a lot of missions that left you guessing about what was going to happen.
FPS games were definitely more popular and there was genre fatique. However, MMOs were still somewhat niche at the point that FS2 came out. EA was one of the publishers insisting that the only way to make money was by replicating the success of Ultima Online. With the rise of the internet, companies were also feeling the pinch of software piracy more and more. MMOs were a guaranteed income stream. Eventually this leads to EA outright saying every game they released had to have an online component (since it's the only part where they can force people to have a paid account to play) but that point is still many years away at that point.Something else that comes to my mind with the shift away from the genre, wasn't that also around the time when online games became more and more popular so everything had to be online and shoorters and MMOs where the easiest type of games to make online games from. So that might also have been quite an influantial factor to the change. Kinda like we see now where physical copies are very rare now and we can allready see that streaming and service games will be the next thing after digital destribution.
I suspect if we could find out what the numbers were for FS2's marketing budget versus Prophecy's marketing budget, we'd be blown away by the disproportion.
Yep. Since my previous post, I read up a little more about FS2, and it seems like it was basically a product Interplay didn't want. They had funded it, obviously, and they were the publisher, but they didn't seem to believe the game would sell well enough to justify any marketing money. They only really started putting any kind of effort into marketing after FS2 won a couple of awards - and by then it was obviously too late.Unfortunately (I have read) there was virtually zero marketing. This is backed up by the fact that I really loved FS (I used to build campaigns in FrED) and I only knew about FS2 when I saw it on the shelf in a small corner of my local Game store.