Hopefully you can respect enough to at least see why I continued to post here - to learn
why some opinions are the way they are. My interest in the rest of it is negligable - people can be very stupid.
Bandit, having looked at your scan - all I see is a design proposal that indicates they compared Privateer Online with the current genre leader of the time. If Starlancer or Tachyon was released before FS was, they might well have drawn up a different proposal that compared the two. Hardly conclusive evidence that FS is resposable for anything.
Very interesting scan. Just a thought; if FS2 bombed *because* it sucked, it wouldn't be as bad. However, if it was a good game (or simply perceived as such) and still bombed, it would be more devastating, making it very risky invest on a market where even a good products won't do well. The grudge is understandable, really.
Actually Delance you only prove my point, if it bombed because it sucked then the other developers and publishers should've identified this and continued to do what they want - nobody stopped making FPSs when the bad reviews of Daiakatana began to roll in. However if it bombed even though it was good then it proves that regardless of design specs for other games being compared with the FS franchise, or the strength of any game at the time, there was a low point in the space sim genre that couldn't have been avoided.
In either case, blaming any one game - be it FreeSpace, Tachyon, Starlancer or another - is placing blame for blames sake. I can understand how I'd feel if a game I was looking forward to got cancelled, but I wouldn't leap to blame its competition or those that came slightly before it simply because they were compared to it or were the last one out of the door.