warzog said:
Quarto:
You're discribing what I call, "Being led around by the nose."
And blaming Chris Roberts for that, IMHO, is wrong.
Especially when one considers that it's one of Microsoft's only means of putting "difficulty" into a game.
Back in the time that Privateer was made, we called games like Freelancer, "Once Through" games.
IE: Once you go through it, you're through with it, forever!
Microsoft, and many other companies use it as a way to increase sales, by making them so boring you have to get something new A.S.A.P.!
Well, it's always convenient to blame a big faceless corporation like Microsoft, but in this case, Microsoft is clearly blameless. You have to cast your mind back to 1996, for a moment...
A lot of people believe that WC4 was Chris Roberts' best game. Yet, there was so much friction between Roberts and EA about this game, and so much interference from EA, that the end result was Chris Roberts leaving and setting up Digital Anvil.
He didn't want to make the same mistake twice, so he was very careful about the agreement he made with Microsoft. Microsoft ended up in the role of the silent partner - they gave DA money, and had virtually no say in how it was spent (of course, whether Microsoft was ever truly a silent partner as DA claimed is unlikely; but it
is a fact that for the first three years of DA's miserable existence, there was very little - too little - interference from Microsoft). They trusted that the guy responsible for one of the most successful game series of all time knew what he was doing, and could be relied upon to produce StarLancer and FreeLancer without excessive interference. These were, after all, the heady days of the late 1990s, when it seemed like every great game designer was leaving their corporate home to set up their own company that would revolutionise gaming. Neither StarLancer nor Dai-Katana had yet come out, and consequently Microsoft, Eidos and the other 'silent' partners didn't yet realise how foolish they were - so they continued to trust Chris Roberts and John Romero.
The upshot of this is that, during the vital years of planning and pre-production, where
everything about a game is or at least should be decided, Chris Roberts had nearly
complete control. And so, how is it that under his control, FreeLancer, a game all about making your own decisions, ended up with a stupidly restrictive storyline that required everyone to do the same thing? There can be only two answers:
a) Chris Roberts wanted it that way. It's not as though Wing Commander 4 is famous for the amount of freedom it offered to the player - sure, it had a lot of branching, but the player still operated within very strict parametres, with no real influence on the plot. This is what Chris Roberts is good at, so this is what he did with FreeLancer. Like I said before, he's a good designer - but egad, he should be kept away from projects like this one.
b) Chris Roberts screwed the pooch. He was so incompetent that he left the storyline for later, and subsequently a stupidly restrictive storyline was imposed on the game after his departure.
I'd like to think it was option A - not only because it allows me to retain some respect for Chris Roberts, but also because we all know that a storyline is not something that can be thrown together in a few months at the tail-end of a project, so the idea that Microsoft imposed the storyline after Roberts' departure is pretty silly.
Whatever the answer is, it is pretty clear that Chris Roberts is the guy to blame for one of FreeLancer's greatest weaknesses. He was in command, he was in control, so he's the one that gets strung up because his squadron screwed the pooch on the mission
. EA had interfered far more with WC4 than Microsoft did with FL during those first few years - so unless we're about to start giving EA (as opposed to Roberts) credit for making WC4 so great, we have to also give Roberts credit for making FreeLancer suck.
There is another thing worth adding here. When you talk about it all being Microsoft's fault, you imply that there is such a thing as a standard Microsoft game. But Microsoft is not EA - they maintain very strict managerial control over most projects they finance (probably even more so now, after losing millions on Digital Anvil), but they don't exercise such all-encompassing creative control. Halo is completely different to FreeLancer, both are completely different to Age of Empires, and all three are completely different to StarLancer. Microsoft wants its developers to make games that sell... but Microsoft's upper management has always seemed surprisingly aware of the fact that they know nothing about computer games, and should leave the creative decisions to their developers when possible. The consequence is that some of their games are designed to be completed once and never returned to, some are designed to be played on multiplayer with the single-player mode serving only as a bonus, and some are designed to allow people to make dozens of mods - "Once Through" games, as you put it, are not Microsoft's standard method, because Microsoft has no standard method.
Finally, there's a question worth asking that nobody ever seems to ask. FreeLancer had been in development for an incredibly long time before Microsoft stepped in. The game was released in 2003, but if you search the CIC news archives, you can find reports from Chris and LOAF about playing early versions of the game at E3 as far back as 2000. So, when it was released in 2003, the game looked good... but it was already very dated in some ways (just look at its models). There is no doubt, meanwhile, that when Microsoft finally pushed Roberts aside, they gave the order to cut the game down to size and
get it done. Which begs the question - how much longer would Roberts have taken to finish it? I'd say we'd have been looking at a very late 2003 release, possibly even 2004. In which case,
the game would have sucked, because it would have been released simultaneously with a generation of games designed to take advantage of the newest graphics cards. Everyone would have laughed at its graphics and models, which were actually amazing... back in
the year 2000. No, Microsoft didn't ruin Chris Roberts' brainchild - in this sad little story, Microsoft was the good guy who stepped in at the last possible moment to save the game (but also deserves a solid amount of blame for not stepping in earlier).
I'm sure parts of what I wrote above are not true - there's so much we don't know (and we'll never know) about the backstage events behind FL that it's impossible to fully understand the whole thing. However, I daresay my argument is a lot closer to the truth than yours, because it's based on more than just the assumption that Microsoft, as huge and evil corporate entity, had to be the one who ruined FreeLancer. I really think Chris Roberts is a great game designer - and I think that's all the more reason to let him take the blame for his own mistakes instead of trying to shift them onto other people.