Quarto said:
I bet we wouldn't have. For one thing, Chris Roberts left the dev team fairly late, so it's doubtful that his departure changed that much.
Well, YOU'd be surprised!
In the game, and on the disk, you'll find a file labeled, "Engine_Goods.ini"
It's empty, it's there so that you can buy/sell engines, to upgrade them.
They couldn't delete the file, because it's required by the source code.
(Which means it's a change that came late in developement.)
So, instead, they disabled the ability by making it impossible to unmount an engine.
If you check the files of my mod, which have been decoded, you'll find ECM pods, Repair Robots, and even the nukes from Privateer 2.
They're all there, even the thumbnails, and the actual models of them, but their functions have been disabled.
The Power Generators, Tractor Beams and Scanners were designed to be options that you could buy, I reactivated the ones for the scanners and generators.
In fact, when Juni briefs you on the 2nd (Ashcroft) mission, she says that she'll have a tractor beam installed on your ship.
That tells me that the ability to add/remove/buy/sell them had been there, but it was removed very late in developement.
Not only that...
Try leaving a base without a generator, or a scanner, on your ship.
There's a prerecorded voice message stating that you can't launch without one.
Why would the messages be there if it hadn't been an option at one time?
(There's also a message that you can't launch without an engine, too!!!)
Quarto said:
Although it's difficult to tell, I suspect that FreeLancer could well have been a better game without his influence.
When Privateer came out, Chris Roberts said that he wanted more ships, more equipment, more developed systems/bases, and more weapons, but that the computers of the day couldn't handle it.
IMHO, Freelancer was going to be what Privateer had been meant to be.
Unfortunately, the powers that be didn't, and that probably caused the rift that led to Roberts leaving.
I truly believe that Roberts was trying to make "Privateer 3-Freelancer."