Thank you Thank you!!!

C

cappyra

Spaceman
Thank you for bringing back to life one of the best PC games ever made. This was one of my favorite games of all time... and now thanks to your efforts is once more.

I remember back in January or February of 1993. I was thumbing through a computer game magazine and saw an advertisement for Wing Commander: Privateer and was completely blown away. I thought... "WOW I can be like Han Solo... flyin the stars, making my own way... merchant, smuggler, pirate...
I checked by the computer game stores every week waiting to see the game.

Then BAM! There is was. I ran home and quickly loaded the DOS version on my machine. 7 or 8 floppies! What a HUGE game! I remember that it didn't work initially LOL... and after several hours playing around with my Autoexec.bat and config.sys files... and EMS ROFL It finally worked. No voices though. This was the original without the voice overs.

I was in Privateer heaven... and keyboard frustration Hell LOL no joystick. Believe it or not I finished the original game using only the keyboard =)

Then came the voicepack and the addon... Righteous Fire!!!

SWEET!

I remember the firstime I played the game... with a joystick. OMG! I can actually get my reticle over the target!

The game stayed on my hard drive for years.

Time passed and I played all the Wing Commander games. While fun... they never captured the open ended game play, or the one man against the universe feel of Privateer.

At some point I finally got the Privateer CD game for Windows 95. It worked OK.. sort of... with Windows 95 and 98... You had to play with the CD in... weird... I hated the new nasally whiny voice of the Privateer =(

Then... *turns his head and vomits... Privateer 2. What a disaster. Probably in my top 10 worst games of all time that I actually played until I finished list. The only ONLY reason I finished the game was that I thought in some way... it would get better... but alas... it was not to be. I hated Privateer 2 for what it could have been... but wasn't.

Then... Freelancer! I thought finally! FINALLY!!! here is Privateer reborn. It was... sort of... kindof... but still it didn't have the same feel as Privateer.

In the past year I have tried getting the old Privateer game to load and work properly with XP. I had limited success. Weird errors... sometimes one peice of the puzzle would not work... I sadly bent my head.

A week ago I was thinking about Privateer again and wanted to give it another try to see if I could get it working. I was thinking... I wish that whoever owned the game would revamp the origional with new graphics and re-release it. I would wait in line to buy the game.

I did a search and my jaw dropped when I found this site. I immediately downloaded the game and started playing.

*sigh... with the updated graphics and new features.. *sniff... you have made me so happy =D

I still have the origional game on floppy disks packed away. =D

Thanks again!!!!!!
 
glad you like it--just you wait until we release the 1.1 patch :)
trust me that gives it a bit of xtra umph :)

We're going to be looking for beta testers for that pretty soon--so keep your eye out for forum posts about that--maybe you can be on it
 
I have to agree, I'm very impressed with the remake. Freelancer suffers from the designer deciding to force you to play it their way. The entire high transit system and lack of autopilot just gets old after a while and is designer arrogance. I've been tempted to load up some of the mods for it (they are/were trying to redo Privateer too), but I'm really pleased with the Vegastrike version.

And I like the extras. Things you can use if you want, ignore if you do not (which seems fair).

I would like larger "jump point" areas, it is harder to hit a jump point than it was in Privateer, but other than that, I've no quibbles with the changes (though I'm not to Oxford 3 yet).

Very, very, very good job. I haven't looked back at the Freelancer boards since I finally got a new video card and have Vegastrike running right.
 
I just registered to say THANK YOU!!! as well.

Although I have to say, I might just start complaining to you once my grades start dropping... but who need a diploma anyway, right?

Now that I have seen those new version of the mining stating around here, I can't wait to see it ingame.

Once more:
THANKS!!!

-theBlind
 
w00t! ive been loving privateer since it came out when i was a little kid! the remake difinitely needs some work, maybe you should try bringing back some of the stuff (like the purchasing screens which arent very interesting) and make the asteroids fly by you, but its still an awesome idea! i think freelancer is an great game, but privateer is a timeless classic. Good Luck Vegastrike!
 
:) great to hear it...
maybe the jump points looked bigger in the original cus they had a cross rather than a targetting box around them--that makes 'em look a bunch bigger...
anyhow cool---will let you folks know when there's a 1.1 beta patch out
 
u all are dissing a good game...
freelancer is a game with great gameplay and jawdropping graphics, so dont criticize it anymore. face it, micro$hit made a good game. however, you are right, it doesn't compare with the original. privateer MADE freelancer what it is.
 
Good to hear that other people enjoy playing it. Thanks for taking the time to register to tell us about it!

naz.t.nate: I don't think anyone is saying Freelancer was no good. I played through it and really loved the campaign (even though I missed the joystick). Voice acting was pretty decent, and the difficulty was just right as you advanced. It had some shortcomings but was a good game. I just didn't feel like playing it after the campaign was over.
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
Good to hear that other people enjoy playing it. Thanks for taking the time to register to tell us about it!

naz.t.nate: I don't think anyone is saying Freelancer was no good. I played through it and really loved the campaign (even though I missed the joystick). Voice acting was pretty decent, and the difficulty was just right as you advanced. It had some shortcomings but was a good game. I just didn't feel like playing it after the campaign was over.
Click to expand...

pretty much hits it on the head.

bad points included stripping the AI out of the game (you could purchase AIs so you could autopilot) -- I know the designers were proud of the appearance and the graphics, but after a while, real time views just bored me to tears and took too much darn time.

A flight model that made it important to take joysticks out of the game in order to disguise weaknesses in the model. Sheesh.

Turning the genital switch on with two of the models and off on the rest and using skins for clothing so it was obvious.

"jump points" that disappeared (that was just a bite).

Chopping out half of the missions developed and all the code for the WC-like HUD radar and similar items (it was there in the beta-test, but they had to cut it all to make it fit on one CD -- come on, they cut a lot of stuff that would have been great for the community in order to save twenty-five cents per game sold -- not to mention they ended up delivering fewer missions than they promised).

No way to by-pass the cut scenes. Again, I realize they were proud of them, but ... (a lot of what they did with the game was designed to force gamers to have a specific experience, bless their hearts, the same as P2 had some game behavior forcing artificial rules).

Yes, I liked it, but I lost the urge to replay it after I had finished it once and run out to the ends of the world and bought the upgraded ship and shields, listened to the dialog and met the apes and robots.

Oh, and code that allowed stealth fighters with guns and shields in the open multi-player games. Sheesh, that was a mistake. Of all the things to leave in.

There was a project to use the code for freelancer to create a Privateer mod and some other mods. I'm playing Vegastrike Privateer ....
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
Good to hear that other people enjoy playing it. Thanks for taking the time to register to tell us about it!

naz.t.nate: I don't think anyone is saying Freelancer was no good. I played through it and really loved the campaign (even though I missed the joystick). Voice acting was pretty decent, and the difficulty was just right as you advanced.
Click to expand...
I found freelancer disappiontingly easy. Privateer is much more of a challenge. I did like the mouse interface though, especially as my joystick is broken.
 
>>In the past year I have tried getting the old Privateer game to load and work properly with XP. I had limited success. Weird errors... sometimes one peice of the puzzle would not work... I sadly bent my head.

>>I still have the origional game on floppy disks packed away. =D

If you use dosbox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net), you can play the original Privateer. And the disk version is more stable than the CD version, due to some incompatibilities in emulating SB16. But it is ok. I finished the main campaign some years ago, (when I had a real SB16, on a dos machine), and now I am trying the RF campaign.

>>Then... *turns his head and vomits... Privateer 2. What a disaster. Probably in my top 10 worst games of all time that I actually played until I finished list. The only ONLY reason I finished the game was that I thought in some way... it would get better... but alas... it was not to be. I hated Privateer 2 for what it could have been... but wasn't.

I respectfully disagree. Priv2 was a fine game, but it had nothing to do with the Wing Commander Universe. In fact it, was meant to be called "The Darkening", but the PR department at EA, according to Computer Games Magazine (then Strategy Plus), decided to pass it as a sequel to Privateer. But as a stand alone space trading simulation, is IMHO very good.

>> Then... Freelancer! I thought finally! FINALLY!!! here is Privateer reborn. It was... sort of... kindof... but still it didn't have the same feel as Privateer.

I like Freelancer, but I think it is too short. But there are many single player mods, and you can continue to play if you finish the main campaign. There is one mod I use, that lets me buy the Millennium Falcon. ( I wonder if I can do the same with Privateer Remake).

By the way, when Privateer became a commercial hit, there was a rumour that Lucasarts was planning a space trading simulation, in the Star Wars universe called Falcon, and that Larry Holland was going to develop it. Has anyone heard that before?
 
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