Originally posted by ChrisReid
Sure, if you wanna get really technical about it there will be plenty of Freelancer veterans out there pulling crazy acrobatics and flight stunts with their mouse while swiveling their guns' firing arcs, but you better believe its flying doesn't hold a candle to WC. It's not supposed to. The entire point of making it mouse driven was to make it easy and accessible to the mass market. It's not supposed to be a space/flight sim like Wing Comander, Jane's or even Starlancer. Sure, when you get good you can do all sorts of snazzy stuff, but at its heart it's easy to beat the game just putting the cursor loosely over the enemy ship and holding down both buttons. You don't need to think about speed/strafing/maneuvers/sides and you'll beat the game just fine. Can you imagine being able to ignore all that stuff in a WC game?
Well, this is a long reply. I hope people like it.
I think the point was that very few people actually was to not restrict the sales of the game to people who own joysticks. A great market problem this days is to expand your demographics. You don't want to sell games just to the hard core fans. Hard core fans of Space Combat Sims and Elite/Privateer games are highly likely to buy Freelancer regardless of such details.
You are right when you say they made it more accessible. That's exactly what they did, the game is much easier to play. But more because of the weapons arc than the mouse system. Without the weapons arc, it would be just like WC with a mouse.
The so-criticized nanobots and shield batteries are actually just a normal game convention. Even FPS regarded as very realistic often have “medkits”. I think they should take a few seconds to work, to make it feel more "realistic", the fact that they work immediately is making it harder to accept. But make no mistake, Freelancer is not a simplistic shooter because of that. For example, if you pick a new weapon, it isn't an automatic power-up. You have to land on a base and have some servicemen to install it on a compatible slot. You can pick up items by running into them, you must tractor them in – even if it’s a really fast tractor. When you jettison cargo, you lower your shields. Those nice details make the difference.
So yeah, FL is easier to new users because of the weapons arc. But when you think about it, it's very reasonable to believe that space fighters of the future could have weapons arc for energy guns. Seriously, even the crappiest capships of space combat sims have turrets, and it's unrealistic to think that fighter’s weapons are supposed to have a fixed angle straight ahead.
The fact is that there was no easy way to control both the weapons and the ship's heading with the joystick. Guns that automatically track the targets are terrible, because it's very had to "lead" the targets. The Freelancer control scheme is the best way found so far to control both the ships direction and the weapons.
Another factor that makes Freelancer an easy game is game balance. Freelancer could really benefit from a difficulty setting. Most Wing Commander games could either easier or much harder than Freelancer depending on the settings. If you could made FL more difficult, people would not still be able to win by, as you correctly described, put the cursor loosely over the enemy ship and press fire.
In conclusion, I think FL is easy because of the game balance, not because of the control scheme. I'd like to see both developed into a more complex simulation. It looks promising, and I hope it works. There surely is room for a lot of improvement, but it was the first attempt at this kind of thing, so let’s give it some credit. The game community should be more open to change. X-Com had the best turn-based combat of its era. Mythos decided to experiment a real time engine for X-Com III, but people complained so much that they end up putting an alternative turn based engine there. The turn-based engine was even better than the one on the original X-Com, but the real time was vastly superior. It was also very unique, since no game that I know of has used a really similar one. Perhaps the same would happen to the control scheme of FL, but it would be a shame, since it could be a chance for the revival of the space combat genre.
