mr dave

grand olde days of Freelancer? WTF way to make me feel geriatric. i remember when that one was announced (and how awesome it was supposed to be - same as the original Halo).

it wasn't a bad game but not perfect either, that forced (and fixed) race was effing annoying and what caused me to stop when i tried playing through it a 2nd time.

what i really don't get is how awesome Wing Commander Privateer was and how much of the core elements of that game were replicated in Freelancer (same core designers) but all the extra details that made the old game feel like it was so full of life were stripped from Freelancer. what if i didn't want to help the scientists? what if i wanted to be a gun running pirate (notice a theme here? hehehe) or an even clearer example, i take a mission to retrieve contraband, now it's in my cargo hold, but i can't do anything with it besides return to the station and finish the mission no option to sell it back to the original buyers so i can get cooler guns.

it's not like i'm talking theory here, they MADE a game with all those cool possibilities years before they made Freelancer, so why get rid of it? oh wait, published by microsoft games. nevermind.


1 - i play TQ to have a god killing beast of a character. what's your class combo of choice? i really like the hunter / dream master combo but i'm stuck on act 3 with that build. stopped playing for a while because i'd get to a point where a bunch of dragon looking monsters would stun me at range then rush in and obliterate me. i'd be lucky if i could kill 1 out of the mob. very annoying.

2 - what Anticipation said.

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Zarko

Haha was joking around about FL's age.

FL was inherently simple compared to most space sims, but thats probably what I enjoyed about it in my younger day, having played it on its original release date (7 years to the day actually) when I was only 13-14. I lvoed the arcade-y combat.

I played it with a huge mod later on. Became quite a lot larger than I remembered.

mr dave

i tried it again not too long ago, within a year or so. still lots of fun, and you're right the simplicity of the controls made it great for inexperienced or casual gamers to jump in, but damn that stupid race in the middle.

you ever try Starlancer from back in the day? it was a bit more demanding with the controls but quite fun at the time.

although none have topped those old wing commander games, what i wouldn't give for a proper remake of Privateer. FL was close but i think that's what made it even more bitter for some, it was SO close, like putting candy under your nose so you can smell it but never actually letting you lick it.

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Zarko

Yeah, Starlancer was solid, but I only got it AFTER I had played Freelancer, which I was still in love with, so I didn't play it too much.

Stop reminding me about the race btw kthx .

Eve is another one I quite enjoyed when playing the trial, but being an MMO just felt constricting unless you were specifically looking to group up.

Never played Privateer though.

storymilo

Thanks, I'll probably end up getting it then. I still have to beat the first one, as I stopped around the time my graphics card started fucking up and haven't played since. Although I hear the ending sucks

1- Let's see... I have a couple characters. My most powerful one is a warden (hunter/defense) but with him I just went online with a friend and duped a bunch of ridiculously powerful user created items that let me do whatever I want, so he doesn't really count. My best character that I actually played for real is a guardian (nature/defense) who's basically just an uber tank and is extremely hard to kill. I beat the game with him on normal but I've hardly started epic greece. This time around I started a Brigand (Hunting/Rogue) who is actually really powerful.... not a whole lot of health (and since I put most of my attribute points into dexterity I can't use a lot of strength requiring weapons.armor, but I use bows anyways) but kills most monsters with one shot, there's very very few that require more than two. But I'm only at Athens with her so things will quickly get harder I'm sure. Also, I know the things you're talking about. They're really really annoying, I think they've killed me more than any other type of monster. What kind of stats do you have? I haven't played one but I always thought the haruspex was a pretty powerful build, so you should probably be able to get past the dragon horse things without a huuuge amount of trouble:/ Maybe you're underleveled or don't have great gear. I have an Assassin stuck at Olympus because I can't ****ing kill Typhon. grrrrr

2- I always knew it was praised but I had no idea my genitalia depended on it... better hurry up shouldn't I.

Guybrush

There are multiple endings and the one I got was actually quite sweet, I thought At least it was no more disappointing in Bioshock than it was in many other games, I thought .. like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Fallout 3.

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mr dave

that's unfortunate, i can see how it would be hard to go back to SL after playing FL for a while.

Eve always intrigued me but hearing that it literally took months to finish all the tutorials turned me off. it sounds too demanding on the player. also i hear that it's virtually impossible to survive without associating yourself to a guild and basically working a virtual job.

Privateer is super old school. flying around on a 2d plane in 'space' and shooting at flat sprites that looked like ships. it did look fantastic for the time but it's hard to go back to stuff like that, the imagination did wonders for filling in the blanks that so many pundits of the industry now think are mandatory. like the trailer for the new Metroid game - Samus was young, young and naive.... WTF??? Samus was an alien ass kicking bounty hunter, that's all we needed to know back in the day to make her awesomer than everything. enough with the sappy japanese melodrama, save it for the soap operas and get it the hell out of the video games.


my haruspex is level 31. don't quite remember all the stats, didn't have any problems walking through the game up to that point though. same as you though i was focusing on archery and range which doesn't seem to matter for anything against the dragon horses. i'm thinking i'll try to run next time i actually play.

i had a couple of characters on my old pc that had gone through the game once but whenever i tried copying their save files into my new install it would just crash the game. so now that 31 is tops, i have a warrior/defender combo around level 14-15 that i was using as a bit of a mule.

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Zarko

Depends how quickly you connect with a game I guess. EVE seems intense at the start, but is really quite simple. The difficulty comes in with trying to find a decent corporation, without which you have no chance to complete missions, mine decent ore types, or have access to necessary schematics for tech. It became an annoyance because trying to find get yourself in a corp with enough like minded people, let alone adding in time zone differences, can be difficult.

I did some minor PVP. Just flew in to low sector space, started shooting up a miner, then before killing, asked for a price to save them . Was pretty fun on the small scale, let alone larger one. Then you get your ship destroyed and its rage time.

But yeah, getting the necessary skills also takes ages, given the skills are leveled up purely on a time based system. So it can be daunting to be 'so behind; if you started playing now.

But X3 is a lot harder to get into atm than EVE ever was for me.

saddle_sore

crush the castle
and
circus

mr dave

the 'so behind if you start playing now' angle is my biggest and most common gripe with MMOs. even if it's a game with an active low level population most of them are alternate characters and they still expect you to know all the nuances of the game system.

what got me into X3 was completely ignoring most of the lore in place for the game and filling out the details with my imagination. the systems are pretty vast and the overall game is quite expansive but it doesn't really offer many ways to really get into it. when i tried the original release there were no little hooks to get you into the world (like your example of terrorizing mining ships). i found i had to look at it more like a weird Sims style game only instead of developing a city or creature i was building up a space fleet.

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