On Freelancer

I AM A LAZY UPDATER

Freelancer was an amazingly fun game, and if you haven't played it I strongly suggest you do. It certainly shows its age, but it ages gracefully - it's still a gorgeous game, and still a blast to play. I've read it as being called "Diablo II in space," and that's not an inaccurate assessment. You fly around in a semi-sandbox environment and blow shit up. You can make money trading commodities, ala the old spacefaring trader games like Escape Velocity on the Mac and Elite way before that, back in the stone age of computer gaming. Unfortunately, all the commodity prices are static, which makes that particular avenue get old after awhile. A dynamic economy would've make trading much more interesting and viable.

Let's talk really briefly about the story of Freelancer, since that's sort of what I do around here. It's set about 800 years after Starlancer, a game which I didn't play. To escape the endless war and strife that had befallen our solar system, five colony ships are launched to begin anew in the stars around Sirius. Four of them arrive safely, and the resulting civilizations are arranged into four "houses," each roughly analagous to the culture which its sleeper ship came from - the Liberty obviously formed from America, the Bretonia from Britain, Kusari from Japan, and Rheinland from Germany. Each house displays some mildly stereotypical qualities of its ancestral nation. Unfortunately, during the sandbox gameplay the single male voice and handful of female voices for every NPC in the game partially destroys this sense of cultural difference.

The main single player storyline and missions, however, are really quite well done and compelling, complemented by great voice acting even from a couple big-name actors such as George Takei and John Rhys-Davies. And during the storyline and its seamless cinematics, people even have ACCENTS! Imagine that. In the bar on most worlds, you can view the news stories that are available across known space and specifically at the system or planetary levels. Though text only and containing occasional typos, they're generally quite well written and informative, and if you take the time to read them they do a lot to help flesh out the illusion of a rich universe.

During the main storyline, the story is told very cinematically, either onworld or in space, frequently taking control of the game to do so. This isn't as jarring as it sounds - in general the cinematics are very well done, and only in a couple places are they mildly annoying. The story itself is one of political intrigue which gradually gives way to a secret alien invasion. During the first two-thirds or so of the storyline, the player is caught up in a series of events that put him and his NPC comrades on the run, fugitives from the house governments one by one. While on the run and laying low, one can watch through the news feeds as tensions increasingly escalate between the houses, briefly resulting in open war. I really liked the feeling this evoked - knowing that you play a part and are affected by these political machinations, but at the same time being small and beneath the scale of the events that are unfolding. Of course, in the end you save humanity and all that usual stuff, which is satisfying in and of itself, but during this part you gradually fall out of touch with what's going on with everyone else, and focus almost entirely on your missions with the crowd of characters that you're with.

Despite some aspects which make the universe seem somewhat less alive than it rightly should be, Freelancer's original intended scale necessitated some cutbacks, and I can understand how that might happen. A lot of spacefaring game plots seem to revolve around "A vs. B, shoot 'em down," and while a lot of the sandbox missions are boring in that sense, the element of political intrigue and the coloration of interstellar events by the news makes Freelancer much more interesting. It's become one of those games that I reinstall every two years or so and play through again, because it's just so much fun.