Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Curse MS for not having Freelancer on STEAM
http://store.steampowered.com/app/71000/
I didn't know they had this game on Steam? Then again, I never searched for it since, I already have it.
What FreeSpace excels at that Freelancer can't even touch is in the singleplayer. Freelancer doesn't have the tools to tell much of a new story, let alone multiple masterpiece-level campaigns. I've been Edison Trent. But I've also flown with optimistic dimension-hoppers, snarky duct-tape freaks, pilots on the run, backwater aces, countless heroes, black ops, mercs, incomprehensible aliens, and a bunch of different anime characters. I've played dramatic military stories, humorous shenanigans, popcorn flicks, and psychological horror (yes, in a space sim). The past fifteen years have seen a lot of tales told, and the possibilities increase by the year.
People mock linearity. But where there's a track, there's a meaningful destination, and a good ride designer can make every moment of it engaging. Battuta would know. He made me feel fear, elation, and rage, just as he planned. He told me a story I'd pay money to read, and it hasn't even been finished yet. It's neither multiplayer nor open, but it's far from being bad.
You're out of your mind if you think everyone wants to play an MMO. Just because something else doesn't scratch your itch doesn't mean you have to be more opinionated than a political rally.
Troll detected! Freelancer doesn't even have joystick support. :D
Let's compare the base game first, if you want we'll get to mods later (because that's where things get tricky and potentially subjective AND my FL mod knownledge if a bit out of date).
I've also included a tl;dr section at the end :)
Stock Freespace warships boast an impressive array of diverse weapon systems:
- You've got low powered laser turrets - which in were about as effective vs fighters as the Wing Commander laser turrets before them and the stock (unmodded) capship turrets in Freelancer after them. In the end, these are more useful to shoot down incoming bombs than fighters.
- You've got flak guns - fast firing turrets with area of effect projectiles that even very agile craft have trouble avoiding.
- Anti-fighter beams that fire instantly, bypass shield entirely and whack your craft around.
- Anti-capital beam weapons, the big brothers of the above that warships use to fight each other.
Stock Freelancer warships have:
- Low powered laser turrets - as mentionned FS 'blob' turrets aren't much better.
- Low powered anti-ship weapons, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the base game gunboats and Liberty cruisers were the only ship with such dedicated weapons - which tended to be all around worse than any single one of your weapons.
- Anti-fighter missiles, which weren't much more effective than fighter-mounted missiles.
While this gives fightercrafts more agenda and control over the battlefield, it makes unscripted capship-to-capship combat silly at best.
Stock Freelancer fighters have:
- 3 types of shield which work on a damage type / armor type system (ie. lasers do limited damage to graviton shields).
- 2 types of missiles: fast & agile with poor damage value vs slow & low turn rate with high damage value.
- A wide variety of weapon types (laser, plasma, particle, tachyon, photon, pulse, neutron & whatever nomad & lvl 10 gun types are supposed to be) & several subweapon types & stats (for instance Rheinland-style fast firing tachyon guns vs Outcast(?) slow firing tachyon guns). On top of my head, I'd say the range varies from 500 to 1000+, with weapons having on average between 600 & 750 with varying projectile speed and energy consumption. Apart from pulse weapon, which a specialist anti-shield gun, weapons are designed for dogfighting.
- 3 types of fighter (light, heavy, very heavy) and 1 type of freighter. Fighters are primarily distinguised by number of gun placements and whether their turret is on top or on the rear. Speed, acceleration, toughness and turn rates are mostly interchangeable between ships of the same class & level, making the differences between ships mostly cosmetic. Gun placement itself is also irrelevant since your weapons automatically aim at wherever you are pointing.
- 2 types of utility weapons: the pretty neat cruiser disruptor missile and the torpedo launcher. The first torp launcher you get is kind of a joke, having roughly the stopping power of 2 'slow' missiles, though the late-game sunslayer is a bit better (although you can't have until after you've finished the game and therefore won't be fighting capships anymore). The cruiser disruptor is far more useful to prevent opponents from running away :)
- Destroyable ship weapons and ship parts.
Stock Freespace fighters have:
- No strictly defined weapon or shield types, though individual weapon effectiveness again hull, shield and subsystems very between weapons. Dogfighting weapons, including anti-shield specialist vary in range & speed about as much as FL's guns. In addition to standard guns, you've got a kinetic gun which allows you to whack fighters around, an anti-subsystem gun and a long-range anti-hull gun with an annoying camera-shake recoil effect, but is excellent for taking out turrets & subsystems on capships (and, obviously, damage their hull).
- Missile types come in a very wide array of types: short range dumbfire rockets, easy-to-deflect heat seeker, hard-to-dodge apsect seekers, long-range game breaker, 3 bomb types with distinct roles (anti-subsystem, medium damage all-purpose bomb & high damage slow bomb), cluster bombs (things with sub-submunitions), gimmicky kick-me-off-the-server EMP and swarm aspect seeker (good vs bombers & cruiser/gunboats).
- (mostly) 3 fighter types & 2 bomber types. Interceptors that zoom around the battlefield filling bombers & bombs; jack-of-all-stats space superiority; agile-but-fragile advanced space superiority; slow heavy fighters w/ tons of missiles and/or guns; slow-ass heavy bombers and I'm-almost-a-fighter light bombers. Also, since there isn't any auto-aim in FS2 retail, where the guns are actually placed on your fighter can be pretty important.
- Destroyable subsystems; you can't destroy shields or individual guns, but damaging the weapons subsystem will prevent the enemy from firing. Other notable subsystems are sensors, coms and engines (a destroyed engine means your ship can't move).
tl;dr version:
FL capships are mostly there to look pretty (or ugly, depending on your tastes).
FS2 capships are there to shape the mission and actually serve a purpose in universe.
FL fighters are well balanced, but overall lack variety beyond their appearance.
FS fighters are rather varried, though not always well balanced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_flight_simulator_game
By your logic war thunder and world of planes(?) both sims. And only thunder is a sim
Freelancer is an open-world sandbox game with an economy. It's much better at being an exploration and trading game than FreeSpace 2 is.
They're both good games.
War Thunder and World of Planes are not set in space.