If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers was a beautiful masterpiece which I just finished. If you enjoy pixel art and pensive point and click narratives then you should check it out!
Getting pretty deep into FF16, really enjoying it still, the combat seems to be opening up which is making it more fun, will try and do all the side quests before the end, but will see how it goes.
Generally I try to keep my Freelancer obsession under wraps until I’ve known people for at least a few months.
I love this game and have put thousands of hours into both the online and campaign (I speedrun it) and into online server play. If you’re a fan of Everspace, Elite: Dangerous, or other games in that vein, I very much recommend giving Freelancer a look as it still hasn’t been beat 20 years later.
The world is set roughly 800 years after the Alliance has left the Sol system during the Alliance-Coalition War. Following the events of Starlancer (not at all necessary to have played, just tangenting off that universe) five sleeper ships were launched as part of the escape. The five ships named for their home countries - Liberty, Bretonia, Kusari, Rheinland, and Hispania, headed toward the Sirius sector and each landed on separate planets and funded their own governments mirroring their Earth counterparts.
The story picks up as you, Edison Trent, arrive on Planet Manhattan. You and the survivors of Freeport 14, which has been destroyed at the hands of some mysterious and seemingly alien force, are just coming to terms with what has happened and you’re trying to pick up and move on. You meet a Liberty Security Force agent Jun’ko Zane, who has some contract work for you to pick up and outfits you with your first ship. Not two minutes out of atmo and the incoming diplomatic delegation from Rheinland is attacked and destroyed, and you, Juni, and her partner King find yourselves unraveling an investigation that goes to the highest levels of all four major Houses.
The rest of the game is pulling on those threads and unraveling a political conspiracy as you, King, and Juni track down leads. The main structure is alternating story missions and free roam periods, where the story missions expand the area you get to play in and push out to new systems, and then the free roam is you being the titular freelancer and picking up off jobs to earn credits and purchase better equipment and learn more at your own pace.
While the story is interesting, the true hooks in this for me are two things:
The World - There is so much love and lore tucked into every corner of this game. Loads of environmental storytelling, but then nearly every selectable object has an infocatd with additional detail fleshed out. History about everything is thought out to some degree. And if you see something interesting, odds are it has an interesting story to tell. This makes exploration rewarding, sometimes also financially within the game. Each system really feels like several hundred years of development and history were thought out to get to the game world’s current state.
The Controls - Generally in an older game, controls are hard to get the hang of. Freelancer uses an intuitive mouse aim flight system that lets you focus on where you want to go rather than how you have to maneuver your ship to get there, which means it’s not a burden to exploring and makes combat fun while still retaining a lot of depth. It’s not a space sim in the traditional sense. It doesn’t have the systems control that your more hardcore space sims do if that’s your thing, but between the ship customization and ease of flight, the barrier to entry is almost non-existent while still being engaging.
Past the campaign, there is still a very active modding community that continues to support an active online player base. There are plenty of simplistic mods to add new ships, weapons, or QOL features, out to full mods such as Discovery that adds a new house and continues to extend the game storyline through iterative updates and player-driven events, including dynamic player-created stations, to total conversions like Tides of War that wrap the world in a well put together Star Wars skin.
I was active on Discovery for a long time and really is where I put most of my hours into this game, playing online and just existing and driving the world into different directions at the same level of quality as the original game.
I could gush so much more, but just booting it up and playing a few minutes I think is enough to hook the right person. While not on the digital distribution platforms, the usual abandonware sites typically host a copy of the disc iso (as does DiscoveryGC for use during their mod install process) and it will install and run without issue on modern systems. Last fall, the Freelancer HD Edition mod was released on ModDB that updates visuals, textures, and adds some QOL features so that the game properly supports widescreen resolutions and looks great on modern displays.
I love this game, and frankly it’s the platonic ideal of a space sim that I’m still looking for a worthy successor to this day, with the closest from a gameplay perspective being Everspace, and nothing matching the depth and care and just jot of zooming around space.
It’s a bit rough around the edges, but you (or someone else) might enjoy Genesis: Alpha One
You fly a space ship (well, mine usually look more like stations that can also move), across different life-infested solar systems. The main gimmick is that you build the station yourself out of different modules.
So when your scientists come back from planet surfaces, with some spores on their suits, you might find pockets of ewww hiding in the vents of the station you made yourself. You have/unlock multiple times ways to make sure that the infestation stays relatively isolated to, say, the landing bay. But even with those, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of first-person vent-crawling to figure out where that disgusting crab-thing just came from.
Plus, it’s a rogue-lite with some permanently unlockable progression. There are multiple player factions you can unlock and there’s a NG+ mode, but I found myself not replaying it too much (even though my one played campaign was quite fun). Still, I sunk a good 16-20 hours into it, I think.
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