Ships in Freelancer zoom around in space like WWI-era dogfighters: There's no barrel rolling or inertial turns, just simple and straightforward chase-or-be-chased. Planets and space stations are all individual places you visit for your own purposes, and Freelancer clearly isn't interested in making each planet more than a village it wants you to get back on your ship and fly out into space.Īnd that flight is so unlike other games in the genre! This smallness leans into the "wagon train to the stars" conceit of the space opera genre. The scale of the planets and stars is comically unrealistic, with small planets being seemingly only a few hundred times the size of your one-seater spaceship. Each star system has its own skybox, and different regions of space are somewhat color-coded it's not unlike how in Skyrim, the color palette shifts from autumnal oranges in the south, to cold blues and whites in the north.īecause of its compact size, Freelancer can feel like a toy universe. Every single planet in Freelancer has its own texture map, giving them all different colors and aspects. Coming about a year after Morrowind, it was part of the ushering in of large, hand-built video game universes that players could explore and get lost in. Freelancer instead had hand-designed content for its entire universe, itself a technological luxury of the CD-ROM era. This is a very deliberate choice, and not a technical one the original Elite of course had a procedural universe. This is obscured by its shape as a space sim, but Freelancer does almost everything differently from other space sims. Released a year after Morrowind, it looks a lot like another transitional step towards the open-world design pattern that would bloom in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2. But from the vantage point of fifteen years later, Freelancer is a very special thing. Setting up a pattern that other space sims would seem fated to follow, it disappointed on release by not having the breadth of features that was promised during development.
It was announced late in 1999, but only came out in 2003, after a long and troubled development cycle. Its release was then followed by a nearly decade-long hiatus in big, ambitious space sims. The indirect child of Wing Commander, a distant sequel to the even more obscure Starlancer, Freelancer did what it did by breaking with almost every rule or expectation about space sims. Delayed, misbegotten, and incomplete, Freelancer wasn't a big enough hit to make developers Digital Anvil sustainable. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies.And in the history of the space sim, Freelancer is a key link between them and the broader open-world game genre. "Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes science fictional space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies."
It has a romantic element which distinguishes it from most hard science fiction: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains, awe-inspiring scenery, and insanely gorgeous men and women." It frequently takes place in a Standard Sci Fi Setting. The action will range across part of a solar system at a minimum, and more commonly will extend over large tracts of a galaxy or several. Space opera has an epic character to it: the universe is big, there are usually many sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigue. Technology is ubiquitous and secondary to the story. "Space Opera refers to works set in a spacefaring civilization, usually set in the far future or A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. The scope being larger than a single world is a pretty common expectation for Space Opera.
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