It was overwhelmingly impressive in 1999 and, now upgraded with much better models and effects, it remains so in 2020. Capital ships now tend to be bigger and they are equipped with massive beam weapons, huge stream of continuous energy which can literally cut lesser vessels in half. The big changes become more obvious once the game starts. Each mission opens with a briefing about your objectives, with you able to jump straight into the action with a pre-prepared ship or you can select your ship and weapons loadout yourself. The game is similarly divided into campaigns, which is each subdivided into missions, for 35 missions in total. It controls exactly the same way, even down to the keybindings and functions being almost exactly the same, and the structure is similar. Freespace 2 was such a masterpiece that it rendered all other space combat games completely pointless.įreespace 2 at first glance is identical to its predecessor. There is another explanation for why the genre crashed (beyond other ideas like the declining popularity of joysticks as game controllers): after Freespace 2 the genre had nowhere else to go.
Space games since this time - including the recent mini-resurgence spearheaded by Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky - have focused on trading or exploration over narrative and combat. Even the latest game in the perennially popular X-Wing series, X-Wing: Alliance, fared badly that year and very few new games in the genre have subsequently been released ( StarLancer was a notable exception in 2001). The game also had the misfortune to come out during the Great Space Combat Crash of 1999, when the entire genre effectively ceased to exist. Freespace 2 was rushed out of the door when publishers Interplay started having major financial problems and was released three months early without any publicity whatsoever.
FREESPACE GAME SERIES
Freespace had been a late but successful entry to the space combat simulator genre, selling and reviewing well and with its laser-like focus on gameplay winning over gamers tired of other series in the genre becoming far more obsessed with story and FMV cutscenes. As the Alliance military struggles to recover the three systems and end the war, it also discovers an immense alien megastructure in the Gamma Draconis system, through which an even greater threat is waiting.įreespace 2 was released in 1999 as the sequel to Conflict Freespace: The Great War and its expansion, The Silent Threat. However, a new civil war has erupted: Admiral Bosch has formed the Neo-Terran Front and established a new state, encouraging Polaris, Regulus and Sirius to secede from the Alliance.
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