The Haus

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Freelancer First Impression -- 11:20 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I really haven't had much time to play the Freelancer demo yet. I got it (and DirectX 9) installed and fired it up. It runs very smoothly on my system at 1024x768 with all the options cranked. It's probably going to take a little while to master the control scheme, but it seems to be very powerful. As I was playing, I kept thinking that it looked like Parsec. Hopefully I can devote a bit more time to it soon.

J.t.Qbe comments: I played it yesterday for an hour or so myself. It works under DirectX 8.1, but I hear that multiplayer requires DX9. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the demo ran very well on my Athlon 800; at 1024x768 with all the options at 75% or so I didn't see any stuttering. The game is very pretty; the graphics are great. Combat is very fast-paced, more like the old X-Wing games rather than the Wing Commanders. Freelancer is trying very hard to be like Privateer and Elite, but with more of a storyline. I'm still not sure how that'll work out; it didn't work too well with Privateer II. And I didn't like that I couldn't skip past any of the cinematics once I'd already seen them.

It's impossible to sum up a game after an hour of play. The beginning of any game is going to be more story-heavy just to get you into the game; I hope that there's more interactivity than I experienced. I didn't get much chance to play with the trading system, since most of the first hour is cinematics and combat. I'll play the demo more this week. Offhand I can say that I probably wouldn't buy this on release day, but would wait for a decent sale. So far it's a good game, but not a desperately-must-have game.

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