Sequels That Should Have Been: Freelancer 2

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut. Despite the work being far more mundane than shown to the public. Hell, you can’t even be sure of actually going into space even if you’re accepted in the program! There’s just something undeniably awesome about floating around in zero-G, watching the Earth below you and the vastness of the rest of the universe behind you. While it’s still theoretically possible for me to fulfill my dream, I simply lack the required discipline to achieve such a momentous task. Thankfully for me, and countless others who share the same ambition but know their chances to be stupendously minimal, the game Freelancer exists.

As the successor to Starlancer, which took place during an interplanetary war between the Alliance and the Coalition, Freelancer had a big burden to lift. Gameplay-wise, the two games did not have that much in common, but the events of Starlancer provided the necessary background for Freelancer. As the war ended with the Alliance, the side you fought on, losing, it was decided to create five colony ships, one for each of the surviving nations in the alliance, that are to travel to the distant Sirius system where they can start anew.

800 years later, the protagonist (voiced by none other than Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 fame) of Freelancer’s story is extremely unlucky, as the space station he and his debtor find themselves on is attacked and destroyed. The two of them barely escape alive, his debtor in a coma. As could be expected, the space station’s destruction wasn’t just the result of a random pirate attack. Rather, it is a deep and involving conspiracy! Not really, though. Instead it involves an ancient alien species known as the Nomads, who are dead set on destroying all humans. Typical.

Given the intro’s ominous ending, I had anticipated that the game would either have involved another conflict somehow arising between descendants of the Alliance and the Coalition – although, in fairness, they are countless of light-years from each other. Interestingly, another intro actually exists. An extended one which shows the Nomads showing up in our solar system and, well, completely destroying it…somehow. Why must sci-fi games always involve extremely powerful alien and/or robotic species with indiscernible, destructive motives? Can’t we just fly around, shoot pirates and enjoy the wonders of the universe? Thankfully, Freelancer allowed just that, taking focus away from its miserable story.

With your ship having been blown up together with the space station, you must make do with an old rundown ship – which bears an odd resemblance to a vacuum cleaner – on your first missions. Quickly, though, you are let go from the shackles of the single-player story and allowed to fend for yourself. You can transport goods through the civilized parts of space, join the pirates and raid convoys, or just fly through the vastness of space and watch the stars as they pass above you. It seems like the perfect basis for a space-themed MMO, and thankfully some modders have actually turned into just that, for which they deserve commendation. Incidentally, Freelancer was originally intended to have some MMO-elements, but most were lost along the way.

It's...it's....beautiful! Also, notice the flying vacuum cleaner!

Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to try it out, but I hope that they have managed to clear up the biggest issue Freelancer suffered from. Because even though the story was by-and-large abysmal, it was the only thing that didn’t get marvelously dull after just a few hours of play. Going on the same side missions time and again, hauling trade goods from a backwater space station to a backwater planet got old quite fast. And even the trance-like state I found myself in when drifting through the vast, black emptiness quickly wore off when I realized that I was in fact just sitting in front of a screen, my hands clutching a mouse. Curse you, reality! On the other hand, the game already contains two points that seem essential when creating an MMO these days: repetition and grinding.

The main missions at least had something unique about them, something that didn’t feel copy-pasted ad infinitum. There was something human about them. There were unexpected events, twists and turns, voice acting! That I can become so excited over, frankly, such banalities says something about the lack of quality of the game outside the story. On the other hand, I generally do get quite excited or angry over minor details. While the game was absolutely massive in scope, it felt dead when you weren’t playing one of the main missions, as if everyone in the entire galaxy just stopped living whenever I wasn’t helping it out. Oddly, one of the few things about the world that did seem organic was the ship routes, which always had a certain life to them, filled with different people with different goals, from cargo freighters carrying dangerous materials, to simple police patrols doing their daily sweeps.

It should be added, though, that despite the generally low quality, repetitive content of the side missions, they did feature plenty of the highly enjoyable combat. While it was fairly simple – fly spaceship, aim at opponent, shoot, glorious destruction! – simplicity is by no means a negative term. It was action-packed and supremely entertaining, exactly because it didn’t require you to read a thick manual just to figure out how start the engines. I appreciate realism in games, but there has to be a limit. Freelancer, however, wasn’t just as simple as I have hinted it to be. You had access to a wide variety of missiles and the likes to turn your foes into dust, countermeasures to narrowly avoid said foes own missiles and multiple ships that each had their own strengths and weaknesses. The combat was simply easy to get into, while still staying fairly challenging throughout the course of the game. You felt sufficiently badass when surviving a battle, but not overpowered.

I’ve already mentioned it a few times, but this game was damn pretty. The ships were well-designed and clearly different depending on which faction they belonged too, the planets you passed were huge, imposing and gorgeous to behold. Not to forget that they were unique in design, rather than made from a template. Personally, I think I spent hours (in total) just flying around them, looking at them. But the place this unique beauty was most clear was in the asteroid fields. Foreboding and dark, they radiated secrecy. What could hide behind that chunk of rock? A space station? An artifact left by an ancient species*? Probably nothing at all. Because in situations like these Freelancer embraced having something kept unknown to the player. The mystery is the real point, not the solution. Once you’ve solved the mystery, do you feel any greater? Because the mystery stimulates the imagination, and in the imagination fantastic things happen. It’s kind of like monsters from horror films and games. If you’re staring at them for hours, they might still be repulsive, but they’re not horrifying the same way. But when the monster is kept from our vision, and our knowledge, all sorts of strange things set in.

In short, Freelancer 2 has a lot of flaws to fix, as the original is one of those games that fit very nicely into the “good, but flawed” box. Everything had potential to be amazing, but most of the single elements were not particularly engaging. And what should be prescribed to cure these ailments? Well, there are two routes for any budding developer who wishes to make that game. Either focus on the story and make it – dare I say it – compelling. Although the story in Freelancer never got interesting, it still somehow ended up being one of the game’s strengths. The other option is to simply ditch the story, and craft some solid background material to serve as the backdrop, focusing on making a living, malleable world.

Although that sounds rather much like an MMO, and we’ve got far too many of them already.

*Despite my raging against “ancient alien species”, they were already in the game, so they might as well use them to their advantage.

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Previous installments in the “Sequels That Should Have Been” series:

Jade Empire 2           Jedi Academy 2           Vietcong 3         Freedom Fighters 2     Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscurer