Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Rhys on May 21, 2019, 06:13:05 pm
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I decided to reinstall the age-old space sim after a number of years, and after making it halfway through the story I've come to realize how unpolished and rudimentary it seems. Poor writing, inconsistent pacing, unbalanced weapons, and strange design choices really hinder this game from standing out on its own, especially after all these years. I still love the cutscenes, though. The hall fight on the Azrael is still pretty cool to watch. I do find it jarring when 90% of the story unfolds in cutscenes and command briefings while the rest of the game is this often disjointed series of missions (some missions can be as short as two minutes while others can go on and on while nothing happens (thank god for time compression :p)
The core gameplay is still great, though! Albeit the pacing is a bit strange (constant waves of the same number of enemies and type followed by many minutes of matching speed with a transport as it flies off to some vague point in space so an objective can be accomplished). Bringing fleet flagships to a small engagement with a couple cruisers only to warp out five minutes later really make me scratch my head.
Mods like ST:R, BtA and BP bring home a cohesive narrative with storytelling that takes place both in and in-between missions. FS2 is miles ahead of its predecessor in this regard.
I still love the premise of the series, and the mods are fantastic and I have my own headcanon after putting these mods together. I love it!
All this said, I'm still enjoying the FS1 campaign despite its shortcomings. Though I can't say I'd have the same opinion had I not played it as a kid when it came out. Nostalgia goes a long way with these games.
It's still great.
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I remeber the last time I played the FSPort I was constantly thinking "when do they actually start with the plot?". It felt like it would take forever, somewhere along the way Vasuda was nuked and Artifacts discovered, but then the campaign was
already finally over. As someone who played FS2 first my initial contact with FS1s plot was in the techroom, where the summary sounded really super-cool from a retrospective POV. But actually playing it... it was like as if you could dump 1/3 of the missions without missing them.
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1998 was just a different time with different standards...
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Vastly different standards than 1999?
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1998 was just a different time with different standards...
StarCraft came out in 1998, Homeworld came out in '99. FS1 just has poor writing.
The music's cool, though.
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FS2 always seemed to me to be one of those rare sequels where the developers actually addressed most of the shortcomings of the original as called out by players and reviewers. Much to our benefit 20 years later!
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Vastly different standards than 1999?
1998 was just a different time with different standards...
StarCraft came out in 1998, Homeworld came out in '99. FS1 just has poor writing.
Yes
Also, the quality of the writing is not dispute. Just that [the] standard [by which] to wave it through was lower.
ps. The comparison with StarCraft is also ignorant. StarCraft had a notriously long dev-cycle for its time (1995-1998; including a complete engine change).
Also the metadata for some mission suggest that that FS1 was in development from at least June 1997 (see Eve of Destruction, $Created) to August 1998 (see Good Luck, $Modified). Not much time to incooperate the shifting landscape of 1998, if you factor in that people were actually working instead of absorbing every new game. Or alternatively lead to several itterations of the story outline being slapped together because work didn't procceed as orderly as it could have.
And, if you ever looked at the FS1 tables, you will find goodies such as this:
$Fire Wait: 20.0 ;; note, damage toned down until ai and turrets start shooting at bombs.
$Lifetime: 25.0 ;; temporary fix for problem locking onto big ships.
... the writing might not have been the only rush-job here, or rather "good enough"-job.
ps. Side Note: Metadata on FS2 missions suggest work on those started around April 1999 (see Surrender, Belisarius) and was finished around September of the same year (see Apocalypse). The shorter time period suggests a highly organized work process IMO.
EDIT: Corrections in [] - I should really mark post I make on the go....
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You don’t need a long dev cycle to write good sentences. It just wasn’t a priority for them like it became in FS2.
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You don’t need a long dev cycle to write good sentences. It just wasn’t a priority for them like it became in FS2.
... but if you have more time you can spend more on refining the writing you have. Get more feedback, involve more voices etc etc
Not everyone writes pure genius like you, Battuta. /sarcasm
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They made FS2 much faster, though, and actually had a lead writer.
My argument is entirely: the year 1998 did not have lower standards of sentence writing in games. You had so much good game writing coming out in this time. Baldur's Gate was the same year, and say what you will about its pulpiness, it's got a lot of perfectly okay writing.
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They made FS2 much faster, though, and actually had a lead writer.
Not in dispute. See my comments about the mission metadata.
My argument is entirely: the year 1998 did not have lower standards of sentence writing in games. You had so much good game writing coming out in this time. Baldur's Gate was the same year, and say what you will about its pulpiness, it's got a lot of perfectly okay writing.
My argument is that the standard was not a singular standard yet, rather that different standards coexisted (that plural in my first response wasn't just a turn of phrase). IMO Autum 1998 is a crictially important point in time line for at least passable writing becoming an industry standard, but it is not on its own a transformative singularity. Being released post Autum 1998 doesn't make it so that every work conforms to the standards set through important works at that time - FS1 in particular, I'd argue, is very much ante Autum 1998 in its conception and execution, even if the release falls in the autum of 1998.
There have been plenty of well written games before 1998 but that doesn't mean that it was necessary requirement - some of the more (over-)praised titles of 1998 don't have a good writing either, e.g. Half-Life lacks an expressed theme or conflict in the dramatic sense, its just a inciting incident, a destination and some obstacles.
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Okay but "the Vasudan foothold on Vasuda Prime" is prima facie, and without context, dumb.
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That does sound dumb, stronghold comes to mind in place of foothold.
I like FS1 cheese though.
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Node inconsistencies is a pretty big one. Though I suppose some of them could have gone extinct by the time FS2 starts.
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Node inconsistencies is a pretty big one. Though I suppose some of them could have gone extinct by the time FS2 starts.
*cough* multiple Sol nodes *cough*
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Node inconsistencies is a pretty big one. Though I suppose some of them could have gone extinct by the time FS2 starts.
*cough* multiple Sol nodes *cough*
Sure seems to me that in FS1, a jump node could go to multiple systems (I'm thinking Tenderizer and the Taranis Briefing Cutscene). However, in FS2, it seems to be strictly a 1-1 relationship. I'm not sure which I like more. It certainly makes more sense to have them 1-1, but FS1 just seems like it's more open.
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Maybe they are sometimes so close by that destroying 1 destroys all? In the mission after VP got nuked there were 3 extremely close. Since FS1 and FS2 play in entirely different systems, you could even say it varies.
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That's the Alpha Centauri node cluster, with three nodes that connect AC to Aldebaran, Sirius and Vasuda. I believe it's considered canon.
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Okay but "the Vasudan foothold on Vasuda Prime" is prima facie, and without context, dumb.
a) It's "The Vasudan foothold on Vasuda Prime and the subspace node remains solid."
b) Not neccessarily dumb. It's not like an invading, colonizing force never claimed that "the savages" are "tresspassing" on the land that "by divine right"/"manifest destiny" would be colonizers. Granted that's maybe too big an idea for the rest of the writing - but I can work with that.
Actually I made a in-universe consciracy theory out of it - called the "The Empty Planet" - to flesh out the NTF. Basically, the it's a "moonlanding conspiracy"-type (mixed with a "ancient astronauts"-type and a few choice bits from deep down the rhetoric of hate's well) but for the entire Vasudan civilisation, used by Terran Supremancists to "justify" their opinions about "Vasudan Inferioirity".
I was going to post about it but then Christchurch Attack happened and I found it to be in bad taste to talk about just how vile I can make the NTF what paralells to present day and historical racists I can draw.
c) As it is, I would suspect, the final line it a copy and paste job, replacing something else that was in the place of "Vasuda Prime".
d) That's a problem for an Editor to catch - not just the writer. If you don't have an editor, and the writer is also doing a different job, you of course wind up with suboptimal results. But that's not an issue with the writing per se but with work organisation at the studio.
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That's the Alpha Centauri node cluster, with three nodes that connect AC to Aldebaran, Sirius and Vasuda. I believe it's considered canon.
This one is canon for sure.
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Okay but "the Vasudan foothold on Vasuda Prime" is prima facie, and without context, dumb.
d) That's a problem for an Editor to catch - not just the writer. If you don't have an editor, and the writer is also doing a different job, you of course wind up with suboptimal results. But that's not an issue with the writing per se but with work organisation at the studio.
Unless your 'editor' is a joke, fails to spot any errors you made AND adds errors where there were none any to start with. I had this with the first two articles in my three-parter over at Vocal Media. (It's the hit piece about how implausible / boring popular 'humans with bumpy heads aliens' are.)
The, editor for, the, first article had a, thing, for commas so put, them where, they, were not, needed. :)
The second one sentence the structure altered makes sense it didn't so. :lol:
Apparently they were 'training their moderators'. At least they fixed it quickly after I kicked off :p
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Something I will point out with FS1 is that while the writing is significantly more functional, dry, and unfocused, the way they incorporate their game systems into the plot is in many ways more interesting (to me at least) than what FS2 did. FS1 has the entire Shivan introduction to play with its mechanics and then calls back to the first few missions of the game in Good Luck.
FS2 has nothing like this and as much as I love the SOC loops and As Lighting Fall in particular, they don't have the same dramatic impact that turning whole systems off and on in the first game did.
I have to agree that it's remarkable FS2 was developed in the time it had, though the FS engine and tools probably helped a lot. (I also remember some comments about the texture mapping and model quality of FS2 ships not being as good as FS1 but I can't remember who said that or where it was).
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I also remember some comments about the texture mapping and model quality of FS2 ships not being as good as FS1 but I can't remember who said that or where it was
FS1 models were made before the engine got support for 3D hardware acceleration. Therefore many textures were not adhering to the size constraints of the early 3D cards, like maximum size of 256x256 and clumsy support of non-power-of-two sized textures.
By setting the proper registry flag (and if your 3D card supported the texture) you could enable the game to use those large textures.
For FS2 ditched the software renderer, so many (but not all) textures of the reused FS1 ships got downsampled to be maximum size of 256x256 to play nicely on the 3D cards of the day (which typically had 8MB, 16MB or maybe 32MB of RAM).
See below the example of drone02-01a.pcx, which got dumped from 1088x512 to 256x120 pixels.
(https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1DFGmueibxeOdfa7A0g5wKLRJXb43UVu2)
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:eek2:
That's an eye opener!
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I never knew that... because i never played the original FreeSpace i assume :D.
But that is very interesting.
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:eek2:
That's an eye opener!
Just that FS1 felt more like an eyeball-opener to me TBH, you could look through the capships...