Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Spoon on March 16, 2016, 10:11:12 am
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Amazing how this hasn't been turned into a thread yet, considering how this has been going around on IRC.
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Kind of disappointing that they haven't used FSO and the MVPs.
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that stream was live at the same time as the one for the final stretch of the Overload KS, which IMO was a bit more interesting (I was streaming both, switching between them)
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Haha, this is fun. At first it was kind of annoying watching them stumble around in their own game, but then it became kind of endearing as they slowly started to remember stuff while dropping some interesting factoids along the way.
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Cool video.
What really hit me watching it was how brutally difficult the game is to get into, even for its time. You get tons of information thrown at you in the HUD and every key of the keyboard has some kind of a function. It was funny when they talked about expecting the player to be able to simultaneously fly the ship and navigate the menus to call in reinforcements (while keeping track of objectives, watching the radar, managing the shields ...). Seeing how FreeSpace is basically a stripped down flight simulator in space, it's not hard to see why it didn't do very well financially.
Kind of disappointing that they haven't used FSO and the MVPs.
I think their point was to play the game in its original state so they could look back and laugh at the poly counts and low res textures, lol
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Actually a lot of other space sims used a similar model at the time. Freespace was practically built on Tie Fighter mechanics and I-War upped the command complexity even more. Games like Mechwarrior also had a similar feel and keybind counts. Complexity was definitely not the main reason Freespace failed financially as similarly complex games did very well.
Space sims didn't have the complexity in their flight mechanics that plane sims did so they had more room to add in complexity with targetting, commands, shields, subsystems, and energy mechanics.
It's really not THAT difficult, the tutorial is there if you need it and you can always lower the difficulty if you're being overwhelmed. On the lower difficulties you can safely ignore most mechanics and just focus on the flying. And the early missions are rather tame so you get time to adjust.
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Didn't Wing Commander games have a similar level of complexity?
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The reason it didn't sell well has nothing to do with the complexity of the gameplay and everything to do with Interplay not advertising it.
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...wow. I've actually lost a lot of respect for these guys for shelving their project for so long they've forgotten everything about it. :( It's like it's not even their game.
I suppose it really drives home the point that, this is our game now.
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Hey, it's been 17 long years and they've gone a long way since Freespace 2. I really can't blame them, FS2 isn't even what Volition is best known for nowadays. I bet many of the original mission designers wouldn't even be close in FREDding skill to the best FREDders on HLP right now(using fred2_open, of course).
Though what they played here really was their game, it was completely vanilla.
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Not to mention things are a little bit different for developers who get paid to make new things than it is for hobbyist modders who are probably a bit on the obsessive side
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Seriously. Even if you're fortunate enough to be doing a job you love, would you remember all the details of a project you worked on for several months more than 15 years in the past?
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I bet many of the original mission designers wouldn't even be close in FREDding skill to the best FREDders on HLP right now(using fred2_open, of course).
No disrespect to :v: intended but that was true even without SCP additions. By the time the code came out the best FREDders in the community were already beating :v: simply because they had spent more time using FRED than the guys who worked on FS1 and 2.
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While my brain agrees with FrikgFeek, Hades and Mongoose on this. My feelings definitely agree with Galemp.
Seriously. Even if you're fortunate enough to be doing a job you love, would you remember all the details of a project you worked on for several months more than 15 years in the past?
Some times I get asked WoD questions (like the recent thread about the Celestial texture) of things I've done like 2-3 years ago. Which make me go "Uuuhm, what did I do and think at that time again?" and unlike :v: I haven't worked on like 5 other big projects in the mean time. :p
No disrespect to :v: intended but that was true even without SCP additions. By the time the code came out the best FREDders in the community were already beating :v: simply because they had spent more time using FRED than the guys who worked on FS1 and 2.
Definitely.
Having replayed FS2 recently through BP's blue version of it, I was reminded how :v: 's made missions are from a technical standpoint not exactly very... advanced.
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Deadlines, and budgets. Then customer satisfaction. They won't be very satisfied if the entire FS2 department got the axe, now, would they? Now get that mission finished before noon so the playtesters can finish by tonight. Chop, chop!
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I don't think it was just deadlines though. FREDders quickly saw how everything :v: did worked and improved on it. By the time the source code was released people who started on FRED 1 had more than 4 years of experience working with it. There is simply no way :v: can compete with that kind of experience, none of their FREDders could possibly have spent as long working with it.
Like I said, I don't imply any disrespect to the :v: FREDders. They did a pretty amazing job putting the missions together but they never had the time to do more than scratch the surface of what was possible.
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Regardless of their FREDing skills, I appreciate the work and effort they put into Freespace 2. The fact that Jim Boone requested Freespace 2 for his last streaming session is indicative of how fondly the developers remembered their work. That said, it really doesn't seem like they care too much about the FS2O. I suppose they feel that FS2O isn't their own work anymore. Of the folks on the stream, it seems like Dan Wentz might be the only dev who gave FS2O a shot.
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No disrespect to :v: intended but that was true even without SCP additions. By the time the code came out the best FREDders in the community were already beating :v: simply because they had spent more time using FRED than the guys who worked on FS1 and 2.
Definitely.
Having replayed FS2 recently through BP's blue version of it, I was reminded how :v: 's made missions are from a technical standpoint not exactly very... advanced.
That they are "technically primitive" doesn't diminish that they are still somewhat impressive ....
technical sophistication on the reverse however diminishes the impact - It is hard to have the same kind of awe and respect for Blue Planet knowing how much additional gears are turning in the background and how much had to be done for this and that to work just so....
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Deadlines, and budgets. Then customer satisfaction.
Don't forget that they also had to build FRED/FRED2. So they had to plan out these missions before they knew what FRED(2) could/would do. Sure, they probably had early versions to test out the missions, but they were probably buggy and didn't have all the features the final versions did.
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That they are "technically primitive" doesn't diminish that they are still somewhat impressive ....
technical sophistication on the reverse however diminishes the impact - It is hard to have the same kind of awe and respect for Blue Planet knowing how much additional gears are turning in the background and how much had to be done for this and that to work just so....
Actually, Blue Planet relies much more on brilliant FREDding than just the pure power of fred2_open.
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The two go hand in hand, I think.
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Regardless of their FREDing skills, I appreciate the work and effort they put into Freespace 2.
I don't think any of us would be here if we didn't. :)
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I'm not at all critical of their FREDding skills as they may apply today. I'm upset that they forgot how to play the game entirely.
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To be fair, the game's not exactly meant to be played on a couch using a gamepad with a keyboard nearby :P.
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To be fair, the game's not exactly meant to be played on a couch using a gamepad with a keyboard nearby :P.
QFT
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Yeah, that Prom R- Prom R loadout gave me cancer. Might also explain why insane was all over the place in retail, nobody at Volition ever played it :lol:
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I definitely doubt they did much playtesting on Insane.
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Yeah, or if they did they decided to ignore it as it was too much trouble to tweak missions to work on insane. The difficulty curve is pretty much inverse, with the Myrm missions being harder than endgame missions and some missions being completely self-playing due to the beam refire rates.
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I get it all, but this was still a downer for me to watch.
Some things are best left to the imagination.
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Honestly, I'd like to see any of you behind the wheel of a motor vehicle after a 15+ year absence. :p I'm gonna go out on a limb and say even when they were actively developing FS2, they didn't get much playtime in. Coding != playing, although I'm sure they did do that to some extent. Now their playtesters, on the other hand...
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At 1:04:35, I love how they mention that in meetings they often put "FreeSpace 3" as a bullet point as a joke, and that there was a "magic" about this that they rarely see in their other projects.
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I watched some of this last night, along with the Descent video. It's pretty hilarious how they don't remember the most basic things in their own games. :D I can sympathize with them though, they have worked on numerous other games in the meantime and have long since moved on. It's common knowledge that game developers today hardly ever play their own games.
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*whispers* Alt-H... Alt-H... Alt-H...
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What was the command that made those two guys popup from the corner's of the screen?
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What was the command that made those two guys popup from the corner's of the screen?
Enable cheats with: www.freespace2.com
Fun times with: tooledworkedowned
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I watched some of this last night, along with the Descent video. It's pretty hilarious how they don't remember the most basic things in their own games. :D
And yet they did remember the cheat codes!