[Black Wolf]

We had a sense that the Shivan fleet in FS1 was a scouting party—searching for stars suitable for blowing up and cleansing the space of biological life. The Shivan fleet in FS2 then came in to collapse the stars and open up the new nodes to Shivantown. Now what come through those nodes is anyone’s guess—perhaps factories that churned out new ships to continue the cycle. I felt that the Shivans were very, very old and had been at this for millions of years perhaps. Maybe they outlived their original purpose and were living out these endless loops of destruction and creation long after their creators had died off. Or maybe the master race was still alive and aware of what they had unleashed.

That whole paragraph is so cool.
Think about the implications - it means that there must be masses of supernovaed stars to Shivantown all over space - it's be like a spiderweb, with tendrils reaching all over the galaxy. Of course, logistically, it means the Shivans should have crushed the GTVA even more efficently than they actually did, which opens up whole new avenues of coolness - like maybe the Shivans were kind of the last remnants of a dead empire, with masses of subspace infrastructure, but no base from which to exploit it, a shell, essentially, a shadow of former glories. Or a tool of such a species, as implied in the interview.

For FreeSpace 2, we had to work within tight constraints.  We had to use most of the original FS1 assets, no action cutscenes, no new species and nothing massively ambitious.

I wonder if this explains the overall lower quality of the FS2 assets? Not that they were bad persay - stuff like the Deimos and the Hatshepsut had great designs, but the implementation was much sloppier than FS1's lovingly UVMapped  and high res-textured ships. It sounds like FS2 was quite restricted in terms of assets and such - makes sense when you consider they churned both it and Silent Threat out in around a year whilst simultaneously developing two brand new franchises.

[Snail]

I'M LITERALLY CRYING AAUUUGH

[QuantumDelta]

Why snail cry?

[Snail]

For the first time in my life, my heart is filled with joy

[QuantumDelta]

Beautiful sir, beautiful.

[Jeff Vader]

Kool ****.

[Jeff Vader]

Double post!
Burn the witch!

Meh, no one seems to care anymore.

[Luis Dias]

Ahhh you collapse stars and you get black holes. Cappella has enough mass to get you a nice black hole

No it doesn't.  It doesn't even apparently have enough mass to supernova. That's part of the point.

I stand corrected. You're absolutely right. I somehow confused the mass of the star with the mass of the final state of a supernova. Capella has 2.7 sol masses, and that is somewhat the minimum mass of such black holes. The stars that create such black holes however have more than 20 solar masses.

[General Battuta]

FreeSpace Capella is nothing like real-life Capella anyway, I believe the star in FreeSpace is significantly smaller (and there's only one instead of 4).

[Mikes]

Imagine. Dyson spheres, closely to red dwarf suns, black structures that let reddish corona pass through, giant balloons of gas sucking up power. Black cities of habors, cables joining thousands of sathanas. In the void center, a black hole. Could be Cappella.

Wouldn't that have been a great ending for FS3? A campaign first dealing with what the Shivans brough to Capella... optimism building... commulating in a huge push to the Shivan home system......  to have the whole taskforce utterly destroyed and the antagonist either killed or barely escaping with a few survivors. The End! Tada!

Then in Freespace 4 we could fly through some dangerous trench and hit the vuuulnerable spot....  or use a computer virus and place a bomb after an uplifting speech by the president uh... or something... :coughs:



Seriously... i think ending on a cliffhanger was the best thing that s happened to the Freespace franchise

[TrashMan]

Interesting. It is almost spot on with my own ideas.

However, it would be good to note that [V] had ideas and concepts, not a definite plan. So if FS3 happened, there's no telling if it would have been following that specific concept.

[General Battuta]

Like I said in the first post, it pretty much fits everyone's ideas.

[Nohiki]

I find this rather anticlimactic. I was expectingsome complex story about the shivans and instead i get that even they don't know. well, I should have expected that when there's no game there's no story written Other than that this is very satisfying, especially that about bosh. I really wanted the alliance to work but i wanted even more to see the bastard dead
Good Jobttuta.

[General Battuta]

He didn't say Bosch was dead.

[BengalTiger]

He didn't say Bosch was dead.

But he kind of gave a hint that Bosch is now Carl's b****.

[Nohiki]

He said it didn't end well for him. If he ain't dead, it means he's still sufferig which is even better

[Snail]

I dunno, maybe he got turned into some transhumanist cyborg cliche.

[Sololop]

Mind blown.

[Stormkeeper]

Well. I seem to remember someone asking about an interview with [V]. JGZinv, I believe.

To quote Manny the Mammoth, 'Wish granted!'

And I think they were right. The mystery with the Shivans, their motives, Bosch and ETAK, the Knossos; the sheer cliffhanger ending in FreeSpace 2 has propelled the mod community to make their own campaigns and in turn made FS2 live far longer than any other game that I know of.

[Mobius]

First of all, congratulations. We as a whole have been willing to read news like this for years.

I find those revelations about the Shivans expectable, but in the good sense. I was thinking, in fact, to add a "Cylon-like" Shivan theory to the FreeSpace Wiki some time ago.

I also find interesting the decision to ask something about character-driven campaigns, but I'm afraid the answer we got is a bit ambiguous. In poor words, they (he) claimed they would feature characters, but that doesn't mean they would have turned FreeSpace 3 into a character-driven campaign. Character-driven, at least in our jargon, indicates a campaign where a talking protagonist interacts with other characters, and the psychological aspects of all characters have a primary role in the campaign.

Thanks to Snipes, who turned average missions into memorable ones, we learned that adding characters can be a powerful storytelling and balancing tool. Pretty much all campaigns feature characters nowadays, as does Inferno which absolutely isn't character driven, but that doesn't mean all those campaigns are character-driven. It's not the presence of characters that defines the genre a campaign belongs to, it's the way those characters are handled that makes the difference. Just my 0.2€.