[Anjelus]

 Clearly all of you must be silly. This game is 12 years old and yet here you all are! Play something new why don't you!



This is a very special game to stay alive so long and have such an amazing community built up around it. What is it that Freespace means to you that keeps you personally that keeps you coming back?

For me I love the lore obviously, and the retail FS1/2 games are some of the best space sims of all time. But not THE best, I personally think TIE Fighter and Wing Commander edged them out by a hair.

But the ENGINE. This to me is the best possible engine for a space sim. I love it, and I love the creative possibilities for it. So much has been done with Freespace already and new innovations are being made every year to make it even better. In the beginning we just had great user-made campaigns but now we have mind bogglingly great projects completed or in progress that hopelessly dwarf the original scope of the games. This is a "game" that lights my imagination on fire.

I always loved Freespace, it was a favorite for years but it wasn't until I discovered the scp in 2006 that it really started having a (positive) impact on my life.

So what about you? What the deuce are you still doing here 12 years on?

[Deadly in a Shadow]

Uhh....

1. Freespace is awesome
2. Shivans are awesome
3. the dozens of campaigns and mods and TC's are awesome
4. The SCP is awesome
5. the new graphics are awesome

Dunno.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

EDIT - long story short -> basically what they said |^|

Always loved space sims, nostalgia made my brother acquire FS2 in early 2007 (iirc). Loved the game ; played through 2-3 times ; looked for mods, found warzone ; brother found WCS prologue ; looked for more mods + looked for freespace wiki -> discovered SCP
Played lots of mods & lurked the forum ; played more mods ; started FREDing ; found out that FRED is one of the best mission editor I ever worked with ; lurked on the forum ; played more mods ; created a forum account ; kept FREDing ; started talking on the forum ; played more mods ; talked more on the forum ; played less mods ; talked more on the forum ; got recruited for a mod ; ...


In other words : I think I really liked the story & gameplay. Even without SCP & the community, I had a lot of fun before even starting to look for mods. It really amazed me to see that people have been improving the engine for years, and are still improving it.

What keeps me coming back, I think, is this forum, this community. Otherwise I think I would just look for new mods once a year, play a new mods for a few weeks & move to something else. I don't even play FS2 that much these days, but I always hang out on the forum.

[-Norbert-]

Same here: Great game, great mods and great a community.
And the fact that after FreeSpace 2 nothing really good came out in this genre might play a part too...

[NGTM-1R]

Someone has to keep correcting you all when you get the plot details wrong.

[Pred the Penguin]

And the fact that after FreeSpace 2 nothing really good came out in this genre might play a part too...

This a hundred times.

[Angelus]

I'm more RPG player but i knew FS and didn't care tbh.
My only interrest was The Babylon Project until a couple years back i discovered The Beyond the Red Line Demo.
To be more precise, i saw some screenshots and my thoughts have been: "it's a fake!", nofrikkinway that this are real ingame screenshots.

I downloaded the demo to prove i was right and prepared letter.
After playing the demo, well it was gorgeous!
I got hooked, played lotsa multiplayer, started creating own missions ( mostly MP) and joined hard-light, mostly to ask some questions regarding Freding and Modding.

Once you join here, you sooner or later try other campaigns, that's where i discovered a great 'verse, which is kept alive by a dedicated community.
One thing leads to another, i joined Fringespace and started my own project ( a reimaged FreeSpace 'verse).

[starbug]

1. Freespace is awesome
2. Shivans are awesome
3. the dozens of campaigns and mods and TC's are awesome
4. The SCP is awesome
5. the new graphics are awesome

Also Freespace was the last great space sim and it was the last best single player space sim since all recent space games are MMOs which i hate! No game has beaten it. Sorry X series my have good graphics but it lacks the pace and epic story and kickass beam weapons Freespace has.

Freespace also came shipped with a mission/campaign editor, which was very easy to use, learn and came with proper walkthrough. I don't know of any other space sim that did that.

Also Freespace has become even more epic with the source code project, up to date graphics and high poly models.

Last of all the mods. Blue planet, Inferno, The Babylon Project etc all epic and awesome!!!! thats why i stay.

[Black Wolf]

FRED is the reason the community has lasted as long as it has, with a (close) second place to the SCP, IMO.  If not for FRED, we wouldn't have made it to the code release in the first place, or at least, not as the large, still vibrant community we were immediately before the source was released.

Third place goes to the Kazan's and Heikko Hermann's of the world for creating awesome modding tools, and [V] for making things like tables so user friendly. Freespace stayed alive due to its ease of editing and modding as much or more than because of its storyline and stuff.

[Axel Wers]

Conflict FreeSpace (in EU, Descent FreeSpace in USA) was my very first game what I bought in late 1998. Both FreeSpace games are the best games in history. And thanks to this strong community it can still live because FSO gave LOT OF usefull and interesting features (currently I am playing with species_defs.tbl and iff_defs.tbl which allowed me add another two totally different species). You all are doing really good job.

[SypheDMar]

FreeSpace 2 has great story, and the universe can be as rich as we want it to be.
FRED is user friendly, and the walkthrough is a great place to start.
Modding community is very helpful, particularly karajorma's site back in the day.
But most importantly, IRC is chill.

[Rodo]

Well for me, I've always loved space, spaceships and all that stuff.

Whatever game I could get with those in I loved, so I came to know FS eventually and also loved, but dropped playing after my old pc died.

After that I came back for some more fun and got involved in these forums, started modding just out of curiosity and got sucked in this world, now I think there's no turning back for me, I just love working in FS.

EDIT: I could summarize it all like... came for the fun, stayed for the love

[rhraziel]

The few other space sims that I've played have seemed cartoony to me (I-War, Black Prophecy, etc.). I like Freespace because it has a gritty, realistic story that's well voice acted. Plus, the combat feels more accurate than any other space sim I've played. Like others have said, the lack of these types of games really works to its benefit.

[BlueFlames]

I invested too much time and effort to leave. 

[Destiny]

Does one truly require words to express their will and reason? I think not.

But for the sake of the topic I might as well say it: This community, HLP...how should I put it, gathered or rather as it's motto, brought modders together to keep it alive. And along with their skills, their ideas, inspirations, fantasies, dreams...all gathered into projects, mods, campaigns. Conflicts and disagreements are not uncommon, but that rarely affects something grand in the works. Well whatever, I'm not even sure what I'm talking about

[General Battuta]

I have no ****ing idea, every hour I put into this place could be moving my career forward instead

[Colonol Dekker]

It was the only Retail SCS with an Editor packaged at the time. That sold me. FS2 introduced beam cannons.


The rest is sexy history.

[Sushi]

And the fact that after FreeSpace 2 nothing really good came out in this genre might play a part too...

This a hundred times.

Make that two hundred. To be brutally honest, if a better space-sim came along, I'd probably be playing that instead.

Then again, I haven't actually played Freespace for nearly a year now. It's all been coding/modding work, mostly for Diaspora...

[Pred the Penguin]

But ATM a better space-sim being made seems quite impossible...

[Colonol Dekker]

But ATM a better space-sim being made seems quite impossible...

Testament to the work done here

 In we trust.