Author Topic: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace  (Read 4008 times)

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Offline Snarks

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Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
For someone who has not played Freespace 1/2, what should be presented for the person to fully enjoy Blue Planet? I have a few friends who I think will enjoy Blue Planet because of its narrative structure but may be turned off by the older minimalist styles of FS. I'm finding it difficult to explain various concepts like the Shivans or the Sol Gate because it really feels like the player needs to experience what the Shivans are like or what Earth meant for the Terrans. Anyone got an idea on would be a good way of getting that stuff out of way? Or if a player really needs to know about any of that stuff to begin with before enjoying BP?

 

Offline rance

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
Well ideally you'd force them to play Freespace 1,2 and the Silent Threat or at least 2. Freespace Blue combines Freespace 2 with all the shiny upgrades of Blue Planet and of course comes with Blue Planet AoA and WiH. Blue Planet draws on content though out all freespace cannon to make up it's narrative. I'd say it'd be very hard for them to follow a lot of the detail without the prior knowledge.

 

Offline Cyborg17

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
I feel like Freespace 1 is not as necessary, if they are only going to play Blue Planet.

Do they know anything about Battlestar Galactica?  The shivans are a relatively close match to the cylons, and the quest and desire for sol/earth matches pretty closely that of the GTVA.

But do they know how hard Blue Planet is or how complex the controls can be for Freespace in general?

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
They're going to have to purchase the game anyway to play Blue Planet, right? And they're going to have to learn how to play the game, and I think playing Freespace would be more gentle than being thrust straight into Blue Planet. They can at least try to play Freespace, and if they're not enjoying it, then maybe it would be the time to think about filling in the blanks. There is no substitute for playing Freespace to learn about such things. So I would suggest turning them loose on Freespace. And if it just doesn't work, but you still think they'd enjoy Blue Planet, I'd suggest having them watch a let's play. Words can only do so much. You can't convey such things as the dread of the Lucifer jumping in with mere words or screenshots of ships.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
You definitely don't need FS1. You could just watch the FS2 cutscenes with a sentence or two of exposition in between.

Or run them through FreeSpace Blue, since that'll be an easier difficulty curve to learn the game on.

Or have them read Morrigan in the Sunglare, which will spoil the BP2 story but spoilers ain't no big thing, and then you say 'so do you want to play that!'

They better play BP with the difficulty down!

Or you could say

Quote
Fifty years ago, humanity and the Vasudans fought a war for territory and galactic hegemony. When the Shivans struck - voraciously hostile, beyond comprehension or communication - only a desperate alliance turned them back. The Vasudans lost their homeworld to orbital bombardment. And humanity lost Earth: sealed away behind a collapsed jump node.

Eighteen years ago, a rogue human Admiral, Aken Bosch, triggered a bloody civil war as cover for his theft of ancient artifacts. Bosch believed the Shivans were more than blind destroyers: part of an ancient cosmic design that could save humanity, or see it utterly annihilated. Bosch opened the way into Shivan space, trying to achieve communication - and vanished. The Shivans poured into our systems, destroying most of our fleet and, at war's end, triggering a supernova in the densely populated Capella system.

What did the Shivans want? Why did they trigger a supernova, instead of steamrolling the rest of our systems? Did Bosch make contact, or meet a gruesome end? If the Shivans are millions of years old, why are we able to fight them at all?

For eighteen years humanity struggled to understand. Economies collapsed. Allegiances frayed.

Today, using alien technology discovered during the second war, humanity prepares to re-open the jump node to Earth. The homeworld is a symbol of unity, and hope, and a chance for answers.

But we may not like what we find.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
There's a kind of ****ty tutorial at the start of AoA that covers what I believe to be the only controls you really need to play BP at low difficulties.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
Voiced by me! :D
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Codethulhu GitHub wgah'nagl fhtagn.

schrödinbug (noun) - a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place.

When you gaze long into BMPMAN, BMPMAN also gazes into you.

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(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
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(...)
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<MageKing17> more than two hours
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
And voiced really well, the performance is dead on! I really like the fictional framing too.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
Freespace 2 is on sale at GOG. So if there's any time to get your friends to buy the game...

  

Offline Snarks

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
Hm, I might be able to get them to play FS2B first.  As a contingency, I was thinking of FS1 intro -> Ancient Cutscenes -> FS1 ending -> FS2B Playthrough OR All FS2 Cutscenes -> BP Time!

 I also could say they're like the Reapers from Mass Effect, but that might have some misleading connotations.

 

Offline Crashdown117

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace
I also could say they're like the Reapers from Mass Effect, but that might have some misleading connotations.

Well, Shivans don't "harvest" and there's no such thing as synthetic life in the FreeSpace universe (unless the Shivans are), but, according to Bosch's ideas (as I understand them), the rest is a pretty close match.

On the question about playing retail first: I'd definitely recommend playing at least the first couple of missions in the FS2 campaign (maybe up until the first loop begins) to give them a first idea of what they're going to experience. Some of the more "sophisticated" controls covered in the various TSMs might also prove useful, though on lower difficulties (in my opinion) you actually have to try, if you want to fail some of the early missions.
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Offline leoben

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Re: Blue Planet for People Who Have Not Played Freespace

Do they know anything about Battlestar Galactica?  The shivans are a relatively close match to the cylons, and the quest and desire for sol/earth matches pretty closely that of the GTVA.


While there are certain similarities between the style of storytelling, I'd really not put Cylons from BSG on the same platform as the shivans as a comparison.