[Phantom Hoover]

sometimes i wake up in a cold sweat hearing that hull impact sound

This would seem to go against your argument.

the sound of impacts on an enemy hull. because it's an amazingly horrible effect

[Kestrellius]

I think the Flail sounds nice, but that's about the only good thing I can say about FS1's sound effects.

(I'm in the middle of replaying FS1 right now, because I finally figured out how to fix the flickering thing. (Turns out it was switching between windows really quickly for some reason, so I just have to alt-tab out and back in every time I open the game.) I'm currently on Playing Judas. ...I hate Playing Judas.)

[Mongoose]

Sometimes I feel like the only person who never had any trouble with that mission.

[Kestrellius]

Unless you are aiming to be some kind of grand hipster, you should probably like the thinks you like and don't feel bad about doing so, even if it's generic and mainstream and all sorts of other horrible words. 

...Now I sort of feel like I should make "Grand Hipster" my title or status or whatever that thing below the username is called.

But yeah, you're right. I guess what I'm trying to say is I think the FS1 designs are better, but I don't like them as much.

[FrikgFeek]

I'd be able to forgive FS1s shoddy writing and generic plot if it wasn't so far behind FS2 in gameplay as well. Capships feel pretty much useless as they can't defend themselves from fighters/bombers or deal meaningful damage to other capships. Aside from the excuse that destroyers are needed as carriers there seems to be no reason to ever deploy a capship instead of a few wings of fighters and bombers.

Almost all weapons do crappy damage and big Shivan bombers like the Nephilim take way too long to go down without anything interesting happening as you just wail on them with Avengers and Furies for like 10 seconds. A lot of missions where you have to disable or destroy cruisers or transports also have infinitely respawning fighter waves which is just a cheap way of making the mission "difficult". You can't get rid of the fighters and then focus on your objective as the fighters just keep respawning(FS2 has some of this but mostly in escort missions where destroying fighters and bombers IS your objective).

There are also way too many long escort missions where all you do is shoot at respawning Basilisks or Nephilims which gets really boring really quickly. This combined with crappy weapon sounds makes playing FS1 feel like some kind of purgatory punishment.

[Kie99]

Freespace 2 is better in pretty much every respect.  The graphics are much improved, the voice acting is far better (they have Robert Loggia FFS), it has beam weapons as opposed to the ****ty looking Super Laser, flak cannons, better missions, plus there are incremental improvements like to the controls (B targeting bombers) and removal of bugs such as flying into a **** and waiting in its hull while it's jumping in.

I think the story is also far better, but your mileage may vary on that, the only area I think they're substantially different and FS1 might be better is in the music. 

[Goober5000]

A lot of missions where you have to disable or destroy cruisers or transports also have infinitely respawning fighter waves which is just a cheap way of making the mission "difficult". You can't get rid of the fighters and then focus on your objective as the fighters just keep respawning(FS2 has some of this but mostly in escort missions where destroying fighters and bombers IS your objective).

There are also way too many long escort missions where all you do is shoot at respawning Basilisks or Nephilims which gets really boring really quickly. This combined with crappy weapon sounds makes playing FS1 feel like some kind of purgatory punishment.

This should be understood in the context of the time.  FS1 drew a substantial amount of inspiration from X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and those games were full of missions like this.  I remember one particularly annoying mission where you had to single-handedly fight off swarms of the most difficult-to-dogfight craft in the game.  And TIE Fighter was forgiving compared to X-Wing.

I suspect this was due to the arcade game design philosophy of the 1980s heavily influencing the games of the early 1990s.  When you remember that game developers in 1992 (the year X-Wing was written) probably cut their teeth destroying wave after wave of enemies in Space Invaders, this starts to make a lot more sense.

[Kestrellius]

There is one thing I think FS1 did pretty well, or...at least...sort of tried to do well, which was small-scale stuff. That is, in the sense of building up a single Aten cruiser as a credible threat and a Big Deal.

Unfortunately, it entirely fails to sell the apocalyptic horror of the Shivans, which kind of wrecks the experience.

(Also -- and this is sort of new-thread material -- but I feel like there's a distinction between a "mission" and a "battle", and in a game about a "Great War", you need at least a few of the latter, which...there kind of aren't. This is related to but not synonymous with the BoE concept -- a mission being a battle is more about presentation than scale. You could easily have a proper battle with just a couple destroyers and cruisers, if you set it up correctly -- portray them as unified battlegroups that meet for in a pitched engagement. I think part of the issue is that so many engagements in FS are running affairs, where the objective is to get from one place to another, which detracts from the idea of it being a proper battle.

I think what got me thinking about this originally was the opening cutscene of FS2, which drops you into "THE BATTLE OF DENEB". Now, it's not as though those sorts of situations don't happen in-game. If you took a few minutes of high action from one of the more hectic missions, it'd look pretty much the same. (Case in point: FS2's ending cutscene.) But it feels different, because the engagement comes together so haphazardly.

I have gotten horribly off-topic. Apologies.)

[NGTM-1R]

A lot of missions where you have to disable or destroy cruisers or transports also have infinitely respawning fighter waves which is just a cheap way of making the mission "difficult".

In addition to what Goober said, you have to realize that FS1 is actually significantly better than TIE Fighter or X-Wing in that regard; it has much tighter mission design and they're actually pretty good about turning off the tap when it's appropriate to do so unlike the other two.

[Firesteel]

I still enjoy FS1's structure and story. The execution is rather dry, though that has as much to do with deadlines as anything. While I was quite young playing through the game the first time, I love the way the Shivans are introduced. From today's perspective, FS1 doesn't capitalize on that introduction as well as it could in hindsight, as a product of its constraints, I still enjoy it.

You should also remember that, while the team was built out of the fragmentation of Parallax, they had never done anything like FS1 before. As Goober noted, the design sensibilities of the time were still somewhat rooted in the arcades (just look at Descent 1 and 2's score/live system and even how Freespace lets you see your mission and campaign scores) and more integrated narrative, not just a text screen every so often, was still new to action games in the mid 90s.

[General Battuta]

I don't know if you can blame deadlines. I don't think (for example) that Jason Scott would have produced material that rough even on a first pass.

[Goober5000]

Silent Threat?

[Firesteel]

I remember, admittedly hearsay, hearing that  had to throw FS1's story together near the end of the development cycle. While I would tie the Ancients' monologues as a symptom of this, the briefings most likely were completed in a draft or two and were deemed serviceable enough to get the point across. I'm also not sure if FS1 even had a dedicated writer attached to it.