@CMaster

“Based on what we know so far, the best games to compare this with are things like Planetside, Mechwarrior 2:Mercenaries, Wing Commander and seemingly APB.”

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I was surprised to hear you mention Evochron as a game with an unrealistic flight model… while it does have an overall (quite high) speed limit, when you turn off the inertial damper system the game at least felt very Newtonian to me. I enjoyed getting up to really high speeds and then coasting past enemies sideways, strafing them and making their missile targeting go all wonky. I had other issues with the combat in Evochron, but definitely not related to the flight model. Also there is TrackIR support. Evochron DEFINITELY feels different than something like X-wing or Freespace, which are much more like WW2 dogfighting, as you say (although I still enjoy those games).

Back on the subject of Black Prophecy, my concern is whether the flight model will even be close to games like Freespace, or if it will be more “arcade-y” like Descent. Will I be able to use my joystick? Will I even WANT to use my joystick? Will it fly better with one? I’d be happy if it feels like Freespace, to be honest. I guess that since it’s free I can try it out myself when it comes out to see if it’s what I’m looking for.

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Shame it’s an MMO… Never really played any, and am not that keen to. Saying that, EVE always seemed like an interesting take on the MMO, and, if I were to ever play one, it would probably be EVE. But then, this is nothing like EVE apparently… So I don’t know what to think of it. I note it’s MMO and not MMORPG… so I’m assuming it’ll be less grind focussed and more action oriented. Which could be a good thing… I can try it without too much of a time sink.

In reality though, I just want another IWAR… Or another Privateer 2: The Darkening (with an All New All Star Cast!!)… or a New Elite!

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Let’s get the most annoying thing out of the way first: Bloody quest window, I’m going to have to use Windows Magnifier for that. Do they never learn? They may include a scalable UI/font size dealie, but I seriously doubt it.

Sigh.

Right, negativity out of the way, everything else looks beautiful. It’s not text heavy outside of the above, I can just merrily ignore the chat log (which I do in all online games that aren’t CO anyway), and the tiny bits of text that are there look like the sort where I can function by the positions of bars and icons alone just by previously knowing what the text says.

Those customisable ships, the style of the game…

Could it be the first space game I’ll be able to love post-Freelancer? Freelancer is the only game of exactly this type of game that I’ve ever loved, mostly because it was text-lite, it was mostly icons, it looked amazing, it was just a little bit silly (British people flew around in fish-ships, geddit?), okay, it was very silly, and I loved it for that, British cop people wore proper olde British cop hats, and… every other civilisation was just as stereotyped. But even in space, it was fun. Customisable ships, amazingly fun combat, the freedom to explore…

I’ve been waiting for another Freelancer for such a long, long time.

Will another one ever arrive?

Will this be it?

Quietly optimistic, hoping I won’t be disappointed, all ready totally smitten with the ship designs.

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If you want it in high quality, downloadable from here

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i miss you on vent :(

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Maybe the 90% of the EVE player base that never strays from high security space might try to go shoot people for profit then…

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The main reason I gave up on recent games like X3 and Evochron is that it just doesn’t feel like space combat with slow-moving ships, a speed cap, and a cramped playing area for star systems. I haven’t seen a game that felt even close to “real” space combat and a space environment since Independence War 2. All the game devs seem to think we want WWII fighter combat in space. I wish someone would try an Independence War-type game engine again.

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Also, cutscenes? Really? You’d hope that, by now, cutscenes were an abandoned experiment. Taking control away from the player in a game is bad.

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