Lame insults you tossed

Status
Not open for further replies.
Coo, I thought this had died.. at any rate..

As Kazan said, yeah the Olde English filter was an April Fools event - it's not a consistent feature. Last year it was Russian apparently but I can't remember back that far.

I'm not entirely sure why you guys think that the FS brand single-handedly killed off the space sim genre (which, while not dead.. is something more of a niche product now than it ever used to be). I'll hand it to you that it was a very "faceless" game. You were one amongst many and had no identity, and the charachters with whome you interacted (aside from maybe Bosch and Petrach in FS2) had very poor appearence ratings... wingmen changed from one mission to the next - as did your role in the game.

On the other hand, Volition first started up with FS and FS2 - they had nothing else. So I'd say what they did with the game was pretty damn impressive. I realise how this sounds but I do feel that if they were allowed to go on to do FreeSpace3 as opposed to Summoner or whatever other bastard-money-sucking idea that Interplay / THQ wanted from them then it would be a very good game. But that's speculation.

I will echo what has been said already and say that the engine had/has great potential as the talented SCP lads have displayed. But no doubt if another WC game was to be released today it would look every bit as good if not better.

At any rate, I'd like to hear how FS damaged the genre so badly. I don't think that's true - heck there are still space sims being made today, and WC hasn't put anything forward for some time now - so it could be that it is the fault of the publishers for killing off the industry in favour of RTS/RPG/FPS games... and nothing to do with developers. But I'm open to correction :)

As for the rather curious little car analogy images... well everyone is entitled to an opinion. Collectively as a series the WC games present a very rich package - but the fact is they are old games. Nothing wrong with that - just that they're old. Look at the original FS, it shows its age something rotton now.. thats just how things go. The SCP enhanced FS2 engine however does look very promising indeed - and I think it's great that a WC port-over is being done for it, since in the lack of anything new from Origin I'd like to get into the WC universe (and I'm to lazy to install a Voodoo2 card I got hold of specifically to play WC:Secret Ops again).

And as for relations around here... well I don't feel hostile at all myself - but I'm aware there are some who feel more... passionately? about their beliefs and don't like that being pulled apart by anyone, no matter what the reason. We've got some on HLP and evidently you guys have some here - it's just how people are. It's no big thing.

I would appreciate someone asking my question about how FS killed the space sim genre though!
 
As for the rather curious little car analogy images...
Click to expand...

The car analogy is purely superior humor aimed at the anon guy's 'car picture'.


I would appreciate someone asking my question about how FS killed the space sim genre though!
Click to expand...

From an industry perspective, Freespace 2 was treated by EA (and Lucas, and presumably other companys) as 'the game to compete with'. Proposals for things like Privateer Online (etc.) were written entirely from the "this is better than Freespace 2 because..." perspective. The last two 'important' games to come out sold fairly well (not amazingly - but high six figure numbers), and the corporate types were watching FS2 to get a read on the next generation of space sims. FS2 also promised to do a lot of the things Prophecy didn't - specifically, the multiplayer stuff - so everyone looked to it for an indicator of how much WCP's sales were hurt by lack of multiplayer.

...and then it sold around 20,000 copies. That's *nothing* for large companies like EA and Lucas (both of whom immediately killed their big space sim games). (Yes, StarLancer and Tachyon came out soon after and had similarly low numbrs... but Freespace 2 was the first, and it was the one everyone had been treating as the game to beat...)
 
Fair enough... whos fault is that though? It doesn't seem like Volitions.. each developer is only really out to make good games that are popular entertainment and a lot of fun to play... right? It doesn't strike me as Volition or FS's fault that the other big-names in the industry decided to use it as a yard stick and didn't put effort into considering their alternatives.
 
I think the responsibility for selling a game falls completely on the people making the game in the first place. Freespace 2's ad campaign was *entirely* based on 'one upping' Prophecy... "we've got multiplayer, the competition didn't!" and "look how big our ships are!" and so forth - but when it came out, people treated it as simply a cheap copy. That's no one elses fault.
 
Perhaps the WC hard-core fans treated it as a cheap copy. But it did have multiplayer and.. while not exactly a massive point.. it did have larger ships as well. At any rate if you want to try and run that comparison - Daikatana didn't kill the FPS industry - it just didn't sell, and everyone said it was crap. FS2 at least sat in the top 5 space-sim rankings for several years before anything else came out to challenge it.

To me that says that the space-sim industry was on the way out anyway... around that time came Half Life, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, a multitude of big RTS titles and other reasons for people to spend their cash on something other than space games. If FS hadnt ever existed - what would've happened? Just a large gap between the last decent space sim, and the lastest batch? Or perhaps even worse - publishers saw a void in the space sim genre and presume it entirely dead?

Sorry, but bad marketing didn't kill the genre. Just the franchise.
 
Perhaps the WC hard-core fans treated it as a cheap copy. But it did have multiplayer and.. while not exactly a massive point.. it did have larger ships as well. At any rate if you want to try and run that comparison - Daikatana didn't kill the FPS industry - it just didn't sell, and everyone said it was crap. FS2 at least sat in the top 5 space-sim rankings for several years before anything else came out to challenge it.
Click to expand...

I believe Daikatana sold fairly well - it was just badly reviewed. Bad reviews aren't equal to bad sales. Heck, they even did a GameBoy port. It certainly sold significantly more copies than Freespace - it just wasn't the greatest game of all time as promised.

Freespace 2 was in the 'top five' because everyone stopped making space sims. It's like the guy holding the smoking gun in the room full of bodies bragging about how he survived the shooting. :)

To me that says that the space-sim industry was on the way out anyway... around that time came Half Life, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, a multitude of big RTS titles and other reasons for people to spend their cash on something other than space games.
Click to expand...

The FPS and RTS 'booms' had already occurred - they weren't a factor for worry... Prophecy, afterall, survived being released against Quake 2.

If FS hadnt ever existed - what would've happened?
Click to expand...

Wing Commander: Strike Team, Privateer Online, X-Wing Whatever etc. ... :) There wouldn't have been a 'gap' - the games in development when FS2 hit would have come out eight to twelve months later.
 
I'm sorry but I fail to believe that such renowned and respected developers as Origin or Totally Games / Lucas Arts etc. would be phased at all by what happened to FreeSpace. Both WCs and X-Wings creators have funding, experience and reputation enough to create another game if they wanted to. They also have garunteed fan-bases in you guys here and the untold masses of Star Wars fans out there.

The fact is, I know FS had bad marketing. It also made a lot of promises that didn't hold out. But either way it doesn't garuntee people will buy the game. People buy what they want to buy - it shouldn't have influenced other developers to do anything other than what they wanted to do. If other developers are that easily swayed to do one thing or the other then their primary interest is apparently not in their fans or in making good games, but in what their competition is doing. While competition is important - you don't stop producing 4x4s because Jeep had a long line of bad models. You make better 4x4s and get the sales.

Of course, if nobody wants a 4x4 then no matter what you do - nobody will buy them. And if nobody buys them then it would be a bit stupid to continue to make them. So it is with the space sim genre. You either love them or you hate them - it's nothing to do with Volition or Origin or anyone else. Either way, it is not the fault of any developer :)
 
I'm sorry but I fail to believe that such renowned and respected developers as Origin or Totally Games / Lucas Arts etc. would be phased at all by what happened to FreeSpace. Both WCs and X-Wings creators have funding, experience and reputation enough to create another game if they wanted to. They also have garunteed fan-bases in you guys here and the untold masses of Star Wars fans out there.
Click to expand...

It's not a case of beliefs, though - it's a matter of record. They dropped their space sims after Freespace 2 (and then StarLancer and Tachyon) flopped so very badly. I don't think you're quite understanding the depths of Freespace 2's failure: it was a game that was supposed to sell a million plus copies... and it sold 20,000. That's economic suicide - if EA or Lucas spent money (several million dollars for a WC or an X-Wing) to make a game that ended up selling so few copies, it'd be a company restructuring/massive layoffs/etc. type situation. They couldn't risk that.

(It's not a case of the creators not believing in the game, either - it's up to the parent company, which looks at things economically rather than 'we know we can do better'ally.)
 
The failure of FS2 is due to the publisher's short-sightedness and self-fulfilling prophecy, not due to Volition - Blame it on Interplay, not Volition

as for "less than 20,000" copies - there were more than 20,000 users registered on PXO IIRC

as for "bigger startships" -- that's just a matter of scaling - the WC starships never felt properly to scale for me
 
So what you're saying is that, despite their previous success' - both companies lost their nerve after not only FreeSpace but also Tachyon and the Microsoft published WC-spinoff Starlancer died as well?

If thats the case, you should at least say that a combination of the three titles failiures at the time (I.E. a massive decline in interest in space sims in general) was the cause. To blame FS alone as the cause of this would be to deny the obvious evidence. People are losing interest in space sims. Titles of sufficient quality have not been produced recently outside of brands such as Star Trek or Star Wars to attract sufficient crowds to make continued production worthwhile.

Of course, if you insist on blaming FS alone I have only to point out that the advertising and promotional aspects of the game were handled by Interplay, who've since gone belly-up. Volitions efforts have been spent playing whore to THQ lately (something I really don't approve of). Massive numbers of people agree that the engine was solid, the features were there. In light of that, the blame can only fall to the publisher - not the FS franchise itself.
 
I'm pretty sure I *do* blame all three games... frequently. Freespace, however, was...

- the first
- the most derivitive of WC:P
- the one that appears in all of the Privateer Online literature.
 
If you want to blame any one game for the death of Space Combat Sims, I personally would blame Unreal. The release of this game, bought about a massive revival in the fps genre, with equally massive modding support.
Blaming FS2 for the death of Space Combat sims is like saying 'it was the last good one to come out'. There have been games released since then which have succeeded to carious degrees, IWar2, Freelancer etc etc, but it is the public as well as the publisher who decide how many sell. Just because this type of game doesn't sell very well anymore doesn't mean it is anything's fault, it just means not as many people like them. Most 3D SCG's that have been released usually appear on the shelves of my local PC World, so it's not as if the games are not available to the public. But people wan't FPS games these days, things WILL, and I believe ARE turning round, but FS2 was both badly advertised and badly timed, but I don't believe for one moment that it caused the change in public thinking.
 
So?

Wing Commander had a good formula, for a fledgling company like Volition there's a big risk involved in trying to do things incredibly differently - so they set out to do them better instead. I'm not FS a copy, I'm saying it saw what worked and built off that. In so far as a car has four wheels, doors, windows, a steering wheel... so what? See where I'm going with that? You could say WC has elements of X-Wing or TIE-Fighter in it, but then it does in the same way that Unreal has something of Quake in it.

And at any rate, that still doesn't make it the fault of the game. It makes it the fault of the publisher. I still don't see how you can blame a game for affecting a genre for reasons that had nothing to do with the game, but everything to do with the publisher.
 
If you want to blame any one game for the death of Space Combat Sims, I personally would blame Unreal. The release of this game, bought about a massive revival in the fps genre, with equally massive modding support.
Click to expand...

I'm not really following you - financially Unreal was fairly unremarkable, even from a subset of only contemporary FPS games. Quake II and Half Life both outsold it, and (in my opinion) got a lot better press.

Blaming FS2 for the death of Space Combat sims is like saying 'it was the last good one to come out'.
Click to expand...

No, it isn't - because I'm not saying it was (or wasn't) good. I'm not even talking about the quality of the game... I'm talking about the economics behind the games that allow future games to be made. From that perspective, X-Wing Alliance was the last 'good' game to come out... and Freespace 2 was very, very bad.


Wing Commander had a good formula, for a fledgling company like Volition there's a big risk involved in trying to do things incredibly differently - so they set out to do them better instead. I'm not FS a copy, I'm saying it saw what worked and built off that. In so far as a car has four wheels, doors, windows, a steering wheel... so what?
Click to expand...

So they copied Wing Commander to make a quick buck. Lots of people did that, and I have nothing against them... but then Freespace set itself up as the competition. They advertised the hell out of it, and then they couldn't deliver anything more impressive than Wing Commander.

See where I'm going with that? You could say WC has elements of X-Wing or TIE-Fighter in it, but then it does in the same way that Unreal has something of Quake in it.
Click to expand...

Other way around - Wing Commander proceeded X-Wing. X-Wing was developed by LucasVariable after Wing Commander (1) was such an unexpectedly huge hit. I have nothing against that - X-Wing took the same basic concept and made it different, in many respects better... they earned the success they had with their series.

(Side story: Richard Garriott actually went to Lucas in 89/90 with the Wing Commander 'base' and offered to develop it as a Star Wars license... LucasArts turned them down, saying they didn't think it'd sell.)

And at any rate, that still doesn't make it the fault of the game. It makes it the fault of the publisher. I still don't see how you can blame a game for affecting a genre for reasons that had nothing to do with the game, but everything to do with the publisher.
Click to expand...

Because, in my mind, the publisher did a great job. They promoted the game as it should have been - as the next big thing. The actual game failed to deliver on that - it was just a smoother Freespace 1.
 
No, it isn't - because I'm not saying it was (or wasn't) good. I'm not even talking about the quality of the game... I'm talking about the economics behind the games that allow future games to be made. From that perspective, X-Wing Alliance was the last 'good' game to come out... and Freespace 2 was very, very bad.
Click to expand...
X-Wing is based upon the Star Wars lisence. This garuntees it two things - lots of funding, and an immediate fan base with an interest in space sims. While it's not impossible to compete with that, it has to be taken into account when considering good games. When X-Wing Alliance came out, all the SWs fans (myself included) really wanted a decent game to follow in the footsteps of X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter (a great game in itself). Judging from the subsequent failiures of Tachyon and Starlancer I think it's safe to conclude that the space sim genre was in a lapse. At any rate, the economics of anything do not prove much in the way of a point - humans are stupid. Most of them will like what they are told to like - because thats what everyone else like, or so advertisments would have you believe. Personally I found the marketing for Freespace incredibly lacking - and subsequent support equally lacking. If it wasn't for the hard work of the modding community and the fact that its very easy to work with in that respect - it would've died some time ago. The fact that people enjoyed it enough to stick with it and continue to mod it - as with Wing Commander - should prove that it has elements worth liking, regardless of what economics says.

So they copied Wing Commander to make a quick buck. Lots of people did that, and I have nothing against them... but then Freespace set itself up as the competition. They advertised the hell out of it, and then they couldn't deliver anything more impressive than Wing Commander.
Click to expand...
In so far as both games have elements of space combat? Yeah, I guess they did :) But then Serious Sam, Doom and Half Life have you fighting aliens / demons etc. I suppose they all copied eachother? At any rate, any game that sets itself up in the same genre as another is competition. Try getting a game to sell but making a point of not being competition for other games and what do you have left? Its rather hard to say "hey, come check out my space sim. It's nothing like the next guys - we made a point of making it that way. But it's in space! Isn't that great?". Nobody would care, there's a limited number of options for every genre - granted there's infinite scope for story telling - but then I don't see those boundries being pushed in many genres.. if any. People like the easily accessable.

Because, in my mind, the publisher did a great job. They promoted the game as it should have been - as the next big thing. The actual game failed to deliver on that - it was just a smoother Freespace 1.
Click to expand...
The last time I looked, marketing came after the initial specs of the game were released. Are you saying now that the job of the marketing deparment is to lie outright, or to set the hurdles for the development team to clear? It seems to me that this is the wrong way to go about it. At any rate the advertisments for FS2 seemed to fulfill what the game promised... if memory serves: "Dogfighting, But with bigger dogs" or something along those lines. It promised nothing more. Again this says that anyone buying the games should know what they were buying - it got excellent reviews and support for modders/communities in mind with the inclusion of FRED and so on. Therefore the space sim genre was in a low point - nothing more.

I'm afraid I'm not being stubborn - I just think you're... mistaken. Placing the blame for your lack of further developments in WC in places where they needn't be placed.
 
Unreal wasn't the changing factor because of it's popularity, it was because of it's modding capacity, Quake 2 and Half Life effected the market even more financially I agree, and once the Tourney Games started coming out everyone wanted to play that online against each other. Especially with built in Map Editors as powerful as the ones that come with UT etc. But, from my position, it was Unreal that started bringing me back into a market which had been quite uninteresting since Doom, or possibly Quake.

As for sales, Interplay may have killed Volition with Bad Marketing etc, but sales are STILL affected by more than any one variable, if hardly anyone had heard of Freespace 2, how can people have made a concious effort not to buy any more SCG's because of it?

To be honest with you though, It's like saying 'Jimi Hendrix's best songs are the ones he never wrote because he died'.... Theres absolutely no way of proving or disproving it, that's why we get so annoyed when people talk about FS3 as well. Some factors killed the market, I don't think it's any one factor, or any one game. It'll be back, but trying to find 'someone to blame it on' just seems pointless to me.
 
The problem with your entire statement is that it's already been shot down by LOAF at a previous date. You're just reiterating someone else's garbage...from the past!
 
I'm afraid I'm not being stubborn - I just think you're... mistaken. Placing the blame for your lack of further developments in WC in places where they needn't be placed.
Click to expand...

I don't think you're being stubborn - I just don't think you understand my position. I'm not saying "I think WC died because blah blah blah". It's not what I 'think' (aside, perhaps, from my opinions regarding the quality of Freespace itself) - I have the Privateer Online design document that says "this game will be great because it does X, Y and Z better than Freespace and should sell variable percent better" and the post mortem that says "we can't do this because of this risk". It's not crazy fandom speculation - we've done our research into why EA killed WC.

Unreal wasn't the changing factor because of it's popularity, it was because of it's modding capacity, Quake 2 and Half Life effected the market even more financially I agree, and once the Tourney Games started coming out everyone wanted to play that online against each other. Especially with built in map Editors as powerful as the ones that come with UT etc. But, from my position, it was Unreal that started bringing me back into a market which had been quite uninteresting since Doom, or possibly Quake.
Click to expand...

Modding is great, I fully support modding - as I said earlier, I absolutely do not mean to put down fan projects... but modding isn't a driving force in the gaming industry, and it's really a non-issue in this discussion. Unreal may be great, but so are a dozen other FPS games that sold as well as or better than it... and the vast majority of them can be modded.

(Unreal, incidentally, may end up doing something positive for WC - it's a distinct possibility that the rumored next game will use a licensed Unreal engine.)

To be honest with you though, It's like saying 'Jimi Hendrix's best songs are the ones he never wrote because he died'.... Theres absolutely no way of proving or disproving it, that's why we get so annoyed when people talk about FS3 as well. Some factors killed the market, I don't think it's any one factor, or any one game. It'll be back, but trying to find 'someone to blame it on' just seems pointless to me.
Click to expand...

It really isn't - it's like saying "Jimi Hendrix was in the middle of writing this song when he died, and then the reason he died is {blank}". All of the games I've mentioned (WCST, PrivOL, X-Wing Whatever) were real projects that were initially funded and then cancelled - not vauge 'what if' concepts that we've imagined.
 
Edit: To LeHah
How did he shoot it down then? No point in making a claim like that unless you can point us to the evidence and let us make up our own minds. No offence, but I can only fairly make my mind up if I've made up my own mind - I won't take your word for it.

Edit 2: Bandit, could you point me a link to that document you're talking about? Similar to what I said above, I've not seen it. I'm working with what I know - and many years ago people believed the world was flat till someone showed them otherwise.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top