The Differences Between Freespace and Other Descent Games

by: Old Staff - June 03, 1998 for Freespace Watch

In the past, the gaming industry has been advanced by a few titles. Every now and then, a company will come out with a smash hit that redefines that genre of gaming. In the early 90's, Wolfenstein and later Doom redefined the first person shooter genre. This past year, we have had Quake II and Half-life do the same. Microsoft Flight Simulator advanced the flight simulation genre to new heights. Real-time strategy games were advanced starting with Warcraft II, and later such games as Age of Empires, Starcraft, and Total Annihilation. RPG's have not had such a jump yet, unfortunately.

Well, space combat sims were never very great games. They were unrealistic, boring, slow, and unfair. Very few space combat games were smash hits. The genre is lacking greatly, and the past titles have not done this genre justice. This is all going to change in a few weeks, when FreeSpace rocks the world.

The past Descent games, although they drew a following, were never as popular as Quake or Doom. This is for several reasons. Aong these is the fact that the games was treated as a flight sim game where it shouldn't have been - you fly solo, into dangerous territories, using Earth's physics as a model. In some respects, it wasn't treated like a flight sim where it shouldn't have been. I cannot think of a flight sim game out there that has primary weapons more powerful than secondary weapons. Flight sim games have long been rendered in full 3D, with kickass multiplayer support. This was not true for space simulations.

And even more reaons exist that made space sims stay low: the whole concept of redefining physics by being able to go side-to-side, and backward. Somehow, the designers think that because you are in space, you can do whatever you want. True, the AV-8 Harrier takes off vertically and flies backward, but that is akward at best and the small engines can barely carry the plane with even a half payload. Also what strikes me as odd is that in space sims, designers think one ship can do everything, where as in flight sims, you get to fly planes on an as-needed basis.

The space sim industry does not have an id Software, or Blizzard, or any real big companies constantly advancing it. This was all true before FreeSpace hit the market. Gone are the days of unfair battles, unrealistic physics, and stupid assumptions on how space combat will work. FreeSpace takes what we know of Earth battles and puts it into a space seting. Although we don't have 2 KM ships on Earth, in space they are feasable - you only need to accelerate it once and stop it once, because inertia will propel it in between. No way in hell can gravity (from a distance, of course) slow down a ship of that mass and speed. On Earth, we have ships designed for specific tasks, whether it be dogfighting, bombing, or carrying supplies. In FreeSpace, we have the exact same model which nearly identical roles, only bomber targets are in space. The FreeSpace model is also not totally linear (i.e if you fail to destroy a secondary target, it may come back to haunt you).

And of course we can go into the technical aspects of the game. Voodoo2, Glide, Aureal 3D sound positioning...we have never had a space sim like this before. It is quite possible FreeSpace may be the Quake II of space sims. Only time will truly tell, but Volition has developed one great game here, hopefully they play their cards right and make it work.