Registered: Oct 2001
Location:
Posts: 1

Hey all. Hadn’t heard of this project till now, but I was an avid Freespace player and B5 watcher. I find the amount of effort and detail put into this just astounding! Bravo. Some thoughts:

Aesthetically, everything is fantastic. Some things sound a little odd (the sound your ship makes when you engage the subspace drive) or whatever, but jeez, I don’t think I have the right to complain until I can pick my jaw off the floor.

The gameplay, unfortunately, seems pretty standard. That is, very, very similar the most official campaign missions. I thought the majority of the official Freespace missions were pretty bland. They tended to degenerate into space invaders – you hear “incoming hostiles” and immediately fly towards the ships, kill them, fly back to whatever it is you are protecting, and repeat. Admittedly, there were some cool missions, but not enough! In this mod, I was really hoping for a feeling of fighting an absolutely overwhelming, super-superior force. And yeah, you do sortof get that when you see all of the capitol ships get blasted into oblivion, but frankly, the Minbari fighters are too easy. My squad had little trouble dispatching them. It seems like it should take a few EA ships to take out a single Minbari.

I think the most fun I had in Freespace (1 and 2) was the extremely short period where you were unable to target Shivan vessels. Whereas usually dogfighting consisted of: hit ‘target closest enemy’ key, hold crosshair in the targeting circle, repeat for next nearest target -- not having any targeting actually forced me to keep some kind of spatial sense of the environment and the enemy ships. This changed the ‘feel’ of the game dramatically (too bad they didn’t use it more in the real game). Maybe something like this could be done with the Minbari ships -- although not being able to target them at all is probably too harsh, maybe if you could only target them within a certain, small, range – like 500. And it would be a blast to have to fight shadow ships with no targeting at all, and with their black ships against a black background… truly frightening.

I realize it must be difficult to come up with missions to take place during the war, since basically every battle needs to result in a loss for EA. Evacuation missions are definitely cool, but some more variety would be nice. Maybe a scouting mission is doable. Could encounter only a couple Minbari ships at first, decide to go for it and take them out, then run into the rest and have to run like hell back to the jump gate to warn the colony or whatever. Or a mission involving the transport of a VIP or anything else important through hostile territory. The key is variety of gameplay. I’d like to see a mission early in the war, showing how cocky and foolhardy Earth was – some crazy Admiral should end up with his foot in his mouth.

And yeah, I agree with many other posters that something needs to be done at the battle of the line to project the scope of the battle. If not static images in the background, then at least more audio updates would be nice. You know, “Oh my God, the line is being breached everywhere, we’re being ripped apar….. [static]”

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged