Poll Archive

Gamecenter has published an interwiev with Chris Roberts, the creator of FreeLancer. It's mostly about Digital Anvils other game Conquest but FreeLancer is briefly mentioned. Here is the excerpt:

GC: And Freelancer is next year now? But is it going to ship at the same time as Freelancer Online?

C. R.: No, we're going to do Freelancer, and then Freelancer Online is six months after that. The plan is to try and get Freelancer out by E3 of next year. I don't want to go to another E3 and show Freelancer. It's just another really big game, so we're mostly focusing on content now instead of technology, but we have a huge universe to fill out.

GC: That's something we've been talking about a lot. It just seems that the space flight sim genre, started by Wing Commander and X-Wing, just doesn't seem to be as popular as it used to be.

C. R. See, I don't put Freelancer in the same category, and there's a lot of things that we try to do with Freelancer.… The way it felt to me when I started Freelancer was that the whole area felt stagnant. Nothing's adding to it. Everything's just a little more polished, or maybe the ships look a little better, but the interface and the gameplay are the same...that was there ten years ago when Wing Commander came out. I would say that's probably the case with FreeSpace 2, and StarLancer, and now Tachyon. They're not selling huge amounts because everyone is just jaded. And what we need is a game experience that's different enough, like Diablo. RPGs were so dead. Like no one was doing them, no one wanted to do them, and then Diablo comes out and sells a million-plus units. One of the reasons why it did was that it was fun, it was easy to get into, the interface was really simple, and it had a really good sort of reward pattern to the gameplay.

For a full interwiev click HERE.