If only there was a remaster of the original product. It's not like Microsoft is hurting for money these days. They bought Zenimax! Just update the graphics a bit and get Freelancer running on modern hardware. Or just remove Securom from the old game and put it up on GoG.
StarLancer was a great WC-like game, and its multiplayer capabilities were beyond its time: you were able to connect PC and Dreamcast players in the same session which was awesome 😎 FreeLancer doesn't get enough credit, as it brought space sims to the masses.
I played through StarLancer just recently (to catalog the footage reused from the Wing Commander movie!) and I thought it held up very well. Great game... a cousin of Wing Commander, but with some gifts of its own!
I mean, I would argue Freelancer TRIED to bring space sim to the masses but it obviously didn't. The genre kind of died outside of indies in the 2000s :(
(cont) In my college years, I saw gamers that wouldn't give Wing Commander or other flight sims a glance occupy our study rooms in their laptops playing FreeLancer. In my mind, it was the perfect cross between Wing Commander and an RPG, a genre which was quite popular at the time
(cont) Say what you want about the game's troubled development history (there's plenty out there to document that), but it was a nice game, and it deserves kudos at least for that
Oh yeah! They are not the same. I love the Xbox game, but the PC title is its own thing. More flight sim (though still arcade-y, don’t expect MS Flight Simulator). Different plot and different approaches to some recurring characters. The PC game came first; the Xbox game was a reboot/pseudo-sequel.
StarLancer will play mostly ok on modern PCs if you get a cracked .exe to get around the securom issue. I had to do some tweaking to get force feedback enabled and I had some crashes with the medal display case, but by and large I played through just fine last year on Win10 x64.
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Even featured it in this video:
https://youtu.be/Q1oQuKW48ks?t=3546
I need to look into that bc I love the Xbox game
Then yeah Microsoft need to get that playable on modern hardware
Got videos featuring both.
But Starlancer was far more of a pain to get running properly.