In this week’s Lost in Time, Colin Munch looks back at Freelancer, which did Starfield, 20 years before Starfield. For more, check out our previous Lost in Time videos on Condemned: Criminal Origins, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon
Space log, day 4359. Today in space, I’m to transport some space cargo in my spaceship across space from one space station to a different space station. This space run should net me a bunch of space bucks. There’s danger of running into some space pirates, but luckily I’m armed to the teeth with space guns. Time to risk my fortune out there in the Starfie-
Oooh sike! Starfield who? Today we’re talking Freelancer, baby!
Freelancer was a beloved PC exclusive released in 2003. It’s a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination of popular trends of the early 2000s that dared to ask, “What if Diablo, but space?”
Freelancer is one of those freeform space games, like Elite or Star Citizen, where you can be a bounty hunter, a pirate, or a trader. It was created by visionary game designer Chris Roberts, who, before the Eternal and Ongoing Star Citizen Debacle, popularized space combat games and interactive movies with the hugely popular Wing Commander series.
Wing Commander put you in the space boots of a military fighter pilot, and was big on immersion and storytelling. While you could play Wing Commander with a keyboard or mouse, it was strongly encouraged to play with a joystick. For anyone born after 2000, a joystick is like a controller with one big analog stick.
As the ‘90s came to an end, Roberts and his team at Digital Anvil knew that if PC games were to compete with the booming console market, they needed to move away from requiring specialized hardware like joysticks and. Freelancer ditches the stick and thick manual for a more accessible solution: a full-featured Han Solo simulator you can play with a mouse and keyboard.
You play as Edison Trent, a..wait for it…Freelancer who is caught in a mysterious attack in the prologue, loses everything, and has to crawl his way back to the top by hunting down bounties, running cargo, and doing all the things you do in a free-form space game. Along the way, Trent gets recruited by the game’s version of the CIA and is roped into an interstellar conspiracy involving secret societies and ancient aliens.
Freelancer is set way far in the future. Not Dune far, but a little farther than Idiocracy. In the Sirius sector, humankind has split up into four factions based on old Earth cultures. Let’s see if you can guess which modern nation each one is based on:
- There’s Rhineland, a militaristic, industrial society whose ships look like cathedrals
- Kusari, where all the star systems look like watercolour paintings and the ships have paper wings
- Bretonia, whose cities look like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate levels
- And Liberty, which incorporates the stars and stripes into literally everything
Yeah, it’s not subtle—you start on a planet named Manhattan. But it’s effective and the locations are memorable.
The story in this game isn’t good, but it is video game good. It has a lot of twists and turns and does a great job moving you through all the cool different star systems and factions. This is helped by its excellent music, which is mysterious when needed and propulsive when you’re on the run or in combat. It adds immensely to the sense of speed and pursuit you feel through most of the campaign.
The story is aided by a stacked voice cast, featuring Wing Commander-veteran and Gimli-himself John Rhys Davies, and VO MVP Jennifer “Commander Sheperd” Hale who voices a character named Juni, which I only mention because that’s the name of my cat. Trent, the star of the game, is played by Iain Ziering (EYE-an ZARE-ing), who is so good as a confident sarcastic space jerk, you wish he’d gotten the chance to play a Han Solo ripoff in a real movie, but he did get to attack a tornado made of sharks with a chainsaw, so there’s that.
Freelancer has no branching dialogue system or player choice like Starfield, you just watch cutscenes, but they’re pulpy fun with good writing and performances. Each story mission is gated behind a dollar amount, so you’re free to trade, fight, and explore until you make enough money to move the story forward. You use that cash to upgrade your ships with guns, missiles, and shield generators. There are even a few specialized items, like cruise disruptors, that stop enemy ships from fleeing combat, helpful. Freelancer even has consumable healing items, batteries for shields, and nanobots for hulls, all bound to hotkeys, just like Diablo.
The customization isn’t as complex as Starfield – you don’t have to worry about making a ship that can’t take off, but it’s simple and fun. Pretty much every ship you can buy as you move through the main campaign is better than the one you’re flying. It doesn’t make much narrative sense, but it abides by that beautiful video game logic: Numbers go up, enemies die faster.
Freelancer even has a highly-regarded multiplayer mode, where the server you join saves your progress so you can pick up your game where you left off, almost like an MMO. Pretty revolutionary for 2003—a full year before World of Warcraft!. There’s no story here, just a huge sandbox you can explore at will, and there are still people playing it right now, two decades later. Wild!
The game also had a healthy mod community. Some make the game more complex, extend the story beyond the ending of the story, and even transform it into Star Wars and Wing Commander. The HD mod is still being updated, and is the best way to play Freelancer right now.
So why is Freelancer still so beloved? It’s just fun, man. Turns out that stripping all the “simulation” elements from a space combat game and replacing it with Diablo’s controls was a really good idea. Starfield has great immersion, but there’s something to be said for a game like Freelancer where you can launch into space less than a minute after you boot it up. If Starfield is like Interstellar, Freelancer is more like Firefly: it’s a fun, well-made diversion best consumed in bite-sized chunks.
Interested? Well, here’s where things get tricky. Freelancer is abandonware, meaning you can’t actually buy it anywhere unless you grab an original CD copy on eBay. There are ways to get it online, I just can’t spell it out for you. You’ll have to get into the true space pirate spirit, if you know what I mean. If you do grab a copy, make sure to install the Freelancer HD mod, which makes it much prettier and easier to play on modern computers.
If Starfield left you feeling hollow, or if you’re hungry for more swashbuckling space adventure, Freelancer is still going strong, 20 years later.
