Yeah, but that’s the reason I enjoy I-war so much (I haven’t played Independence War 2 yet, I’m saving it for a rainy day): its because they incorporate nearly unlimited top speeds, you’re travelling at high speeds but all that matters is your relative velocity to each other. And relative velocities are visually shown with a vector trail in the I-war HUD.
I honestly enjoyed I-war more than other space sims precisely because it got rid of the other restrictions. They made it really fun, and at the same time really tactical. In the I-war opening movie, the captain of the dreadnought pulls off a maneuver that I’ve only been able to pull off three times, but is very satisfying. Ships are weaker in the back, since all the shields and hull plating is concentrated in the front. They also incorporated the fiction of an FTL drive that you can activate during combat unless you specifically inhibit that ability using a special missile.
Everything I-War did, it did for both internal consistency with the game’s fiction, the newtonian physics they worked with, while also keeping the fun factor. I think that game put the lie to the assumption that more realism = less fun.
Really? I played Prophecy…it was probably the first space sim I ever played, and I finished it. It was a fantastic game, but I don’t remember it being different in the ways you suggest. However, since it was the first I played, I may not have the proper sense of how it relates to other games.
I’ve been playing any space sim I can get my hands on since Wing Commander, and all I can say is that Prophecy gave me, personally, the greatest sense of speed than any other game in the genre. It had a lot to do with the feature that many Prophecy players never used: the ability to maintain your vector at the press of a button while pointing your nose in any direction. I believe it was the Caps Lock key, right below the Tab Key for the afterburners. So you could use Afterburners, switch to Caps Lock to maintain that speed, so you didn’t have to use after burners, point your ship at a capital ship, or fighter that you were passing by, and shoot. And you could suddenly change your vector dramatically by letting go of vector lock and switching to afterburners in the new direction you were facing. So you could fly circles around enemy ships if you did it right.
I was really involved in the fan community for WC: Prophecy at the time,and I organized a leaderboard for the highest kills on the simulator missions that were tough, and I had the highest kill count for a really long time. So high that I got several emails accusing me of cheating, saying it wasn’t possible to go that high. That was my own personal major complaint with Prophecy though: I loved the sense of speed, and the gameplay, but the game, as designed, was way too easy even on the hardest difficulty. They gave the federation ships way too much speed and maneuverability and weapons. Those of us interested in exploring the simulator made our own simulator missions that were much tougher, and hacked it so we could fly the alien ships instead. Believe me the game was much tougher when you were an alien fighting the Federation, instead of the other way around. The game as just inherently designed to give the Federation a huge technology advantage. I guess the aliens were supposed to make up for it in sheer numbers, but they didn’t. In the missions in Prophecy, the aliens never had enough to overwhelm even one ship.
I still remember the story in Prophecy kept implying that we were facing this great menace, and yet, battle after battle, the Federation kept winning every single encounter with the aliens.
Freespace, which came out near the same time, about 6 months later, got the same story but did it right: the aliens really did have superior technology, and were kicking ass. It really did feel like they would conquer Humanity and the Vesudans.
Was it Terminus that tried to do the Newtonian physics thing? One of those 3 sims that came out around the same time did, and I remember people liking it.
You could be thinking of either I-war, or Terminus. I-war came out at the same time as Prophecy, but only in Europe. Freespace came out about 6 months later, so those were the three big space sims at the time. Two with WW2 physics, one with Newtonion physics.
Terminus came out around 2000 I believe, and I personally didn’t like it very much. It did feature Newtonian physics, but the overall presentation of the game was very sloppy. The font was ugly (which drove me crazy, why can’t you pick a font easier on the eyes? That doesn’t require a higher budget for God’s sake), the graphics were sub-par, and I didn’t like the gameplay. The story was kind of hard to get into, so I never got far in the game. Where I-war makes the newtonian physics easy and intuitive to understand, Terminus somehow made it more convoluted, but I can’t remember how.
The other thing that was incredible about i-war was the mission variety. When Prophecy came out, I remember it was so disappointing that the only kinds of missions they had were: Fly to the waypoint, fight some aliens, fly to the next waypoint, fight some ships. Sometimes you had to protect a ship, but that wasn’t too hard in prophecy because the aliens were so much weaker than the federation, and it meant all you had to was fly to the waypoint, and kill the aliens quickly, instead of taking your time.
Freespace added a few more type of missions. You could scan cargo, you could do other things, and were required to, and it made for more variety. There were some spying missions, like in Tie Fighter, and other kinds of missions, like having to clear an asteroid field so your capital ship could get through. But it still mostly adhered to the formula of flying out there and shooting things down most of the time.
I-war just had so many mission types that I can’t even remember them all. I just remember they actually kept introducing new gameplay elements throughout the game for the sake of mission variety. Like the time when you had to find something based on a weak signal, they actually had a new addition to the HUD just to show you signal strength, so you could locate the device. Then there were missions where if you used thrusters too much, you’d get detected on radar, so you had to remote pilot a spy drone in a way to minimize thruster use, which was really very interesting with the Newtonian physics model, and their map setup. They also had FTL travel, which added a lot of variety and tactics to a lot of missions. There were a lot of examples of this, where I-war just kept adding more and more elements so that most missions throughout the game were unique. And the game was a joy to use with my force feedback joystick. I still remember the first time when all my thrusters got damaged, and as I was frantically assigning priority to repair the thrusters, my ship was drifting through space at my current vector, with enemies closing in fast. And I remember when my thrusters went out, it was because of a missile hit, and my joystick jerked, and then completely went dead. All the tension in the joystick was gone, so just my hand’s weight caused it to slump into a corner, as the joystick went limp, just like my ship.
God, I miss that game. I don’t personally think I-war 2 can be as good from the little I played of the demo, but I’ll definitely give it a shot one of these days.