Geek warning - avert your eyes.

This is a geeky post for geeky people. I make no apologies.

I just finished reading through a list of 123 Games With Untapped Franchise Potential (aka No Sequels) and found a great injustice.

123 games, and no mention of Freelancer. They had X-Wing and Tie Fighter on there, they had Crimson Skies... but no Freelancer.

If any game needed a sequel to tap its potential, Freelancer was that game. And it needs to be tapped. I'd tap that.

You played as a mercenary named Trent, who gets caught up in a war between the four factions controlling space. You buy new ships and weapons and travel through more than 50 different star systems, some of them massive and complex, taking on missions, discovering hidden wrecks, mining asteroid clouds... anyways, it was fun. Sure, the combat missions could get a bit repetitive, but there was so much exploring to be done. And the single-player mission finished after you'd explored about 28 star systems or so. There were heaps more to be explored, with lots more to discover about the universe.

I don't play a lot of games. But I played that one til it was dead and done. That dead horse got flogged. Because I loved it. And yes, I've heard about EVE Online. It sounds terribly addictive, so I'm not going to play it.

Anyway, here's what I'd like in a sequel. This list is purely for my own purposes, and I don't care if no one reads it.

- The ability to build your own base somewhere. There were so many beautiful places in Freelancer and it would have been great to build your own base and create a home somewhere. Mine would have been in Kusari, somewhere far enough away from the Kusari State Police that I wouldn't be bothered.
- More variety in missions. Especially in combat.
- The dynamic economy system that was promised. Game events should change the prices of commodities, making lucrative and dangerous trade runs more important.
- More RPG options in the land-based sections of the game.

Anyway, I loved it. Lots of fun. If Freelancer 2 (2Free2Lancers?) ever gets made, I will be lining up to buy it.