And once it was all over, you had the feeling that a pretty damn good gaming experience had just occurred. Naturally, the best approach was to combine both elements, playing freelance until you had a descent arsenal, and then taking on the storyline missions. There was a story within the game, but you could either follow that or play entirely on your own. This time around, players were entirely independent, flying missions for private contractors or government payees, building up their savings, and using that money to buy new ships, new weapons, and new equipment. In game two, much the same was true, except that you did not move in rank and the entire game was story-driven rather than based on your personal progress. Over time, your success was mirrored in the course of the war and the theaters of operation you were sent to. In the first, you flew missions and were promoted in rank and to new squadrons based on your performance. In fact, each game in the series had its own particular appeal, choosing to do things a little differently than the last. Rather than delving into the Kilrathi War, which was central to the series, this game addressed the lifestyle of merchants, mercenaries and pirates.Īnd that’s what makes this game so cool. Falling in between Wing Commander II, one of the best selling space combat simulators of all time, and WCIII, this game was a diversion for the series in that it dealt with the dark underside of the WC universe. Adding in the Exploratory Services systems to *that* metric, there's no longer any systems which can get anywhere on a single tank, but Palan and Tingerhoff become the best-connected ones, requiring at most seven jumps to get everywhere.Hello all and welcome to another installment in my video game review series! Today, I will be tackling an old (and I mean really old) favorite, a special installment in the Wing Commander series known as Privateer. This, too, is the same whether or not you include Eden. Namely: New Constantinople, Nexus, and Tingerhoff. Omitting the Exploratory Services systems, there are three systems from which you can get to the entire map on a single jump-fuel tank (ie: everything's within six jumps). If you do include the Exploratory Services systems, the furthest systems become Delta Prime and either CM-N1054 or DN-N1912, either of which will take you thirteen jumps. Eleven jumps! And, interestingly, six different eleven-jump paths you could take between 'em. Omitting the Exploratory Services systems, the two furthest-apart systems are CM-N1054 and Sumn-Kp'ta (regardless of whether you include Eden). Since I'm replying, I may as well mention a couple things I looked into last night, for a lark: I have indeed played through the game a number of times! Just that in terms of this sort of map, including those four to that "tail" doesn't really affect the logical map structure, is all. It was done in the Linux editor Dia, though, so the source file probably won't help most folks.Ĭlick to expand.Oh, I only meant "interesting" in a mapping sense I agree it's a rather interesting system from a plot/game perspective. I've attached the map to the post you can also find it (and its source file) at: In the layout I went with, it's the jump between XXN-1957 and 119CE which conflicts with the jump between New Constantinople and Newcastle. This could be arranged in a number of different ways, of course. In the end, it looks like there's a single unavoidable crossed-jump-line in the map. As in: if you detangled the mess of jump points without regard to their actual "physical" location on the map, would it be possible to draw the map on a 2D Euclidean plane without having any of the jump lines intersect? I got curious during a recent replay of Privateer about the "logical" structure of the game map. It's entirely possible (probable?) that this has been done in the past but a tiny amount of Googling didn't bring anything up and I enjoy this sort of tinkering, so I just went ahead with it.
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