THE MAKING OF FREESPACE 2
Volition veterans Adam Pletcher and Jason Scott reveal how a talented team created one of the greatest space games of all time, one that still commands a cult following to this day, in less than a year
The backstory behind the development of Freespace 2 sounds like a recipe for disaster.
The first Freespace game – a spin-off from the Descent series – was released in 1998. “Once we saw Freespace selling well, both Interplay and Volition were interested in turning it into a series,” designer Adam Pletcher recalls. So far so good. The only problem was that development on the game didn’t begin until the end of 1998 and the developers were tasked with completing it for October 1999, giving them less than a year. You wouldn’t be surprised if what came out at the end of this rushed development cycle was a complete mess. But, somehow, the team at Volition created a classic of the space sim genre. Not only that: it was finished a month early.
To achieve this impressive turnaround, the team had to curb some of its early ambitions. “Two ideas I remember discussing were ship interiors and planets, but neither of those features would have been feasible in our short timeframe,” writer Jason Scott tells us. “We were planning a DLC pack set in the Sol system where we would’ve used our nebula features to create gas giant missions, but we cancelled that add-on early in its development.”
The focus instead had to be placed on what about the first game could be enhanced and what key additions would make the biggest impact. A starting point was the new possibilities offered by nascent hardware acceleration tech. “I remember we wanted to improve some of the visuals,” Adam tells us. “This was the start of the era where games could require video hardware acceleration, and we really tried to capitalise on that with Freespace 2. Switching from a polygon-based nebula background to one that used big detailed textures was a big deal for us. Flying through the volumetric nebulae was another one, and [that] let the designers create new kinds of mission objectives.
“On the gameplay front, we wanted the big ships to have more interesting behaviour, weapons and overall role in the battles,” Adam continues. “I think the details added there really helped flesh out the chaotic aerial combat feel of the missions.”
Jason and Adam explain that part of the reason the team was able to complete the game so quickly, was that it didn’t go overboard on new features and wisely choose to zero in on elements that would bring something significantly worthwhile to the experience.
“We chose a small set of new features – nebula, beam weapons, large capital ships – and reused a lot of content from the first game,” Jason recalls. “And studio and project leaders (Mike Kulas, Philip Holt, Jim Boone, Adam Pletcher, Dave Baranec) intervened when scope threatened to get out of hand. For example, an early version of the story featured seven factions and – as I seem to recall – an entirely new race, but that proposal was mercifully shot down. To get the game done on time and on budget, we had to focus and simplify.”
“I forgot about all those factions,” Adam responds. “Really, that was the heart of it, just careful management of scope. We already had a list of technical and design features we couldn’t fit into the original Freespace. It made a great starting point for the sequel and helped keep everyone focused. Like, ‘Here’s the game we really wanted to make.’”
The improvements Jason and Adam mention were a significant part of what makes Freespace 2 feel special. Having multiple gigantic capital ships going at it, their powerful beam weapons lighting up space as you flitted about among them doing battle with other small fighters, gave battles a real sense of scale. You often had a very specific job to do, tasked with performing a small role, such as protecting a particular ship from bombers, rather than being an all-destroying hero doing everything
“ONCE WE SAW FREESPACE SELLING WELL, BOTH INTERPLAY AND VOLITION WERE INTERESTED IN TURNING IT INTO A SERIES” ADAM PLETCHER
yourself. This was an interesting and refreshing approach that tied in nicely with an overarching story that placed you in the position of being a cog in a machine who was only told what they needed to know.
“The universe of Freespace is very impersonal,” Jason says. “Your character is referred to only as ‘pilot’ or ‘Alpha 1’, and you’re up against countless waves of a seemingly unbeatable, genocidal adversary that never communicates its goals or motives. In the briefings we tried to convey the sense of a much larger conflict unfolding in multiple systems, while at the same time hinting that your commanders weren’t telling you the full story. Mechanically, beam weapons transformed capital ships from floating space furniture into lethal weapon platforms that could blow you to pieces with little warning.
All these factors created a sense of alienation, tension, and discomfort.”
“I think the addition of flak cannons really pushed the immersion factor up in those battles,” Adam reflects. “They were a key tool for the big ships to fend off the smaller fighters, but more importantly they were loud. Explosions going off all around you, it really raised the intensity of those missions.”
The game appears to make a conscious effort to weave missions into its story, building drama and weaving things together logically, rather than stringing together a random series of objectives. We ask if this was a part of the ethos of the game’s mission design.
“The Freespace Editor (FRED) enabled designers to build missions very quickly, and because missions all took place in open space, designers didn’t have to worry about building environments and all the complexity that involves,” Jason explains. “But FRED’S strengths were also a weakness in that missions could easily fall apart without some architecture and terrain to shape the action. At one point, we jettisoned the entire first act and started over, placing more emphasis on raising the stakes, building tension, and pacing the experience more intentionally.
We got a little too heavy-handed at times, with all the missions about protecting tiny, vulnerable shuttles and cargo ships wending their way through angry swarms of attackers.”
Freespace 2’s campaign holds
up today, but modern audiences might be a little unsettled by the relative complexity of the game’s controls. There are multiple keys for locking onto different kinds of targets, shield quadrants could be adjusted on the fly and players could manually reallocate power between engines, shields and weapons to boost one system’s performance at the expense of others. Today, developers would likely be nervous about alienating a broader audience with this, and we wonder whether that was a concern at the time, or simply a reflection of what PC games were like back at the turn of the millennium?
“We wanted players to feel like pilots in control of a complex, powerful, responsive and technologically advanced machine,” Jason explains. “Complexity was a virtue, though it limited the market to a more hardcore segment.”
“Making something deep yet easy to learn is a constant struggle for game designers,” says Adam. “We didn’t always strike the right balance there, but I think we did okay. I remember arguing against Mike Kulas’ ‘target my target’s target’ command, saying it was feature-creep and just absurdly named.
But we would often just try something out before punting it, and I’m glad we did with that one. It was one of the most useful combat features in the game. Still, it’s one of those things no new player needs to know in order to have fun.”
Volition also made huge improvements to the game’s multiplayer segment. The mode was forward-thinking, including leaderboards, stat tracking, and a persistent mode where players could battle over territory called Squadwar. “Going back to Descent, our studio had learned a lot about the technical requirements for solid multiplayer, and we just felt like this stuff was taking the next step,” says Adam. “Dave Baranec was nearly a one-man show there, in terms of the programming details.
“Developing our own homemade global matchmaking system was pretty nuts, in hindsight,” he reflects. “It originally had a lot of bugs and the leaderboards were pretty hackable, as we discovered later, but overall I think it turned out pretty great. The squadrons thing was my favourite. At the time, a lot of us were playing team-based multiplayer games, like Threewave Capture The Flag in Quake, Tribes, etc. Clans were totally a thing, and we just wanted a space combat take on that.”
Yet despite its innovative ideas in the realm of multiplayer, the awe-inspiring sense of scale of its battles, its carefully constructed lore, compelling combat systems and the praise it received from critics, Freespace 2 was not a financial success. Finishing the game a month ahead of its deadline probably ended up hindering it in this respect, Adam tells us. “I think this posed a problem for Interplay. Most of a game’s marketing spend has to be booked well in advance of it hitting the shelves. Interplay wasn’t fully prepared to ship Freespace 2 a month ahead of schedule.”
“WE WANTED PLAYERS TO FEEL LIKE PILOTS IN CONTROL OF A COMPLEX, POWERFUL, RESPONSIVE, AND TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED MACHINE” JASON SCOTT
Regardless, there were bigger problems. “By the time we shipped, Interplay was in its death spiral, and I don’t think their marketing team was prepared or equipped to give Freespace 2 the attention and resources it needed to be commercially successful,” says Jason. “That said, some aspects of the game probably limited the size of our market, such as the complexity of the controls and the need for a flight stick when fewer players were investing in that kind of hardware. Freespace 2’s darker tone and more impersonal universe may also have been a harder sell for players looking for an experience that was more character-driven.”
“That’s all true, I think,” says Jason. “Gaming trends were shifting, and the space sim market was shrinking as a natural result. I never thought Interplay didn’t care, it’s just that they had bigger (money) problems developing at the time.”
This killed the possibility of a sequel, but Jason tells us there were ideas. The GTVA likely would have found their way back to Earth and the Shivans would have launched an invasion using jump nodes created by the supernova they collapsed at the end of Freespace 2. “We had discussed taking the fight to the Shivans in Freespace 3, going to ‘Shivantown’ for the final confrontation,” Jason reveals. “Along the way, we’d find out what happened to Admiral Bosch and his ill-fated experiment. If we had thought Freespace 2 would be the last game in the franchise, we would have ended the narrative more conclusively.”
Thankfully, this was not the end of
Freespace. In 2002, Volition released the source code to a dedicated fanbase who took the ball and ran with it, updating Freespace 2’s visuals and creating their own campaigns to continue the Freespace story. “What I’m most proud of is seeing a talented mod community use the FRED toolset to build a library of content that’s more expansive and in many ways more interesting than what we had originally shipped in the box,” says Jason. “Every few months I’ll take a look at what the community is still doing with Freespace 2,” Adam tells us, “and it always impresses me. It’s great to see fans still being so creative.”