Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Does Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War have a second game?
FreeSpace 2 is a 1999 space combat simulation computer game developed by Volition as the sequel to Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War. It was completed ahead of schedule in less than a year, and released to very positive reviews. However, the game became a commercial failure, and was described by certain critics as one of 1999's most unfairly overlooked titles.
Begun with a crew of five, the project grew to a staff of 17. The game's code was built from scratch. Most of the software modules were interlinked with each other, increasing the job's complexity and difficulty. The code incorporated small portions of "Descent"'s code for specific functions. Kulas, who had worked on several versions of "Flight Simulator" and "Descent", brought his experience into the game's artificial intelligence (AI). The game's difficulty levels are based on advancing the enemy AI, rather than simply increasing damage and "hit points" of enemies. Some realism was incorporated into the game's physics, such that an impact on one part of a starfighter's body will send it spinning appropriately, unlike sphere-based collision detection, in which an impact would simply 'push' the starfighter in a particular direction. Due to time and budget constraints, many of the initially planned cutscenes and stories were cut from the final product. Examples of such cuts include a campaign path where the Terran-Vasudan alliance goes on a retreat, and scenes of racial tension within the alliance. Despite the promise of a deathmatch mode for multiplayer, it was cut from the final product. The expansion "Silent Threat" also suffered the same fate of cuts due to budgetary and time concerns.
The setting of the game takes place in the 24th century when humanity has discovered interstellar travel through the use of interstellar subspace jump nodes that function in the same manner as wormholes, allowing it to spread out across the stars and colonise new worlds. Prior to the game beginning, humanity (referred to as Terrans) formed the Galactic Terran Alliance (GTA) as the central power of all of their systems' governments and military, and became engaged in a war over systems and resources against the Vasudans of the Parliamentary Vasudan Empire (PVE). By the time the story begins, this war has entered its fourteenth year, as a third species, dubbed Shivans, makes an unprovoked attack on the Terran system of Ross 128. The player, acting as a new Terran pilot in the GTA, is initially involved in the conflict with the PVE before the fights focus on the new species' arrival and subsequent assaults.
On December 14, 1999, Hyperion Entertainment announced their acquisition of the license to port "FreeSpace" to the Amiga system. The publisher was changed to Haage & Partner Computer on October 18, 2001. Despite the game's official release being announced for December 2001, the approval to do so could only be gotten on January 7, 2002. The game was shipped without a printed manual, but had additional German and French language support. Hyperion had stated they would port over "Silent Threat" if the "FreeSpace" port sold well. To date, "Silent Threat" has yet to be ported over to the Amiga platform.
Despite Volition's interest and desire to develop add-ons and expansions for FreeSpace 2, Interplay told them to stop.[38] Volition was then acquired by THQ in 2000. As Interplay owns the rights to the FreeSpace series (as well as the Descent series) and Volition's owners, THQ, is only interested in pursuing development on what they own, Volition was unable to continue developing the FreeSpace franchise.[39] Faced with source code which became practically useless to them, Volition released the source code for only game engines to the public under a noncommercial license on April 25, 2002.[40][41] Mike Kulas, the President of Volition, said this was to give those outside the game industry a chance to look at the code of a commercial software product, a desire he and Matt Toschlog had when they were not yet in the industry. In the years since, no sequels to FreeSpace 2 have been made and Interplay has only published a limited re-release of it on February 2, 2004, to commemorate the company's 20th anniversary.[9] Interplay, by that time, was in financial trouble, failing to pay rent and wages to its workers. Seeking investors to inject it with funds, Interplay changed business strategies: instead of developing and publishing single-player games, it sold licenses to those games and looked towards developing massive multi-player online games.[42][43][44] Derek Smart, creator of Battlecruiser 3000AD, had casually mentioned his interest in the Freespace license, but nothing significant came out of this.[45][46] In 2013, Interplay acquired the remaining rights to the FreeSpace franchise for $7,500 after THQ went to bankruptcy court.[47]
FreeSpace 2's sales were acknowledged as disappointing, and described as awful by Kulas. He, however, stated that as the team had stayed within budget by sticking to schedule, Volition should at least be breaking even with the estimated final sales of the game.[72] In NowGamer's interview with Jim Boone, a producer at Volition, he stated that this could have been due to joysticks' being sold poorly because they were "going out of fashion" because more modern first-person shooters, such as Quake, were "very much about the mouse and [the] keyboard". He went further on to state "Before that, when we did Descent for example, it was perfectly common for people to have joysticks – we sold a lot of copies of Descent. It was around that time [when] the more modern FPS with mouse and keyboard came out, as opposed to just keyboard like Wolfenstein [3D] or something.".[73]
Some notable original mods and campaigns have been created, such as "Wings of Dawn" which takes place in an anime-style world, and "Blue Planet" which offers a continuation of "Freespace 2", telling of a civil war between Earth and the GTVA. "The FreeSpace Port", sometimes called FSPort, ports the original "Descent: FreeSpaceThe Great War" to the "FreeSpace 2" and SCP engine with many graphical enhancements, and serves as a base for many mods set in the FreeSpace: Great War era, such as "Shrouding the Light" and "Awakenings". "Silent Threat: Reborn" similarly ports the "Silent Threat" expansion for Descent: Freespace into the Freespace 2 SCP engine.
Following the end of the "Great War", both the GTA and the PVE attempt to focus on the rebuilding of their systems and dealing with the remnants of the Shivan forces, although the alliance between them is in a fragile state. In order to ensure the alliance does not collapse, GTA command assigns the GTI to the task of preserving it, while assisting in protecting valuable research projects and dealing with the remaining Shivan forces. During engagements, a science vessel that had been recorded as being officially destroyed during the war with the Shivans, the "Einstein", turns up during an operation to protect Vasudan craft. Although the crew escape before the vessel is destroyed, suspicions surrounding the science vessel's appearance are aroused, when recovery of the ship's escapes pods is compounded by confusion in communications that lead to two of the GTI's destroyers, the "Krios" and the "Repulse", arriving and claiming to be there to recover the pods; the latter later proves they were assigned to this responsibility.
"Descent: FreeSpace" features two distinctive modes of play - a single player campaign and multiplayer matches - with the game's main menu designed around the interior of a ship's quarterdeck, with various elements (mostly doors) leading to different options, such as starting a new game, configuring the game, reviewing the crafts featured in the game and various story elements, and replaying completed single player missions. In both modes, the player controls their craft and other commands through either a joystick, or a keyboard (either on its own or with a mouse), and primarily view the game's environments from the first-person perspective of a cockpit within a starfighter. While the game features additional 3rd-person camera viewpoints, the game's interface - the head-up display (HUD) - can only be viewed from the primary viewpoint, and can be customised with different colours. Because of the flexibility in the control scheme, some have categorised the game as being a flight simulator, since it has more controls and commands than a typical arcade game, yet its flight model is simple, akin to that of the game "", and incorporates some elements of Newtonian physics such as precise collision physics.
Apogee Software announced on December 12, 1997 that they would be exclusively publishing "FreeSpace" for the first three months before handing the publishing rights back to Interplay Entertainment. This was part of their agreement with Interplay for the latter's purchase of the rights to "Descent", and Apogee decided to release "FreeSpace" as shareware, with themselves as the merchant of the registered version. Interplay, however, bought the full rights to "FreeSpace" from Apogee in late April, 1998, keeping the ownership of the game solely to themselves.
Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War, also known as Conflict: FreeSpace – The Great War in Europe, or simply just FreeSpace; is a 1998 space combat simulation IBM PC compatible computer game developed by Volition, when it was split off from Parallax Software, and published by Interplay Productions. In 2001, it was ported to the Amiga platform as FreeSpace: The Great War by Hyperion Entertainment. The game places players in the role of a human pilot, who operates in several classes of starfighter and combats against opposing forces, either human or alien, in various space-faring environments, such as in orbit above a planet or within an asteroid belt. The story of the game's single player campaign focuses on a war in the 24th century between two factions, one human and the other alien, that is interrupted in its fourteenth year by the arrival of an enigmatic and militant alien race, whose genocidal advance forces the two sides into a ceasefire in order to work together to halt the threat.
In an epilogue, a narrator speculates the Shivans were not necessarily evil, stating that they were "great destroyers but also the great preservers", and that their role was to exterminate other species who advanced beyond their ordained place in the cosmic order; the Ancients were targeted as they subdued or exterminated countless other species in building their vast empire. The narrator postulates that had it not been for the Shivan's intervention, the Ancients would have likely grown too powerful for the Terrans and Vasudans to survive against, and thus theorises that the Terrans' expansion would have made them a threat to any other fledgling species.
The distinct fictional settings in which space warfare occurs are far too numerous to list, but popular examples include "Star Trek" (in all of its various incarnations), "Star Wars", "Halo", "Stargate", "Warhammer 40,000", "Babylon 5", "Buck Rogers", "Flash Gordon", "Battlestar Galactica", "Mass Effect", "Freespace" and many comic book franchises. Video games have frequently touched the subject, with the "Wing Commander" franchise serving as a prototypical example.Few games attempt to simulate an environment with realistic distances and speeds, though "Independence War" and "" both do, as does the board game "".Related to specific countries and facilities:
Volition aimed for a quality release, and promised to deliver a product without major bugs. Minor bugs would be fixed in a prompt manner. The shipped game, however, had deficiencies admitted by the team, such as problems with the multiplayer code, and a few design issues. The game underwent four patches, which resolved most of the bugs, and improved the multiplayer performance. Complaints about an online mission giving unfair scores led to Volition removing the mission from scoring play. Another patch allowed EAX capability to be enabled for Creative Sound Blaster sound cards. Interplay played its part in drumming up the community's interest by holding contests, and expanding material for the "FreeSpace" universe. Meanwhile, Volition created official star maps, and released Vasudan voice clips and story development notes. Interplay hired science-fiction writers such as Fred Saberhagen, Simon Hawke, and Jeff Grubb to write weekly "FreeSpace" stories for two months. Preparing for "Silent Threat"s release, Interplay held a contest from July 28 to August 25, 1998, in which the submitted fan-designed missions could win their authors prizes such as free copies of "Silent Threat", "FreeSpace" apparel, and gaming hardware. Entries were judged by a panel from "PC Gamer", and qualified entries constituted half of the missions in "Silent Threat".
The news of FreeSpace 2 being in development was confirmed in a chat on November 6, 1998. FreeSpace 2 was developed in less than one year. The Volition team revealed they had written up a story and will be targeting high-end hardware with dogfights for a greater number of ships and even larger and more deadly capital ships.[28] The team set themselves the goals of setting new standards for both single-player and multiplayer space combat simulations,[17] and started to modify the FreeSpace game engine for FreeSpace 2.[29] This team was the same team which had worked on Descent: FreeSpace, plus several new members. In order to flesh out the story, Volition hired Jason Scott as a full-time writer before work even started.[30][31] The linear mission structure was adopted as it was decided it would help the immersion factor of the story greatly.[8] As the relations between the Terrans and Vasudans dominated the first game, it was decided to scale the focus down to a personal level with Admiral Bosch and his decisions to rebel. Scott's close work with the designers, and co-ordination of the voice recording process helped to tightly integrate the story into the missions, giving a more sophisticated feel to the story.
FreeSpace 2 was released on September 30, 1999, one month ahead of schedule.[35] However, the team had to quickly come up with and release a patch (version 1.01) for a software bug which prevented recognition of a CD during the installation process.[36] Three months later, they released the next and final patch (version 1.20) to fix several other bugs.[37] The release of FreeSpace 2 was considerably muted compared to its predecessor Descent: FreeSpace.[38] Its publisher, Interplay, did not organize contests for it, nor did they generate pre-release hype up with the same drive as before. They also posted the incorrect system requirements for the game on their site. FreeSpace 2 was also placed on less-visible shelves than Descent 3. However, when GameSpot awarded FreeSpace 2 the "Sci-Fi Simulation of the Year" award, Interplay pushed out the "Sci-Fi Sim of the Year Edition" to capitalize on it.
Other splits included comparisons between the game and that of "" and ""; while some felt the game combined elements of both with better qualities and a strong story, others felt it had simply taken inspiration from space simulation classics, offered very little in original ideas, lacked depth in the story, with some suggesting the player could have had a greater role in the outcome of the game's story, and that they were simply playing a "very sweet looking arcade title" with considerable detachment from some of the game's elements. Despite the splits in opinion, many felt the game's AI was well designed, from the wingmen being competent and performing orders without issues, to the enemy vessels acting in concert with each other during missions, yet one reviewer was dismayed that the game's screen size was fixed and could not be changed.
"" was released by Volition in 1998. It shared the "Descent" name, but otherwise had no connection to the series; it was given the "Descent" prefix to avoid trademark issues with "FreeSpace", a disk compression utility (in Europe, it was released as "Conflict: FreeSpace – The Great War"). "FreeSpace" was a space simulator, and while it was still technically a 3D shooter, it did not retain "Descent"s characteristic "six degrees of freedom" control scheme, save for a cheat code that would force the player's ship to loosely mimic "Descent"s physics. Some early drafts of the "FreeSpace" story had the pilot searching for "Descent"s "Material Defender", but the story of the finished game was unrelated.
In the game's multiplayer mode, players compete in multiplayer matches online or over a local area network (LAN), in which they can band together to complete cooperative missions, or split up into teams to battle against one another. At the time the game was released, online gameplay was free over the services offered by Parallax Online, which also kept track of players' statistics and rankings, while Voice chat is available, although reviewers advised it to be used only on broadband or LAN.
"Descent: FreeSpace" was well received as a single-player space simulation that integrated all the desired features of its genre, from competent AI wingmen, to the presence of large capital ships that not only dwarf the fighters piloted by the player, but also explode spectacularly when destroyed. However, the game's multiplayer mode was criticised, as it was plagued by lag and inaccurate tracking of statistics. An expansion for the game, which was less well received, was also released in 1998 under the title of "Silent Threat", and focuses on events after the main game's campaign with the player working for an intelligence branch of the Terrans' armed forces that later attempt to overthrow the Terran government. A sequel to "Descent: FreeSpace" entitled "FreeSpace 2", was released in 1999 to critical acclaim.
"FreeSpace" was Volition's first project after the split from Parallax Software, which also spawned Outrage Entertainment. It is not part of the canon of the "Descent" computer game series, and contained none of its ideas and only small portions of its code. It was only prefixed with "Descent" to avoid trademark issues with Mijenix Corporation's "FreeSpace", a disk compression utility. Volition also used the term "FreeSpace" in the game to initially describe what became later known as subspace. The game was conceived by Adam Pletcher, with all the features of space simulator games his team had found to be fun. The games "" and "Wing Commander" were their primary inspirations, and those influences made their way into the game's flight model, along with the influence of historical WWII dogfights. Themes from the fiction of "Star Wars", "", and "Ender's Game" form a part in shaping the background and story of the "FreeSpace" world. The chaotic battles between masses of ships commonly found in science-fiction anime became one of the features of "FreeSpace".
Volition, the company responsible for developing the game "FreeSpace 2" was bought by THQ in 2000. With Interplay Entertainment holding the licenses for the "FreeSpace" series, Volition could not continue to develop the series. Without any viable use for the source code, Volition's Dave Baranec released the source code for "FreeSpace 2"s game engine on 25 April 2002. This allowed modders the possibility of modifying the game engine almost without limitations. However, because the source code is under a noncommercial license, it does not qualify as free and open source software.
The setting of the expansion takes place after the events of the "Great War", with both the GTA and PVE working together to rebuild their systems and deal with the remnants of the Shivan Armada. In the story, players assume the role of a pilot from the GTA, who has recently joined one of the fleets for Galactic Terran Intelligence (GTI), the GTA's intelligence service, which consists of three branches - Research & Development (R&D), Intelligence, and Special Operations. The player's character is assigned as a pilot for Special Operations during the storyline.
The game's expansion "Silent Threat", received generally less favourable reviews. While its stand-alone missions were complemented well for being conceived as part of a contest by the game's developers - Volition put in a call to the "FreeSpace" community to stop creating "Battle of Endor"-type missions through FRED, and instead create missions based on Volition's Jason Hoffoss' Zen philosophy of accomplishing more with less - the expansion was judged as decent but uninspiring, with many noting that the campaign missions lacked variety than those of standard escort or destroy missions, and offering no new equipment which were unable to compete against the older equipment, with some feeling that the story was worse than the main game due to its "cold and inhuman" briefings and non-player characters.
"Descent: FreeSpace" received generally good reviews following its launch, with "PC Gamer UK" placing it 20th in its 1999 Top 100 Awards. However reviewers were split on several aspects of the game. While many praised the graphics of the game, some approving of how well rendered an in-game asteroid stood out before the background of softly glowing nebulae, galaxies and stars, others felt the 3D effects were not "spectacular" to those of the software rendered version, commenting that rendered nebulae were unconvincing and that the models of in-game ships lacked detail and had blurry textures. Despite the differences between them, all reviewers unanimously agreed that the explosions effects in the game, including the many small details of the capital ships upon breaking up, were the most impressive they had seen (at the time).