That's why I was asking. It stated specifically in the Readme file that the designers were unsure of how the game would act with all systems. I was very happy when I was able to run it, but the chop became irritating in the asteroids. I'd still like to see if there are a couple of other people out there who might have a better idea. I may just have to try it.

I played the demo,and found the controls a little counterintuitive.I say this only because the only reason I will play a space flight game is if has a user friendly control setup.Freelancer was the first such game that I found,and I still haven't found a game that compares in ease of use.I'm not dissing the game,just its controls.I am a complete novice so I may be alone in this.Just my opinion.

For those of you having a hard time running DSO, see if your one of your friends is into computers. Even someone with a small amount of computer knowledge can do a graphics card and RAM upgrade. For those of you with a computer that isnt good enough, period, i suggest buying one of the cheap Dell (or other manufacture) teaser systems and popping in a decent 100 dollar graphics card if you dont know someone who can build one for you.

Freelancer: Its a way of life.

I just downloaded and played the demo for a few hours. My short review:

I don't like the fact that at Medium settings, the game looks only slightly better than FL yet lags 5 times as much. The voice acting is mediocre for everyone other than the main characters, since aliens don't exactly sound threatening when they talk like angry teenagers. The systems are tiny, and have only cosmetic differences between them.

But damn if the combat and trading isn't addictive! I spent hours doing missions, running cargo, blasting pirates, and constantly upgrading my ship with the money, and had fun every minute of the way. The plot, although not a masterpiece of storytelling, was interesting enough to push me forward. The interface is extremely useful and user-friendly once you get used to it.

BTW, someone mentioned that in the full version you can take a taxi from the stations to the planets. Can anyone with the full German version confirm this? Also, one of the screenshots shows a Freelancer-style station with many aliens standing around and talking. Once again, can anyone with the full version tell me if there's any difference between these and the stations already in the demo? If so, how?

Hi IS THIS A MULTIPLAYER GAME !

NO THIS IS NOT A MULTIPLAYER GAME! Sheesh read the forum thoroughly people.

Edited by - Firefox24 on 8/10/2006 2:01:04 PM

Well, I just finished the game and here's my pros and cons about this game:
(Might contain small spoilers.)

Pros:
- Nice action-filled game for people who want to blast and blast and blast things to kingdom come. There's plenty of action in this game, but... that's about it...

- The bad voice acting, poor story and poor humor in this game made the game fun. I got the feeling watching a cheap B-movie.

So far the pros (which also were a bit negative. *coughs*)

Cons:
- I never traded a single thing, nor did a mission from the terminal. Shooting down pirates along the way and freeing systems, as well as killing pirate gangs whenever you come across one, left me with 7.5 million credits at the end of the storyline.

- When you finish the game, there's nothing left to do. You can jump around with your hyperdrive, now enabled to jump everywhere, but there's nothing interesting to visit. What about doing missions etc? With 7.5 million and a ship armed to the teeth, why would you?

- There are 300 systems (as someone said, didn't count them), but as was expected, they're all basically alike. In the end I think you end up visiting around 33%, since the map already shows if there's something interesting in a system or not.
Within a system there's nothing to explore. Nothing interesting to fly to..

- Horrible, and I mean -horrible- game performance/fps.
1. The devs made the game search for the cd continuously while playing, which killed gameplay when you have an older dvd.
NEVER should ANYONE let a game continuously search for the cd while playing. It's plain stupid. Cdroms almost completely occupy one's system while spinning up and briefly freezes the game. That's why we have harddrives.
Let copy protections be taken care of during the start, and that's it. (Better yet, leave them out of games, since copy protections are getting really troublesome for honest customers.)

Ascaron was fast to release a patch to fix this, however, I really don't understand why I need to wait several minutes until the game has started up. (Copy protection checking no doubt.) Even if people will make mods, there's no fast ingame mod checking this way.
Honest people are forced this way to use no-cd cr@cks etc., to avoid these annoyances.

2. The needed specs are horribly incorrect. I needed to throw the details and resolution to low, since my pc couldn't cope with... well... whatever it couldn't cope with. It felt to me more like shoddy programming than performance issues.
(For the wiseguys: My pc is above the recommended system. Not minimum, recommended. Latest drivers, yadayadayada.)

3. Crashes. And lots of them. Seems to be performance related. Once the fps went amazingly low, the game would crash. And I could read some german about what the crash was about.
I can't read german well.

Well, anyway, someone said that DS1 is the next Freelancer. Wether it was GameSpot or Ascaron, I can't tell. I CAN tell that this game just doesn't come near Freelancer, nor the X-series. So spank the person who said that.

I give it a 4 out of 10, because the performance issues are horrible, in crowded situations it became unplayable.
I doubt that Ascaron tested it on various different systems?
If the performance was good, then I would have given it a 6 out of 10.

Estimated game time: Around 20 hours. Unfortunately little to no replayability.

To Ascaron, please do try again, but it would be VERY WISE to:
- Ask the gamers what they would like to see in a game, in addition to your own ideas. The game hasn't got anything that makes you want to play it again.
- Make sure the product is complete and well tested. Proper framerate, proper trainslation and voices and no german error messages. (For the european people anyway.)
Playing DS1 felt like playing soccer with a vial of nitroglycerine at times. It's a shame. It could have been a lot more than it is now.

I have played both DSO and FL to there completion many times and while freelancer was better in the smoothness of its gameplay DSO offers may good features.
Although i was very concerned whenever i jumped into a system with a foggy backdrop my PC would lag. My system was well beyond the recommmended and even on low settings it would lag. Crashes are also a big problem. Many a time when i got a distress call and tried to help the game would either get extremely laggy or just crash (so i let the person in distess to die).
The story is better than FL and HAS AN ENDING. I hated FLs open ending. Acting isn't that bad, though the pirates arn't really very piratey.
MP is not an isuue. I spent many hours playing the SP quite happly. Although the FL MP was fun.
Missions were a little repetertive, but not all the same. I really quite liked the side missons as well. But once the main story is finished there is really no point in continuing.
I do have one question though. You always see pirates of all races co-operating, even the thul-aint the thul a reclusive race?
Overall, the games performance wasn't really up to scratch. However, it was a great game after you started really getting into thing.

I've just finished playing this through and I agree that once you complete the storyline there is no desire to do anything else, I would sugest that people should rent this game out for a weekend blasting session and let that be the end of it. Ascaron really have shot themselves in the foot by not including a multiplayer option which will mean this game will have a very short shelf life.

Luckily I have an awesome machine which allowed me to play this game maxed out and I will say that it is graphically very good. System backgrounds and planets give an instant impact and really show you how old freelancer is now.

Freelancer is twice the game that darkstar one will ever be without multiplayer, I hope that freelancer mod makers find a way to lift the planet skins, system skins, bases and ships from darkstar one and drop them into freelancer. All freelancer really needs is a graphic facelift and it will continue to live on, for people like me that have spent a fortune on their machine the outdated looks of freelancer are its only downfall.

Well, as a self-confessed Freelancer addict who lost a substantial portion of 2004 to marathon 18-hour sessions blasting my way through Sirius, I was, like most of you guys. REALLY looking forward to this one. I'm afraid I have to agree with Gotcha! on most of his points, though.. particularly regarding the tech problems with the game.

I'm about halfway through the campaign at the moment, and I keep having to drop back to the menu and kill all graphical settings down to low whenever a challenging mission comes up. OK, a little choppiness I can handle (you can't expect miracles after all), but Darkstar One is just ridiculous. Even on medium gfx settings, the framerate on my system is slashed to about 2 fps in every asteroid field, making it just about impossible to aim at anything.. But everything else can still aim at YOU. Next thing you know.. BOOM. Back to the last save.

I wouldn't mind so much if I was running it on an ancient system, but you'd think that an Athlon 64 3500+ system with a 256MB Radeon X600 could at least handle medium without too much trouble. I mean, what did the developers design the thing for, $5000 Alienware setups???

Another point regarding the balance of the financial side of the game. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it took me about 40 hours and around 200 mercenary / bounty hunting missions just to get enough cash to buy the engine upgrade you need to get out of the very first star cluster.. Equipment is MUCH too expensive, and the repetitive nature of the side missions makes it thoroughly soul-destroying just trying to get basic upgrades for your equipment. Eventually, I have to admit that I got so sick of it, that I downloaded a save / cheat which lets you start the game with 9,999,999 credits.. And even THAT runs out after a couple of star systems.

On the plus side, the gameplay is addictive and keeps you coming back for "just one more" mission, but the techical side of the game lets it down badly, and, frankly, I think you'd have to be a real die-hard to slave away at this thing long enough to earn enough cash to complete it.

Well, I'm off to try and finish it. Happy Han Solo impressions, people!

Pass the Cardamine..

Equipment if you have bought a legit copy of the game is really cheap, thats why I said rent it for a weekend blasting session, thats all it should take you to complete the game and max out your ship. Cracked copies of the game are known to have a serious problem with the price of items in the game or unofficial patches can screw things up too. You have one of these issues most likely by the sounds of things.

P.S I have a £2500 Alienware Area 51, and the game runs real sweet on high settings. Guess your right, thats what they designed it for lol.

A lot of people have mentioned performance issues, these appear only in the EU versions that use TAGES protection as far as i can see. Also TAGES has been broken and to be honest, i cracked my original Darkstar One just to get rid of the bloody thing. And i have to say, no crashes, no performance losses no nothing. Wonderfull...

Now refering to the game itself i have one thing to say.. repetitive. While fun, sure, it gets way too repetitive. Same 3 waves in pirate systems, like 3 weapons tops with diffrent effects (Graviton=Photon example). And while it's fun for a playthrou i cannot see myself playing this game again. I don't know.. MAYBE if it was MP modded. But even that, it has to come within the next 2-3 months or the game is dead.

So the game has 300 systems... like anyone cares after seeing the second system. The only thing of interest is the trade station and pirate gangs. End of story. You don't even have to move around... relating to Freelancer, in FL i was SOO happy when i found a wreck with some uber-weapons and expensive stuff. Also the atmosphere it had in certain places, and the fact that that atmoshpere managed to even stay the same online... it's amazing. I quickly learned to say "meh" evreytime i thought... "hey.. they chould have done X here".

I liked the fact that atleast you chould have chosen from First Person/Third Person but due to how it was implemented (static center) it dident help much in battle. And about the races... they tried to give them contour, an individuality, but tehy chould have done so much more..

The characters were pale to say the least but the lines.. they had ups and downs. Sometimes i found myself thinkign how lame the scene is and sometimes i really laughed at some of the jokes. The english voice acting was a bit under par but i got a lot of possitve feedback from the "beer-drinkers".

In any how, DSO does not come close to Freelancer, at most it's an Elite, sort-of remake.

the game crashes too much...
but it has a solid graphic!

btw, I found some nice darkstar one wallpapers and some more screenshots

Tha game is out so how about more than one thread? I'm wondering where I can find a change log for 1.2 to see if it will fix the problems with my new video card.