Freelancer Shots

No for the really bad news...
the game is being designed for <mouse> controls..
thats right..not for the joystick,,but rather you control your ship with a mouse
as for no multiplayer...i can tell you why
it would take them a year to balance the persistant universe with the story line missions. (i have had to do that on a similiar game) and ussually ends up not working if some ya hoo wants to fux it up. (just think of all those 13 year old tards that like to screw up your mp game folks)
Now as for why it has taken so long..i'm guessing there is hardly any one on the production team,,that tends to stretch out dev time.
(i also saw the demo at E3 two years ago) not much change since then

Personally, I was demo'd Freelancer at Gen Con this year *(I write for a medium-sized game site) and my first impression was "They've been working this long on what?..."

I found it to smell strongly of Wing Commander - a great game, but hardly cutting-edge worthy of 4 YEARS development. Since then it appears from the article that they've doubled the number of star systems (IIRC it was only 24 when we saw it in August and the group of reviewers kinda looked underwhelmed). Another news item was that in the Gen Con demo it was said flat out that they were NOT intending it to be a multiplayer game or have any modability built in. Those of us watching were frankly stunned that any company would presume to put out such a game in 2003 and NOT have internet play. Whew, that took balls to even suggest. Glad to see they've dispensed with that idea.
It just felt very....closed. You've got X systems that you can travel to, with something akin-but-not-quite to warp gates/jump points. You can travel on the transit lines and get from place to place quickly, but you can apparently bail out of them (or get waylaid out of them) and travel for any length of time in normal space. You can jump back on the warp lanes as long as the warp gates or whatever they are, are all still functioning.
There's some sort of 'dynamic market' thing going on in the background (merchants in space XVIII if you want to play that way...) but the prices DON'T fluctuate?
I'll be frank, I don't remember much about the review. I stood there for the better part of an hour watching this guy go through the game and was totally unimpressed. 13 missions? Zzzzz. From the way he talked, it wasn't going to be open-ended at all, just the Wing-Commander linear mission tree.
Just color me: Not impressed, and not looking forward to it any longer.

Hey, at least I did get a nifty T-shirt. :)

longer than DNF? I should check.

I seemed to remember it looking better before, ah well.

I dunno, I was stoked for freelancer after playing through Starlancer, but now Im a little more excited about EVE online, from those european devs.

Is this also going to be released for Xboxen? I really wanna play but im not gonna upgrade my computer for it

I so terribly want this game. Let's hope it turns out to be as uber as they claim.

that third pic is rather pretty. i hope this game turns out decently...