Quest for Privateer

Back in 1993 I was introduced to the perfect balance of free-form space flight-trader-combat atmospheric game called Privateer. Since then, I have yet to find another in the genre that didn't fall short in some area. My quest brings me now to Terminus; in this review I will share the progress of my quest. Dost Terminus bringeth me the conclusion to mine quest? We shall see...

Background on the genre: The free-form space trading/adventuring/action genre of games (best known are Elite and Privateer) is an elusive genre that requires an extremely difficult balance to be maintained. Free-form means you as the player can choose to do anything you want within the game and are not restricted to a linear "plot". In fact, you usually can ignore the plot all together and just play forever flying from star base to star base transporting goods, fulfilling contracts, and attacking your enemies; until you get bored of it.

In this genre, there are basic career types:

Trader- a person who likes to find the most lucrative routes shipping goods from one planet/system/city to another, reaping a profit along the way.

Mercenary- a person who earns their living taking contracts to kill people/things.

Pirate- a person who likes to prey upon victims, steal their cargo, and sell it for a profit.

Military- a person who doesn't care about free form and wants to just fly sorties without worrying about economics; and should be playing Wing Commander type games.

Investor/Businessman- a person who likes to create money generating machines; usually in the form of factories, trading business, repair hangers, etc.

A good free form space game consists of a balance of all of these (except maybe the Military career). What the industry doesn't seem to understand is that while Privateer fans want separate careers to choose from, the REAL motivation is making money to upgrade the ship doing several different FUN methods to do so. That means ping ponging between all careers. Privateer to date seems the only one to get this right. Even Privateer 2 missed the mark.

Will Terminus hit the mark?

INSTALLATION AND TECHNICAL STUFF

I finally bought Terminus and I now see that the demo was hardly representative of the game. I am very pleased and awed with the level of depth in this game. I installed it (regular install, no movies; about 700M worth of hard drive space). It installed cleanly. Since the v1.1 release, there have been a half a dozen patches released by the developer (Vicarious Visions) and as of date of this writing, patch v1.8 is the latest. I downloaded and installed this patch before firing up the game as well. As I finally ran the program, I had to insert the movie disk (disk 2 of 3) to watch the intro... which stuttered and sputtered on my CDROM drive as if there was some copy protection verification process going on. My stupid CDROM drive has a history of problems with this so I was forced to do a FULL reinstall (1.4G!!). Then the movies were fine. Now the problem was after playing a movie, the text gets all corrupted (until you start playing a game, after which it looks fine again). I suspect some bugs in the interaction between the game and my video card driver (Viper II). Besides these issues, Terminus has been very stable. I found that even though my system (Athlon 500MHz, 96M RAM) is fast enough to handle higher resolutions, it was best to play at the standard 640x480x32 so the video doesn't have to switch between resolutions when you switch between cockpit view and "computer systems" view.

THE STORY

Set in Earth future, man has discovered alien technology which has allowed the creation of "jump gates"; instantaneous travel between long distances. This has allowed man to populate the entire solar system, moving from planet to planet very quickly. Of course things can't be peaceful and the Mars Consortium comes into conflict with United Earth League, blah blah blah. The story is the typical future space conflict story; just with its own set of characters and its own reasons. The 200 page manual does, to Terminus' credit, have a rather detailed history of the game.

GETTING OUT THE (LAUNCH BAY) DOOR

As I started my single player story game, I needed to choose a career: Earth Military, Mars Military, Pirate Clan, or lone Mercenary. I bought this game to appease my Privateer desires so I skipped both military careers without even blinking. From reviews, the manual, and forums, I know that the military careers are rigid; more for the Wing Commander types who just want to fly missions without worrying about personal economics. Because I don't always want to be an evil guy, I shunned the pirate career and went for Mercenary... afterall, I want to be a Han Solo type of space jockey. I got to type in my own name and name my ship whatever I wanted; then I was dropped into the space station lobby.

Let me say that these types of games are not easy to get into. I had to read a good portion of the 200 page manual and run through the entire training mission just to begin to get familiar with the gameplay. In fact, I think I restarted the career 3 times before being comfortable enough to play through. Although this is a barrier for some people, this genre of game demands it and is a testament for the wonderful depth of gameplay was going to be treated to.

I briefly looked at my ship's loadout and configuration and was overwhelmed by the vast amounts of equipment and ship options available. The sheer variety and control the player has over configuration of their ship is pure joy for the privateering fan. With several subsystems, it really established a sense of ownership over your ship as you balanced the price, performance, and efficiency of your ship's engines, thrusters, computers, sensors, weapons, power supplies, and cargo. As an added but superfluous bonus, you can customize the paint job on your ships hull. I found the interface screens while docked to be annoyingly inefficient to use. For some reason the developer decided to put the navigation access on a totally different screen than the job board, which means there's a lot of window swapping to decide whether you want a contract or will reject a contract because of its distance from your current location. These interfaces, despite being functionally adequate, need a major overhaul to eliminate the tedium of tasks you want to get done. Although the interface suffers from frustrating tedium and inefficiency, I was left with a sense of accomplishment as I tried out my newly configured ship (with some new engines and thrusters) out in space to fulfill a simple patrol contract.

As the game starts, the player is given a low performance ship, a bucket of bolts that has horrible performance; typical for these kinds of games. After all, you are just a poor merc trying to climb his way up in the world. Not knowing what was what, I decided to take on a safe, low paying patrol contract and launch my ship for the first time into outer space without any modifications.

As my ship "launched" into space, I first noted that the HUD was adequately laid out but had nowhere near the perfection of "ergonomics" and information that a game like Freespace has achieved and continues to hold king too. Graphics were adequate with nice nebulae and trite lens flare effects. Ship models are nicely designed. Not as artsy as Homeworld's ship designs, but still "cool enough". I like the fact that you can target different vital parts of a ship in order to employ different strategies. For example, you can take out all the turrets to strip a ship of its defenses before taking out the drive section to disable the ship. This clearly opens up for some salvage or towing options in the real game. Sound served its purpose but again, not as glossy a production as Freespace. The musical score (played from the 3rd of 3 CDs) is full of good mood setting music.

Terminus uses the realistic newtonian physics model; which means, like in real space, there is nothing to stop you once you float in a particular direction. Until you apply thrusters to change course, you'll continue to drift. This is a vast difference between most "space shooters" where space flight is more akin to driving a submarine in a liquid goo. Privateer was more like the latter, while Elite had full newtonian physics. I liked Privateer better (ie had more fun) because my criteria is: I wanna be Han Solo, I care less about "realism". The newtonian flight model in Terminus was implemented wonderfully, and apparently the "science" of space ships in the game are equipped with thrusters beefy enough to keep you in control in the frictionless environment. Add in the "realism adjustment control" in the options, and Terminus made newtonian physics more accessible and fun for fantasy space jockeys like me who want a little realism, but not so much as to make it boring. As I got used to the system, I set the realism at "realistic" and am finding myself really enjoying the space flight realism.

As I began to fulfill my contract, I realized I still didn't quite know what to do. Yeah, I knew (after flipping through the tedious info screens) that I needed to patrol from jump gate belt->Jupiter to belt->Earth to belt->Mars to belt node I, but I wasn't sure HOW to find them, and what exactly constituted "going to" those locations. After some flipping through the manual (which is still too vague albeit its being 200 pages) and trial and error, I was able to fulfill my contract. The system is reasonably clean and logical once you figure it out. Again, a steep ramp up time for this complicated game. But I already began to loathe my hunk 'o junk ship as it putted along in space, had horribly inadequate power systems, and lame weapons (which is exactly what I expected to feel). When I came back to dock, I immediate sought upgrades.

I worked on putting better engines, better thrusters, better computers, better sensors, and better weapons. Before I knew it, 30 minutes had gone by. My reward was a transformation of my old bucket of bolts ship from a slow meandering slug to leaner meaner machine. Interestingly, unlike Privateer, Terminus starts you off with enough cash to immediately upgrade your ship (or even buy a new ship hull) to a reasonably competitive point. By doing this, they eliminated a lot of the first laborious climb in pulling small time contracts in order to upgrade your ship into something that can actually make you a formidable force. This is a gamble away from the traditional Elite/Privateer model and I wonder some of the joy and reward is that path of struggle to come up in the world. In it’s place, is the constant tweaking of the ships. Frustratingly, Terminus doesn’t give any hard number data sheets on any of the devices (no where in game or in manual) and instead describes things like “above average performance with low fuel economy”. With descriptions like that, there’s a lot of trial and error. I loathe the fact that there are no hard stats available. In MechWarrior 2, they gave you all the stats and you still had to go back to the drawing board several times to tweak your mech. There’s a lot of tweaking still with Terminus, but I would have wanted to be able to make educated guesses with real stats.

I still took on safe, low pay, boring patrols to earn money. I wanted to earn more money without yet rubbing anyone the wrong way so I bought a huge Durango class ship (big, slow, cargo ship) and kitted it up with economical engines and a mining laser. I headed out to the asteroid belt and proceeded to experience a bit of the safe, lucrative, and boring life of a miner. As I held the "fire" button down and watched my cargo slowly fill with raw minerals, I grabbed a weight on my real life desk and used it to prop the fire button. I went to my real life kitchen, grabbed a snack and set up a radio as I waited for my cargo hull to fill. I could hear other mining ships going about their business in this remote sector of space as the jump ring occasionally zapped in and out of operation. As I munched on my snack and watch the "free space" cargo counter head towards zero, I realized... my gosh... I really do feel like a space miner!

A DEEP DEEP WORLD

After a few hours into fulfilling patrol contracts and mining for minerals, I was really getting sucked in. I now had enough money to buy a nicer ship. Since I knew I was going to be doing more combat related tasks as a merc, I opted for one of the heavy fighters out of the seven ships that are available to purchase. I loaded it up and opted to accept my first strike contract. Combat takes some getting used to as worrying about the newtonian physics is a whole new ball game over the Wing Commander games I've mostly played. The computer is already an expert at flying in space but I was able to adjust accordingly, silently thanking the developer for including velocity vectors, ship trails, and inertia compensators.

Finding the strike contracts to be quite exhilerating (and with better pay), I realized that I should order my victim to drop his cargo before I blow him up for an easy bonus sale when I go back to base. I took on more and more and soon a voice in the back of my head wondered if I was getting anyone angry for killing so many people. A quick check on the bounty board and I saw my name up there with a bounty reward of 4k credits. Heh. Actions with consequences. I love it. In fact, I can even issue contracts on OTHER ships to have bounties placed on them.

At this point I realized that Terminus "careers" are more like affiliations; it only affects who you are friendly with, not so much the rigid tasks you must undertake. In Terminus, the mercenary-like tasks, the trader-like tasks, the pirate-like tasks, the miner-like tasks, etc are all available options for the player to bounce around with as they see fit. This is a major plus for Terminus and gives it BIG Privateerish points. In fact, it reaches the level of depth of Elite, beyond what Privateer accomplished. Particularly as a merc, I can be a trader, a miner, an assasin, a pirate, a vigilante, a smuggler, etc whenever and however I want. I am limited only by my own funds and resources. NOW THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR!!

For the first time in any of these games, I was able to experience the "plot line" of the game in a totally different perspective. Unlike Privateer, Terminus has a plot line that runs on it's own time... totally independent of the player. What surprised me, was that I didn't have to accept the plot-related contracts for the plot to progress. In fact, I'm finding it just as fun and emmersive to sit on the sidelines conducting my own personal privateering business as the events unfold around me.

After coming back from a mission, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to witness an attempted hijacking of a cargo ship by some pirates. The cargo ship called for help and I ran to his aid while some of my fellow mercs opted not to participate. The ship was able to safely jump out and later to my surprise I saw a news article about it at the "news terminal". On a previous game (when I was still learning) I had seen the same news story but never encountered the ship. This put into perspective my small size in the vast universe.

After playing vigilante and clearing the area of some hostile pirates that were harassing some merchants, I scooped up their cargo and set my coarse for the nearest base. Some new pirates showed up; apparently equipped with sniffer scanner and knew I was carrying some valuables in my cargo hold. I was ordered to drop my cargo, to which my response was to turn around and beat up my persuer. Even though I killed him, he managed to land some direct hit on my ship which really thrashed my systems. I was glad I had spared the extra 300 kg and money to buy the repair system as I limped back to the station before more pirates showed up.

MY COMPLAINTS

One thing I miss from Privateer that is lacking in Terminus is the personalization of characters. In Privateer, you were a character (many players referred to as “brown hair” because, well, he had brown hair) who was a rather cynical loner. A definite Han Solo. He interacted with several characters for a series of missions which introduced them to the player and allowed enough “multiple meetings” to begin to discover the type of relationship (friend, colleague, dating prospect, mentor/superior, or enemy). Although character appear in Terminus, the ones that you interact with are usually met only once and thus never leave the hollow, shallow 2D pictures and .WAV files they are made up of. Voice acting is ok, and nothing great. Listening to them while staring at a still digi-cam shot of what’s probably the developer’s programming staff, receptionist, FedEx guy, and janitors leaves you with a less than ememrsive feeling that blares out “this is only a video game”. Oh well, it’s the ship building, contracts, and persistent world that’s most important.

Some of the story missions are extremely hard. They pit you and maybe 1 or 2 fellow mercs against dozens of hostile ships. Considering the fact that AI equipment is just as good as yours, the computer is better at newtonian flying that you, and that you are totally outnumbered, the missions can be extremely frustrating as you have several people to contend with. This is completely illogical to have a mission where the probabilities for success are leaning towards failures; especially when it doesn’t have to be that way. Taking on 12 pirates? Clearly you need to hire more than just 2 mercs.

Another frustrating aspect is that you have 30 seconds to respond to story mission pages, read the description, and accept them. Then you have less than 3 minutes to fly back to a station, land, go to the job board, read the description, modify your ship appropriately, and accept the mission. If you are out in space when one of these contracts comes your way, you’d better be nearby a station or kiss story missions good bye.

The in flight engineering/communications/navigation screens are also frustratingly inefficient to use, especially if in the heat of battle.

MULTIPLAYER/ONLINE (Update October 5, 2000)

When you complete the story of Terminus and decided "wouldn't it be great if I could fly around trading with real people in the Terminus world?" You can. Terminus also can be played via TCP/IP network (internet or LAN). So long as someone with a reasonably fast connection hosts the game, playing with real people (in addition to the computer AI's) brings a whole new playing level. The biggest drawback is that there aren't too many servers currently available for online play. Plus, due to the "persistent world" nature of Terminus, servers are best left on 24/7; which makes it that much more unlikely to find a lot of servers.

Connecting is easy; you just need to know the server's IP address. As of this writing, I play on www.terminuspoint.com, a 24/7 free mode 100% realism server. It's lot of fun knowing that humans are flying around the same universe you are and their unpredictability adds a whole new dimension to the game. As it is easy to communicate with one another, I found myself making it a point to greet human ships as I flew past them, to hopefully create a positive rapport with them... and avoid the possibility that they may decide to hijack my ship and cargo. Cooperation with other online players can be extremely rewarded as you fly together in escorts; which can prove to be immensely profitable for mining operations.

Unfortunately, the game seems even more unstable in multiplayer mode. You're dealing with a whole new slew of issues including a crashing server, getting booted off the server, malfunction of missions (resulting in failures), and malfunction of the ship's "gadgets". For example, I became frustrated when one night all my strike contracts always failed when I fulfilled them. The server crashed and rebooted later and the next day strike contracts worked like normal. Online play will also make you susceptible to the typical internet play lags which put annoying pauses in the gameplay. A 3 second lag can mean the difference between getting or not getting a contract, crashing into or avoiding an object, etc.

Online play is a lot of fun, and it is the mode that I continue to play having finished the main plot.

CONCLUSION

Terminus is clearly a winner in it’s free form gameplay. The level of depth in this game is astounding and will provide hours and hours and hours of fantasy Han Solo flying. Is this my new Privateer? I’m happy to say mostly yes. Terminus has actually created a class in it’s own between both Elite and Privateer. It satisfies the free form space flying fun. It lacks the production value of Privateer, but has more sophistication. Big thumbs up on this one.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:

I've also been reading the Terminus bulleting boards at stationterminus.com. A user called "AlanCE" wrote a thread describing "a night in the life of a merc" where he describes with some imaginative extrapolation his immersive experiences with Terminus. This single thread was the final factor which led me to buy Terminus. I highly recommend reading AlanCE's thread:

http://www.stationterminus.com/cgi-bin/ubb2/display.cgi?action=st&fn=1&tn=597&fs=1&dp=20



Recommended: Yes