A producer at Volition has said that there's a group of people on the team that would "commit murder" to get the chance to make Freespace 3, citing Freespace 2's poor sales as the reason Volition hasn't returned to the space sim series.
In an interview with NowGamer , Producer at Volition, Jim Boone, was asked how the team would feel about making Freespace 3. Boone said "You have no idea. There is a group of people that would commit murder to do that game. The biggest problem that we have is… oh man, that game is so beloved. I did a bunch of missions for both games and it's so dear to my heart I can't even tell you. The problem we had was Freespace 2 didn't sell as well…"
Boone says that he believes that Freespace 2 sold poorly because joysticks were going out of fashion. "this was a time when Quake was out and it was very much about the mouse and keyboard. 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 that the more modern FPS with mouse and keyboard came out, as opposed to just keyboard like Wolfenstein or something."
"My theory has been, ever since we've got analogue as a standard controller for consoles no one has done a heavy-duty, top, top quality space sim on console." When asked if he felt Volition were the developers to make it happen, Boone said "I feel like there's an opportunity there."
Freespace 2 is a regular member of the PC Gamer top 100 games of all time list, and is one of the best space combat sims ever made. If you feel like checking it out, it's currently available through Good Old Games for $5.99. Would you play a new Freespace game?
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
