Vagabond: [url=]http://game-central.org/2009/podcasts/gcp-episode-39/[/url]
Listen around 32:30.
Whiteblade999: Well I listened to about 2 minutes of it and from what I can gather you say it is because it influenced Freespace and the Space (or space-sim) genre but at the same time Freespace 2 did the opposite.
I can't argue about it being influential because it was but quite a few influential games don't live up to their refined counterparts while some of the originals are better. Freespace 2 is a game that built on what Descent (as you mentioned) and Wing Commander did. Now I think Freespace 2 not having a story is a joke and its better then Wing Commanders. Does that make Wing Commander a bad game? Not by any means but the Wing Commander Saga was good while at the same time not being the best. To me the gameplay and story of Freespace 2 (and the first one while we are at it) is superior to the Wing Commanders so it is the better game.
Eh, part of my problem with the Freespaces (not that I didn't really enjoy them) was the way they made you into just a nameless cog in the machine. Yes, they had to do that because the storyline was so big that it was beyond you. It was a huge, sweeping storyline and as important as your missions were, they were only a small (though influential) part of that storyline. So I understand the reasoning behind it.
But the end result was that while I enjoyed flying the missions, and I enjoyed much of the feel of the game, in the end, I wasn't nearly as invested in the whole thing as I was in the various Wing Commanders which had far more established characters. Freespace couldn't afford to develop its characters beyond the really big ones like the major Admirals and such who drove the various fleets. All your wingmen were just nameless pilots and you never were able to grow attached to them.
The WCs took the opposite approach. Your wingmates were your buddies. You flew with them, they became your pals, you missed them when they were KIA. And when you pulled off a really hard mission and realized just how much impact your own personal bit of flying had had on an entire sector's worth of space, it really felt like you'd accomplished something special.
I found the WC storylines sucked me in far more, but that's me. Some people would rather have the epic plotline even if it meant they were just some wheel spinning in the middle of it with only a seemingly minor role to play in the proceedings. That's fine, but while it worked for me in a sense, it didn't work -as well- for me as the WC approach did.