![]() Volition was acquired by THQ in 2000, and it's possible that the Freespace license came with it, but it's also possible that it was owned by some other party. I've seen this happen with a very large number of older games, and it tends to happen with less popular titles from back when electronic copies of documents weren't really a thing. The license for "Freespace" has fallen into what's known as license hell. Today I don't think any of the original devs would still be around at Volition let alone willing to give it a go. This seems pretty likely seeing how Volition began working on much more regular shooters almost exclusively from 2000 onward (when they were bought by THQ). The developers who originally worked on the Freespace games have since left Volition. The market's now somewhat saturated for space combat sim games, and just because it carries the name of Freespace 3 doesn't mean it'll be any good - worse, people might think it's just trying to cash in on the trend by underhandedly using its old title. In addition to this, if they were to develop the game now and try to release it I think it'd almost certainly fall flat on its face because of games like Star Citizen, the new X, and Elite Dangerous. It's possible that back at the time the idea of Freespace 3 was still on the table, but took too long to take form and after enough time had passed people weren't interested in spacesims any more, or Freespace's name wouldn't mean much to the market. I think the poor sales are almost certainly the reason for it, but here's some other possibilities I can think of: It would be kind of risky though, simply because any company that messed up Freespace 3 would get pulverized by negative PR. I think FS3 could do really well on Kickstarter. There also seems to be a renewed interest in space sims now, with Star Citizen, a new X game coming out, and Elite Dangerous being okay at least. Despite this, I think that after years of having its praises shouted from the rooftops by people like me, the series has such a good pedigree that a sequel could be very viable. The reason for this is apparently that FS2, despite great reception, did atrociously on release, selling only 26,000(!) copies. With all that said, there is no Freespace 3. FS2 is often considered the swan song of the space sim genre, and is one of my top 5 games of all time. They both hold up extremely well and are cheap on GOG if you want to try them, which I would advise you to do. ![]() They were some of the last space sims released before the genre effectively died for a decade or so. For those unaware, Freespace and Freespace 2 are awesome space sims from the late 90s.
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