DESCENT, FREESPACE, RED FACTION and SAINT'S ROW developers Volition are shut down for good

In surprising and disappointing news, the video game studio Volition has been shut down after thirty years in operation. During that time, Volition were responsible for some of the most beloved titles and series in those respective eras. The decision to shut down came after the disappointing performance of their latest game, a reboot of their Saint's Row series, and their acquisition by Swedish mega-company Embracer Group.

Volition started life in 1993 as Parallax Software Corporation, where they started work on a game called Inferno. After various deals with publishers fell through, they teamed with Interplay to release the game, now retitled Descent, in 1995. The game was immediately noteworthy for its 3D graphics and its fast-paced combat. Alongside the following year's Quake, the game became a testbed for 3D graphics cards. The game was quickly followed by Descent II (1996).

The company rebranded itself as Volition and released its space space combat simulator Descent: Freespace - The Great War (aka Conflict: Freespace - The Great War in some territories) in 1998, to immense critical acclaim. The game was praised for taking on the X-Wing and Wing Commander series and beating them both at their own game. They followed up on the game with the massively-praised Freespace 2 (1999), widely regarded even today as the single finest space combat simulator of all time. Unfortunately, a cutting of content, budget issues, no marketing and the collapse of the space combat market (which also adversely affected the same year's X-Wing: Alliance) led to the game being released with relatively little fanfare and extremely disappointing sales. Freespace 2 would go on to enjoy an extremely long tail in sales and a vibrant modding scene that continues to this day.

In 2000 Volition released Summoner, a well-received action RPG based around characters recruiting monsters they could release into combat. As part of the marketing campaign, Volition teamed with the comedy group Dead Alewives to create a Dungeons & Dragons-themed comedy video, in which characters from both Summoner and the in-development Red Faction team up to play D&D. The video was an early memetic success, and was also used to tempt video gamers to try out the then-newly released 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons itself. Lines like, "Where is the Mountain Dew?" and "I attack the darkness!" occasionally crop up in tabletop games to this day. Summoner 2 followed in 2002.

In 2001 Volition released Red Faction, a first-person shooter set on Mars. The game was noteworthy for its destructible terrain and scenery, with players able to blast through walls to create alternate paths through maps. The game was a huge, smash hit for Volition and was followed by three sequels: Red Faction II (2002), Red Faction: Guerrilla (2009) and Red Faction: Armageddon (2011).

In 2004 Volition released their first and only licensed game, The Punisher (2004), which saw Thomas Jane reprise his role as Frank Castle from the film of the same name.

In 2006 Volition made their biggest gamble by deciding to take on Rockstar Games and the Grand Theft Auto series. Volition's equivalent series, Saint's Row, leaned into GTA's ruder, wilder and more insane side, although not quite to start with. Saint's Row (2006) and Saint's Row 2 (2008) at least nominally focus on the gritty underworld crime dealings of the 3rd Street Saints, but become more focused on the doings of crazy characters like Johnny Gat (Daniel Dae Kim) as the series progressed. By Saint's Row: The Third (2011) the series had become a satire of both the GTA format and the glorification of criminal excess, with the game focusing on the Saints becoming a media brand and empire. Saint's Row IV (2013) saw the Saints take over the White House and fight to save Earth from aliens who had conquered the planet and effectively digitised it, with the Saints fighting inside a computer programme which gave them superpowers. Saint's Row: Gat Out of Hell (2015) saw the Saints going to Hell to fight Satan, as you do.

Aware that they had maxed out the viewer disbelief of the series, Volition decided to first create a side-game only nominally set in the same universe, Agents of Mayhem (2017) and then a full reboot of the series, relocating the game to a new city with a new gang and more grounded tone, in the annoyingly-named Saint's Row (2022). Neither game caught gamers' imagination, with the reaction to Saint's Row (2022) being particularly hostile due to the abandoning of previous fan-favourite characters and storylines.

Embracer Group acquired the studio in 2018, but after the initial release and disappointing reception to Saint's Row (2022), they rotated management and oversight of the studio to another subsidiary, Gearbox. As a result of declining revenues and debates over where to take the studio next, it was then decided to shutter the studio permanently.

Sad news. Descent, Freespace, Red Faction, Summoner and Saint's Row are all very worthy franchises, with excellent games and some great ideas circulating around them. Volition were never afraid to take on the big boys and win, and their no-holds-barred attitude was refreshing in an industry that all too often plays it safe. Unfortunately, it seems their downfall was kowtowing to corporate requirements to be safe and predictable, with Saint's Row (2022) not being a bad game, just a redundant one once they abandoned the very thing that set them apart, their absurdist side and idiosyncratic sense of humour.

Hopefully the staff at Volition will find new roles, and Embracer will let some of their franchises live again in new titles that don't completely miss the point of the originals.

Wertzone Classics: Freespace 2

AD 2367. Thirty-two years have passed since the Terran-Vasudan Alliance defeated the invading Shivan fleet, destroying its flagship, the Lucifer whilst it was in subspace en route to the Sol system. The destruction of the Lucifer in the jump node collapsed all FTL links between Sol and other systems, leaving Earth cut off from the rest of the galaxy. Whilst scientists have worked to find a way of reestablishing the link, the Terrans and Vasudans have worked together with recovered Shivan technology to dramatically improve their weapons and capabilities.

However, a new civil war has erupted: Admiral Bosch has formed the Neo-Terran Front and established a new state, encouraging Polaris, Regulus and Sirius to secede from the Alliance. As the Alliance military struggles to recover the three systems and end the war, it also discovers an immense alien megastructure in the Gamma Draconis system, through which an even greater threat is waiting...

Freespace 2 was released in 1999 as the sequel to Conflict Freespace: The Great War and its expansion, The Silent Threat. Freespace had been a late but successful entry to the space combat simulator genre, selling and reviewing well and with its laser-like focus on gameplay winning over gamers tired of other series in the genre becoming far more obsessed with story and FMV cutscenes. Freespace 2 was rushed out of the door when publishers Interplay started having major financial problems and was released three months early without any publicity whatsoever. The game also had the misfortune to come out during the Great Space Combat Crash of 1999, when the entire genre effectively ceased to exist. Even the latest game in the perennially popular X-Wing series, X-Wing: Alliance, fared badly that year and very few new games in the genre have subsequently been released (StarLancer was a notable exception in 2001). Space games since this time - including the recent mini-resurgence spearheaded by Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky - have focused on trading or exploration over narrative and combat.

There is another explanation for why the genre crashed (beyond other ideas like the declining popularity of joysticks as game controllers): after Freespace 2 the genre had nowhere else to go. Freespace 2 was such a masterpiece that it rendered all other space combat games completely pointless.

Freespace 2 at first glance is identical to its predecessor. It controls exactly the same way, even down to the keybindings and functions being almost exactly the same, and the structure is similar. The game is similarly divided into campaigns, which is each subdivided into missions, for 35 missions in total. Each mission opens with a briefing about your objectives, with you able to jump straight into the action with a pre-prepared ship or you can select your ship and weapons loadout yourself.

The big changes become more obvious once the game starts. Capital ships now tend to be bigger and they are equipped with massive beam weapons, huge stream of continuous energy which can literally cut lesser vessels in half. It was overwhelmingly impressive in 1999 and, now upgraded with much better models and effects, it remains so in 2020. Capital ships are also defended by massive flak barrages, which are again hugely impressive (and, I suspect, a key reason why the relaunched Battlestar Galactica employed the same technology in its CG space scenes). There's also been a rebalancing of weapons, shields and armour across the new roster of fighters, making them more entertaining to fly. Controls are also more finely tuned than previously.

The big shift is in tone. Early missions revolve around a civil war between the Alliance and the Neo-Terran Front, but this becomes complicated by the discovery of a massive alien superstructure, which can generate jump nodes leading to a remote nebula. This gives rise to a huge number of missions set inside the nebula, with the player having to fight off enemies they can barely see. The nebula is a fun setting for missions, forcing the player to adapt to the changing circumstances.

These elements introduce a genuine SF sensawunda to the game which was wholly missing from the original title. The pacing then ramps up as events in the nebula trigger a renewed contact with the Shivans...and the discovery that the Shivan fleet from the first game was, at best, a minor scout force compared to what is really out there. The resulting alien onslaught feels like what the Reaper invasion from the much later Mass Effect 3 should have been, a relentless tide of superior alien vessels inexorably advancing for motives that can barely be comprehended. Unlike Mass Effect 3, which wimped out and provided an altogether corny (and overly-familiar) explanation for the Reapers' motivations, Freespace 2 never robs the Shivans of their mythic power through rote exposition. Instead, it provides ways for the player to fight and slow them down without ever really understanding what's going on.

The result is one of the best SF narratives gaming has ever seen, a fighting against the dying of the light until the final mission (which comes literally out of nowhere) puts a rather abrupt capstone on things. Freespace 2 moulds the traditional, cliched military SF narrative with more of a hard SF sensibility (and even a Cthulhu-esque sense of utterly powerless horror) and it's something that the genre has never really done before or sense.

Along the way the game delivers numerous twists and turns, such as sending you undercover into a NTF squadron and having to potentially commit war crimes to keep your cover intact or on a long-range, near-suicide run lone wolf scouting mission deep into Shivan space, which make things more interesting. The first game's tactical command approach also returns with the success of later missions being often down to how you command entire wings of fighters mid-battle. A relatively smooth learning curve, a highly adjustable difficulty rate and very impressive AI make all this a lot easier than it sounds.

Freespace 2 (*****) is, simply put, one of the greatest video games ever made, featuring exceptional space combat with a hard-boiled and ruthless attitude to storytelling and character that is quite remarkable.

Playing the Game: Playing games that are 21 years old can be a bit of an uphill experience, especially for a franchise that's never had an official remaster. Fortunately, that's not much of a problem; back in 2002 Volition released the source code for all three games in the series and that's allowed a very passionate modding community to continuously update them with new graphics, sound effects and voiceovers. The easiest way to play them is to get a copy of Freespace 2 from GoG, download and install the Knossos launcher, and, once that's done and found your copy of the installed game, you can then select which mods to use. The ones you really want to install are Freespace Port (which adds the original campaign), Freespace Port MedivaVPs (which updates all the graphics and sounds), Silent Threat: Reborn (which adds the latest version of the expansion campaign) and MediaVPs (which updates the Freespace 2 campaign with all the latest models and effects). Then you're good to go. Just remember to hit "play" on MediaVPs, not the actual Freespace 2 campaign, otherwise everything reverts to its 1999 version.

As a bonus, there are also dozens of fan-made mods for the game, including ones for well-known franchises like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, as well as a fan-made new game in the Wing Commander franchise. There are also numerous mods which expand on the Freespace and Freespace 2 storyline.

Wertzone Classics: Conflict Freespace: The Great War & The Silent Threat

AD 2335. The Galactic Terran Alliance (GTA) has been fighting a war against the Vasudan Empire for fourteen years. The war has taken its toll on both sides, but peace initiatives have not gained ground and both sides seem to be locked in a stalemate. Without warning, both sides are attacked by alien vessels belonging to a hitherto unknown species, quickly dubbed the "Shivans." The Shivans employ superior technology and seem to have no interest in gaining strategic or tactical advantages or seizing control of systems, only destroying everything in their path. With the Shivan fleet pressing in on the Vasudan homeworld and Earth, the humans and Vasudans reluctantly join forces to face the mutual threat.

The space combat video game genre enjoyed its heyday in the 1990s. Inspired by the original space simulator game, Elite (1984) and spearheaded by Wing Commander (1990), numerous games in the genre were released over the next decade. Arguably the best-received in terms of acclaim and sales was Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994). A late challenger was Conflict Freespace: The Great War (Descent Freespace in the United States for various copyright reasons), released in 1998 by Volition, who, as Parallax, had created the Descent series of combat games.

Freespace chose an inauspicious moment to enter the genre, as its popularity had arguably just peaked and the developers had no experience in the field, but it proved a good move. At the time the game came out, many of its rivals (such as the X-wing series) had seemingly abandoned single-player narratives in favour of chasing a multiplayer audience, whilst the Wing Commander series has grown obsessed with elaborate cut scenes and full motion video starring Hollywood stars over actual gameplay. Freespace struck a chord with its visceral action, impressive game engine, fine sense of pacing and stripped-back presentation. Freespace has no lengthy animated sequences or cheesy videos packed with military cliches, instead presenting its story simply and matter-of-factly, and insisting on getting players into the action as soon as possible.

The game consists of 29 missions, each of which starts with a briefing. After the briefing your ship and weapons loadout are auto-selected, allowing you to join the action immediately. Veteran players can choose their craft and weapons to better suit their play style. During the game you can command fast, versatile (but fragile) scouts, hardier bombers and jack-of-all-trades fighters. The game is notable both for its unusually finely-tuned difficulty setting (with five rather than three settings, including a "very easy" mode that effectively allows you to sit back and just watch things unfold as your wingmen do everything for you) and for its unusually strong AI, particularly that of your wingmen whom you can give very specific orders to (such as automatically fending off enemies targeting your fighter or targeting specific subsystems on an enemy capital ship). Part of the game's enduring appeal is this more strategic element, sometimes allowing you to stand off and observe a battle from afar and order your fighters on how to proceed.

Much more fun, of course, is the up-close and personal dogfighting. Freespace has a robust flight model and, with modern versions of the game, excellently updated graphics which makes close-in space combat often joyous to behold. Matching speeds with enemies, executing an afterburner burn to break a missile lock and dropping velocity to keep an enemy in your sights is all well-handled and instinctive. It was great in 1998 and remains great in 2020.

The story unfolds over a lengthy campaign. The story isn't the most dynamic ever in the genre, but does a good job of keeping you engaged throughout. There's a nice XCOM-ish feel to early missions as the Terrans and Vasudans have to scavenge Shivan technology to match their superior shields and sensors, and later on the battles becoming increasingly large and desperate. It's not the most compelling SF narrative ever written, but does it job very well. Particularly interesting is the lack of exposition with regard to the Shivans, who remain a terrifying enigma right up to the end.

The original game is great, although it does have some technical drawbacks, particularly the lack of fully-voiced dialogue; more than once important plot information unfolds through on-screen text dialogue, which is easy to completely miss mid-battle.

After completing the main campaign, you can proceed on with the game's expansion, The Silent Threat. The modern version of the expansion includes 18 missions (all voiced this time), generally somewhat harder than in the original game, and with a much murkier and more original storyline. I must admit to enjoying this more than the original game, as it moves away from standard SF cliches a bit more.

Conflict: Freespace (****) and The Silent Threat (****½) are both joys to play in 2020, having, thanks to the dedicated and active modding community, aged and matured like a fine wine (see below). Even more importantly, they set the scene for Freespace 2, one of the best video games ever made.

Playing the Game: Playing games that are 22 years old can be a bit of an uphill experience, especially for a franchise that's never had an official remaster. Fortunately, that's not much of a problem; back in 2002 Volition released the source code for all three games in the series and that's allowed a very passionate modding community to continuously update them with new graphics, sound effects and voiceovers. The easiest way to play them is to get a copy of Freespace 2 from GoG, download and install the Knossos launcher, and, once that's done and found your copy of the installed game, you can then select which mods to use. The ones you really want to install are Freespace Port (which adds the original campaign), Freespace Port MedivaVPs (which updates all the graphics and sounds), Silent Threat: Reborn (which adds the latest version of the expansion campaign) and MediaVPs (which updates the Freespace 2 campaign with all the latest material). Then you're good to go.

As a bonus, there are also dozens of fan-made mods for the game, including ones for well-known franchises like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, as well as a fan-made new game in the Wing Commander franchise. There are also numerous mods which expand on the Freespace and Freespace 2 storyline.

The best space combat game of all time has a new modding portal

Freespace 2, originally released in 1999, remains the finest space combat game of all time, with impeccable pacing, story, combat and, for the time, visuals. Thanks to the developers, Volition, releasing the source code, modders have run riot for twenty years, constantly developing new mods doing everything from updating the graphics to adding entire new campaigns, some based on properties such as Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

A new portal, named Knossos (appropriately, after the giant space portal in the game) has been launched to make modding for Freespace 2 easier than ever.

To use Knossos you need an install of Freespace 2. The game is available free, because the source code was released, but for convenience you can get a copy from GoG very easily.

Probably the best place to start is with the FreeSpace Port MediaVps mod, which upgrades all the graphics, models and lighting to the latest standards, and then FreeSpace Port, which updates the original Conflict Freespace: The Great War and its expansion, The Silent Threat to modern standards. Then dive into Freespace 2 itself before checking out the other material.

The world's greatest space combat sim is available free

GoG are running a literal giveaway where you can pick up a copy of Freespace 2 for exactly nothing. The giveaway is running for the next two days.

The giveaway is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of Freespace 2 on 30 September 1999. Freespace 2 is, succinctly put, the greatest space combat game ever made, achieving some kind of towering apotheosis in the genre that caused it to effectively implode shortly afterwards. The slightly different space trader genre continued (via Freelancer, the X: Beyond the Frontier series and the recent Elite: Dangerous) but after a few noble efforts (Starlancer, Tachyon: Beyond the Fringe) the space combat genre spluttered out of existence. Attempts to resurrect it have had mixed results, with the first big challenger likely to be Squadron 42 (part of the wider Star Citizen project), which does not have a scheduled release date at present.

The game's strength is in its instinctive flight model, it's still-impressive graphics and its moody, atmospheric storyline, which pits humanity and an allied alien race against the enigmatic Shivans and a fifth column of human traitors. The game is a sequel to Conflict: Freespace - The Great War (1998) and its expansion, The Silent Threat (1998), both playable in the Freespace 2 engine via mods. The game's mod scene is phenomenal, updating the graphics, adding new campaigns and allowing players to play total conversion mods, including one set in the Battlestar Galactica universe.

For absolutely nothing, the game is well worth picking up.

Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora - Shattered Armistice

Forty years have passed since the First Cylon War, but the Colonial Fleet maintains a strong defence against the potential return of the enemy. Their newest weapon is the Command Navigation Program, an advanced computer system that massively improves warship and fighter response times and efficiency. The fighter wing of the Battlestar Theseus is tasked with testing the program. Thanks to bad - or good - luck and timing, the CNP is not working on the ship and its fighters when the Cylons attack the Twelve Colonies and the battlestar has a fighting chance for survival...

Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is a fan-made space combat game based on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica franchise. It uses the Freespace 2 engine, but you don't need a copy of that game for this to work. In fact, Diaspora is completely free of charge and can be downloaded here.

Fan-made games used to mean "amateurish". Not so with this game. Made over a period of four years, the game features professional-quality audio and voice work, an original musical score and often jaw-dropping visuals (the background skyboxes in particular are fantastic). This game may have the best explosions I've ever seen in a video game. The game also doesn't play as fast and loose with canon as I was expecting. The game casts you as a pilot on the Battlestar Theseus during the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies and has you providing cover as the ship attempts to rescue civilian ships from Aerilon whilst the planet burns below (several of these ships end up in the Galactica fleet) and tries to rejoin the main Colonial forces at Virgon for a doomed counter-attack (as mentioned in the mini-series). The Theseus is a new design - borrowing elements from both the Valkyrie and the Pegasus - and a most convincing one. If this had showed up in the series itself, it would have fitted right in.

As space games go, Freespace 2 is, even seventeen years after release, simply the greatest one ever made and it provides an excellent framework for a BSG game. Like the TV show itself, the game does not use Newtonian physics but a sort-of combination of physics and an "aeroplanes in space" model which is actually quite effective. This allows you to do the kind of "turn and burn" moves seen in the TV show and to deactivate your engines and strafe targets by flying on one direction but facing and shooting in another. Combat is both satisfying and dangerous: even the Viper Mk. VII is a relatively fragile craft and the Cylon Raiders are difficult-to-hit targets. You also get to pilot a Raptor on one mission equipped with missile pods and dual miniguns, which is even more fun.

Issues? Well, it's a short game at only six missions (some of them are quite long though), but there is a multiplayer mode which stretches things out. Also, some of the game's damage readings seem buggy. On a mission to disable a Cylon basestar's heavy missile batteries I found my cannons did more damage than heavy bombs, and both other fighters and the Theseus seemed to take down the batteries in seconds whilst my weapons barely scratched it. There's also some occasional stiff movement and animation that betrays the lack of budget and the relatively small team behind it.

But these are pretty minor things (just switch to engaging fighters in the basestar mission), easily made up for by the fact that the game is free and a lot of fun to play. Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora - Shattered Armistice (****) whiles away a few hours very nicely indeed.

The same team are now working on a follow-up, Worthy of Survival, hopefully for release in the near future.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: DIASPORA released

Following quickly after the news of Black Mesa getting a release date (14 September), another long-in-development fan game has also been unleashed into the wild.

Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora is based on the reimagined version of the SF TV series. The game has been in development for four years, spinning off the never-released Beyond the Red Line title. Whilst using the classic Freespace 2 engine, Diaspora is not a 'mod' requiring the player to already own a game. Instead, it is available for free download and is a self-contained game in its own right.

The game is a space combat simulator pitting the player as a Colonial pilot against the Cylon forces. The storyline has been kept under wraps, but it appears to feature a small Colonial military taskforce that escaped the Cylon ambush in the pilot mini-series, with a story that proceeds in parallel to the TV series (this seems to be the major difference from Beyond the Red Line, which was more of an attempt to directly replicate the TV series and its battles in the game). The Galactica and its fleet do appear, however.

The game is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.