I can see how it wouldn't have aged that well as the content is indeed limited. Of course, the rest of the world tends to open up fire on you straight away, but by then your pimped Centurion is basically godmode. Faction reputations are a thing in the game, and over time you can get on friendly terms with pirates and even Kilrathis, which is hilarious. It was pretty nice at the time, opening up the WC world for you to play with. So I was happy to complete it, but I am also confident I will probably never play it again. That's pretty rare for me - the last game I did that with was Dark Souls several months ago. I played the whole game in about 5 days, without breaking to try anything else.
Still though, I will grant that it was good enough to motivate me through the main campaign plus the expansion pack (I think it took me about 14 hours to complete both of them). The main plot has a couple of escort missions, which thankfully weren't too bad, but otherwise it's a constant loop of "Travel to nav point, kill enemies, warp to a new system, land, repair/upgrade, repeat." They're dressed up different ways, but that's basically all there is. Plus there's really only 2 types of missions for the entire game: killing enemies or ferrying goods. I didn't find any hidden areas or side quests anywhere, and after checking the walkthroughs it doesn't look like there are any. There are minimal weapon and equipment upgrades, only 4 ships to choose from, and nothing to do at the various planets except get more missions and hear rumors from the bartender. The music is also nice and the dialogue and voice acting are solid, especially for the time this game was released.īut the story is completely forgettable and there's very little variety in anything.
Early on, the game is quite difficult until you get a few important upgrades, and the challenge stays fairly consistent all the way to the end. The combat is the best aspect by far, which is good because that's 80% of what you're doing the whole time. So after all that setup time, is the game any good today? Unfortunately I'd say "Not really." However I doubt that is a problem with Steam - more likely it's a limitation of the game itself, or possibly DOSBox's joystick support. When shooting at far away enemies, you want to be able to make very small movements to line up the target just right, but even though Steam has very extensive analog settings available, making those fine adjustments was still difficult. The only aspect I wasn't able to adjust to my satisfaction was trying to lower the sensitivity of the left analog. In short, Steam's controller customization support is pretty epic. With that configuration I was able to play the entire game, with every single command mapped, without ever touching the keyboard. The whole setup sounds confusing but it really didn't take long to get used to. The Left Trigger is reserved as a modifier - holding it down enables alternate functions for the d-pad and face buttons (mapped to 1-8 number keys which are used for in-flight comms), and the analog sticks (mapped to camera switching). The left and right touchpad are mapped to rotating through the ship's MFD displays (tap left for MFD 1, right for MFD 2). Those separated with a "|" are a single input that has multiple functions in-game, depending on the situation. The functions that are separated with a "/" are dual inputs - regular press for the first function and long press for the second (except for the Circle button which is regular press for decrease speed and double press for stop). I gave up for a couple of days but then thought, "Could this work with my DS4 controller if I played it through Steam?" It took a solid hour or two of configure/test/repeat, but it turns out the answer is yes. I think the reason is because WC 1 includes a targeting cursor when using a mouse, which lets you re-center easily, whereas Privateer does not have this so it's much harder. That did not go well, which was disappointing since this worked alright when I tried it with WC 1 not too long ago. I don't have a joystick, so initially I tried playing with mouse+kb. I just recently had an itch to play a story-based space combat sim and had Privateer in my GOG library, so I downloaded the game, made a couple of tweaks to DOSBox's. I had played some of this back in the day on my old 486, but never got very far.
Tl dr After spending some time getting the controls worked out (props to the Steam Input devs at Valve), the game was okay but not one I'd recommend to anyone today for any reason other than nostalgia.