Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War
"Descent: FreeSpace" was well received as a single-player space simulation that integrated all the desired features of its genre, from competent AI wingmen, to the presence of large capital ships that not only dwarf the fighters piloted by the player, but also explode spectacularly when destroyed. However, the game's multiplayer mode was criticised, as it was plagued by lag and inaccurate tracking of statistics. An expansion for the game, which was less well received, was also released in 1998 under the title of "Silent Threat", and focuses on events after the main game's campaign with the player working for an intelligence branch of the Terrans' armed forces that later attempt to overthrow the Terran government. A sequel to "Descent: FreeSpace" entitled "FreeSpace 2", was released in 1999 to critical acclaim.
Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War
"FreeSpace" was Volition's first project after the split from Parallax Software, which also spawned Outrage Entertainment. It is not part of the canon of the "Descent" computer game series, and contained none of its ideas and only small portions of its code. It was only prefixed with "Descent" to avoid trademark issues with Mijenix Corporation's "FreeSpace", a disk compression utility. Volition also used the term "FreeSpace" in the game to initially describe what became later known as subspace. The game was conceived by Adam Pletcher, with all the features of space simulator games his team had found to be fun. The games "" and "Wing Commander" were their primary inspirations, and those influences made their way into the game's flight model, along with the influence of historical WWII dogfights. Themes from the fiction of "Star Wars", "", and "Ender's Game" form a part in shaping the background and story of the "FreeSpace" world. The chaotic battles between masses of ships commonly found in science-fiction anime became one of the features of "FreeSpace".