The Freelancer you played is not the game Chris Roberts originally designed. Not even close.
When Roberts founded Digital Anvil in Austin in 1996 and started pitching Freelancer — then already in early development — the scope was extraordinary. The design called for seamless system-to-system travel with no loading screens anywhere in the game. Not just within systems, as shipped, but between them. You would fly from Liberty to Bretonia without a single loading screen breaking the journey. The sector would be one continuous, streaming space.
It also called for planetary landing. You could take your ship down to the surface of a planet, get out, and drive vehicles on the ground. Environments were built. The technology existed in some form. When the Microsoft acquisition happened in 2000, the scope was reduced to hit a ship date, and planetary landing was one of the first things to go.
And that was not all. The original design included a fully dynamic economy — NPC prices that responded to player behavior at a sector level. If you flooded a station with ore, prices dropped. If you flew combat missions and kept a trade route clear of pirates, traffic picked up and goods became available that weren't before. The shipped game has fixed trade routes with static pricing. Functional, but nothing like what was planned.
NPC characters were supposed to have daily schedules. They would go places, do jobs, have lives independent of the player. The Sirius sector was meant to feel inhabited whether or not you were watching. What shipped was scripted patrol paths.
Roberts departed mid-development after the Microsoft deal. Phil Watanabe stepped in and finished the game. What Watanabe delivered is genuinely great. But it's a trimmed version of something that, had it all shipped, would have been extraordinary.
It's interesting to think about what Freelancer actually was in Roberts' head in 1997. In some ways, he's still building it. Star Citizen is the third attempt.