Action Vault: What are your major considerations in the area of mission design? How many missions will there be, and how much will they differ from one another?
Jorg Neumann: The main consideration is that the missions need to be fun (obviously) - but they also have to make fictional sense. Freelancer features a total of 13 story chapters, which could each be seen as a single mission, but in reality are conglomerations of as many as 10 mission objectives. A given mission can take well over two hours to complete.
But the real "meat" of the mission system lies in what we sometimes call "random missions." The universe supports about 3,000 different trade routes that are offered to the player as cargo missions and are used by transports and convoys to deliver their goods from base to base. Other mission types include patrols, assassination missions, and destroy missions. All in all, Freelancer will have more than 5,000 different missions that can all be adjusted for various difficulty levels.