02-26-2021, 05:50 AM
So, normally my thoughts should be in the flood threads, but this is my honest-to-God opinion on something that actually effects the state of the mod, the state of the game, the state of the universe that I'm trying to craft characters and lives in. Therefore and thusly, I'll pvp on the forums and make a wall of text. Enjoy. Or don't. I'm not your mom.
SUPER AWKWARD TRANSITION THAT SEEMS TO HAVE NO BEARING ON THE CONVERSATION
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Apologies for text wall, cba to format. Also apologies for deviation from my more predictable character. Regular, angry, spastic Godslayer will return in a few hours.
I started my career, so to speak, in disco like anyone else. Fully disregarding my corsair from a time many years ago when all I did was fly a titan and run missions, I made a new character without putting any thought into it, I read the stuff in my cargo, I read the beacons outside the planet Eire, and I headed off to mine helium. I did a lot of back and forth, I bought myself a transport. I thought I was perfectly set, I introduced myself to the forums. I was picked up by some good people, most not, and drew my battle lines very early.
Immediately, I was thrust into a bustling activity during the wind-down of the Gallic war. I traded some events, I joined LH~, which earned me a lot of enemies right off the bat. I was sandwiched all the time, and a certain player had the heart to gift me a Havok with scatterguns, back before they were nerfed. Time after time, I found myself in the hustle and bustle of Liberty and the border worlds near it. It was the most life I'd ever seen in freelancer. At that same time, I joined Commune, which earned me opponents on the other side of the map too. Everywhere I went, there was battles. Not to mention trading, all the piracy, and this new (to me) advent of the forums, I was in an open-world adventure game.
For an entire year, I lived the life of multiple adventures at once. I was a wanted criminal, a nomad worshipper, a brave trader. I pirated military gunboats, chased targets across an entire house, dove between flurries of weapon fire to hunt down the one person my wing commander told me to, and had my ego expanded by my opponents logging off the second they saw my faction tag online. I followed these majestic glowing ships, advanced far beyond the simple blue phallic objects of vanilla, into battle against every enemy that I could find. Glowing tentacles guided me to fight an all out war as a fanatic.
I dragged cargo across systems with more dangers than safe spaces, watching new stars scorch protoplanets, the neutron star I remembered from vanilla now glowing, pulsing, and blasting a lazer off into space. I was caught up in a life in freelancer I never could have imagined on my own. I took pictures outside the cloud over the dyson sphere, I bought new engines, I trash talked naval cruiser captains, I helped strangers. This world that we have here is dense, always full of activity, and always providing something else for you to do. Your work is never done. No matter where you go, there was something or someone to occupy your time.
Don't get me wrong, there's an entire forum's worth of issues that people can have with this game, and with this mod. Yet only just recently have I heard complaints with the starscapes, the planets, the geography (for lack of a better word) of the space. Flying through these places in a camera ship would always show you what this world had to offer. The Red Hessian Army kicking down the doors of Rheinland with a bright orange cloud painting the scene. The Gas Miner's Guild diving in and out of thick, blue fog to shred a Bismarck's hull as it tries in vain to fend them off. The Order and the Nomads facing off over the dead body of Toledo, the victims and the victors ripping at each other over the shredded graveyard that launched the final mission series of vanilla. Zoners hiding their convoy behind a massive purple planet, avoiding the eyes of a very hostile empire.
Any reviewer describing the world of this mod would use the same one that they'd use in any open world. For Zelda BotW, for RDR, for Assassin's Creed, for Witcher. Pick a game, and they will call it "alive". Things are happening, the universe is moving, the planets are turning, the stars are shimmering, and the people are fighting. Hostile ships from factions you either pissed off by your own hand, or were already pitted against by your identity. For better or worse, the modern gamer is conditioned to expect a world packed to the brim with life, with activity. Every faction is out here looking to increase their activity, to prevent their death. So for one and a half years I was fully embedded into this world. I was the busiest pirate, the most hard-working cultist, the most dedicated transporting ship. Eventually, though, I had an oorp fight. Some people swore they'd hunt every ship I flew to make sure I could never log on again. So I stopped playing in Liberty, and had to find ways around it.
Immediately, I was thrust into a bustling activity during the wind-down of the Gallic war. I traded some events, I joined LH~, which earned me a lot of enemies right off the bat. I was sandwiched all the time, and a certain player had the heart to gift me a Havok with scatterguns, back before they were nerfed. Time after time, I found myself in the hustle and bustle of Liberty and the border worlds near it. It was the most life I'd ever seen in freelancer. At that same time, I joined Commune, which earned me opponents on the other side of the map too. Everywhere I went, there was battles. Not to mention trading, all the piracy, and this new (to me) advent of the forums, I was in an open-world adventure game.
For an entire year, I lived the life of multiple adventures at once. I was a wanted criminal, a nomad worshipper, a brave trader. I pirated military gunboats, chased targets across an entire house, dove between flurries of weapon fire to hunt down the one person my wing commander told me to, and had my ego expanded by my opponents logging off the second they saw my faction tag online. I followed these majestic glowing ships, advanced far beyond the simple blue phallic objects of vanilla, into battle against every enemy that I could find. Glowing tentacles guided me to fight an all out war as a fanatic.
I dragged cargo across systems with more dangers than safe spaces, watching new stars scorch protoplanets, the neutron star I remembered from vanilla now glowing, pulsing, and blasting a lazer off into space. I was caught up in a life in freelancer I never could have imagined on my own. I took pictures outside the cloud over the dyson sphere, I bought new engines, I trash talked naval cruiser captains, I helped strangers. This world that we have here is dense, always full of activity, and always providing something else for you to do. Your work is never done. No matter where you go, there was something or someone to occupy your time.
Don't get me wrong, there's an entire forum's worth of issues that people can have with this game, and with this mod. Yet only just recently have I heard complaints with the starscapes, the planets, the geography (for lack of a better word) of the space. Flying through these places in a camera ship would always show you what this world had to offer. The Red Hessian Army kicking down the doors of Rheinland with a bright orange cloud painting the scene. The Gas Miner's Guild diving in and out of thick, blue fog to shred a Bismarck's hull as it tries in vain to fend them off. The Order and the Nomads facing off over the dead body of Toledo, the victims and the victors ripping at each other over the shredded graveyard that launched the final mission series of vanilla. Zoners hiding their convoy behind a massive purple planet, avoiding the eyes of a very hostile empire.
Any reviewer describing the world of this mod would use the same one that they'd use in any open world. For Zelda BotW, for RDR, for Assassin's Creed, for Witcher. Pick a game, and they will call it "alive". Things are happening, the universe is moving, the planets are turning, the stars are shimmering, and the people are fighting. Hostile ships from factions you either pissed off by your own hand, or were already pitted against by your identity. For better or worse, the modern gamer is conditioned to expect a world packed to the brim with life, with activity. Every faction is out here looking to increase their activity, to prevent their death. So for one and a half years I was fully embedded into this world. I was the busiest pirate, the most hard-working cultist, the most dedicated transporting ship. Eventually, though, I had an oorp fight. Some people swore they'd hunt every ship I flew to make sure I could never log on again. So I stopped playing in Liberty, and had to find ways around it.
SUPER AWKWARD TRANSITION THAT SEEMS TO HAVE NO BEARING ON THE CONVERSATION
As a primarily first-person-shooter gamer, I played almost every CoD ever, every Halo as soon as it came out. Quake and Unreal Tournament were my stomping grounds, where I learned what it was to take a game seriously. I could recite stats from UT for hours, tactics, map info, official tournament records, the players I beat, the players I couldn't. I could tell you the differences between the damage tier of the Ion Satellite and the Redeemer. I could tell you the exact moment to shoot down the Target Painter plane to do the most total destruction in a straight line. I could tell you that that plane was named the Dragonfly, and had a pilotable version named the Phoenix that existed in the game's code. I can still hear the "donk donk" noise that the buttons in the menu make. I'll never speak another language perfectly, but I can tell you exactly how many rockets kill a tank.
However, after it was all said and done, after I competed in some tournaments and championships, after I played with player after player and mod after mod, I was faced with boredom. I hit the top of my stride, I knew that there was nothing but downhill from there. The people I was playing weren't getting any better, I was just slowly getting worse. The people I played with before, the cream of the crop, had left the game for greener fields. The people who were left were the ones who were just not quite good enough, and the people who just played for fun. I knew every map like the back of my hand, and playing other gamers just wasn't fun. It was a one-sided slaughter every time. So the answer I found at the end of it all? I came back to the maps, where my greatest victories and most demoralizing defeats had happened.
The first few times, I just ran back and forth down hallways I knew well, the familiar rush of adrenalin kicked in, and I ran across the main highways of the maps like a veteran soldier in his bootcamp training grounds. But eventually, it wore off, and I began seeing things. Things I'd never seen before. Monitors in a Mothership that said -something-. What it said, I wasn't sure. I went through trying to decipher it multiple times, but never got anywhere. Extremely detailed skeletons at the bottom of spike pits and under submarines. The literal north pole above my head in this facility where I beat my greatest rival 50-0. One singular lonely fan in the stadium where I earned respect with a sniper. That same fan at the bottom of the spike pit in a deathmatch map I hated, behind a window, cheering as dead bodies of dumb people came raining down in this environment that only just recently became clear to me as a gladiator's arena. Ruins of a castle under a frozen river, the fact that the starting base for Torlan was a literal fort, these things that I fully missed on my way to get first blood.
I was honestly shocked. How could I have missed these things that I walked by, ran by, even shot at time and time again? These things, places, and paths just outside of the high traffic areas had stayed invisible to me, even though I counted myself among the best of the best. The only thing that had ever gone through my mind about these maps was the utility. The hallways existed to get me from point A to point B with as many angles of engagement as possible. Suddenly, I was faced with sharks that I'd never even seen before, despite being right outside a massive window that I'd walked by countless times. Suddenly, it was clear that I was on a prisoner transport. In the world of this game, I was fighting for the entertainment of others in the same footprints that had once hauled convicts to their likely resting place. Suddenly, these things I'd never seen before felt more legitimate than the rest of the game. The things burned into my mind were artificially created, designed to be a game. The things I had found were designed to be a world. A reality apart from our own.
And so back to Freelancer. Back to Discovery. After all was said and done, I knew that world, right? I'd flown my countless trading trips, I thought I'd visited every system in every house (except Gallia because the Lynx is not fun to fly), I'd been to every base. I knew that world, I knew the fastest route from one point to another, I knew how to get what I wanted with work and determination. Then I found myself with a weird objective. Keep flying hackers but stay out of the core liberty systems where all those people resided. The answer was simple: stay in the border worlds. I could get to the Bretonia border through Alberta, Drake, and Inverness. Kusari border was Galileo and Kepler. And then I went towards the Rheinland border, using the NavMap to path my way through a system I'd surprisingly never seen anyone in on the player list, and had never been in myself. I got out of the jump hole and was dumbfounded. It was quiet. It was dead or dying, and quite frankly it was empty. I left the ice asteroids I found myself in in order to head to the other jumphole, just trying to get the path marked, and entered the other asteroids on the other side. The second brainwave hit me. I saw the lighting, I saw the asteroid shape, I saw the far off star of a familiar color, and it all clicked. In front of me, over by that star, was Bering. I was far, far away from Bering, but closer than being in any other system in the game.
Once I reached the jump hole, I put off going through. I went back to find everything else in the system. I found a Junker base. It wasn't even really a base. It was just a depo to store stolen things. A rest stop, and the only source of life in the system. It didn't hail NPCs, there was no chatter at all. I mapped the planet Taymyr, read its infocard and all. It was just a random planet, hurtling along this empty trench carved in the asteroid fields by the brown dwarf. I found the RES Dallman, a dead husk of a ship sent to explore. Silent and empty, just like everything else in the system. I found Tiksi, another dead husk, the corpse of Taymyr's travels. The deep pink of the brown dwarf, another husk in this system, played a beautiful portrait with the pink cloud and the planet Taymyr. I, myself, was prepared for my enemies to hunt me in this place, to leave death after death in a system that was already a graveyard. That wasn't what I got. I did try, a few times, to bait an enemy into Laptev to fight, but as soon as I came over they simply left. As I kept visiting Laptev, it became very clear to me that I wasn't just scaring them off, or that they just didn't know where the Jump Hole was. They didn't want to be there. There were no trade routes, no battles, no NPCs to speak of there. It was almost like a second Discovery Freelancer, with no spontaneous attacks, no activity, no life.
Here's the thing, though. (Get ready for the gigabrain, poetic reveal of a lifetime). I felt more alive there. I felt like I was closer to being the character I was playing, I felt like I was more immersed in that world. I felt like the seconds, minutes, hours I spent there were more real, almost to the point of reality itself. There wasn't any nearby patrol of LABCs come to take potshots at me. I had a firm grasp on a feeling, a sensation of loneliness that I imagine people who fly a lone fighter through space just to catch a train and make away with goods and money would feel on a regular basis. Under this pink sun, separated from both my comrades and my enemies, from the people I loved and the people I hated. Temporarily, yes, but it was a real feeling, a feeling of reality as well, something that most other systems just don't impart on me.
If you expected the normal Godslayer style "Fk you, Fk you, everything is bad", sorry to disappoint. I'm trying to make an actual call to the progression worshipping people in charge here, who think that these changes always mean something good. Whether its the Omicron changes, or the removal of Laptev, sometimes the change is fine on paper, but kills the subtle things in the game. I earnestly think having mostly empty and out of the way systems is complimentary if not supplementary for the game. Systems like Laptev, beautiful systems like the old LXP 48N system, they should be in the game, accessible through a little determination or simple circumstance that leads you to them. Those Omicron-number systems, old Guard systems, even old factions like the guys who lived in Omicron 82. They don't bring much to the action of Discovery, but they bring volumes upon volumes to the inaction of Discovery in ways that words cannot describe. They add to the atmosphere in subconscious ways, finishing the separate reality of the game world. They are necessary for the universe to feel like a universe, and not just some simulation that we play pixel-empires in.
However, after it was all said and done, after I competed in some tournaments and championships, after I played with player after player and mod after mod, I was faced with boredom. I hit the top of my stride, I knew that there was nothing but downhill from there. The people I was playing weren't getting any better, I was just slowly getting worse. The people I played with before, the cream of the crop, had left the game for greener fields. The people who were left were the ones who were just not quite good enough, and the people who just played for fun. I knew every map like the back of my hand, and playing other gamers just wasn't fun. It was a one-sided slaughter every time. So the answer I found at the end of it all? I came back to the maps, where my greatest victories and most demoralizing defeats had happened.
The first few times, I just ran back and forth down hallways I knew well, the familiar rush of adrenalin kicked in, and I ran across the main highways of the maps like a veteran soldier in his bootcamp training grounds. But eventually, it wore off, and I began seeing things. Things I'd never seen before. Monitors in a Mothership that said -something-. What it said, I wasn't sure. I went through trying to decipher it multiple times, but never got anywhere. Extremely detailed skeletons at the bottom of spike pits and under submarines. The literal north pole above my head in this facility where I beat my greatest rival 50-0. One singular lonely fan in the stadium where I earned respect with a sniper. That same fan at the bottom of the spike pit in a deathmatch map I hated, behind a window, cheering as dead bodies of dumb people came raining down in this environment that only just recently became clear to me as a gladiator's arena. Ruins of a castle under a frozen river, the fact that the starting base for Torlan was a literal fort, these things that I fully missed on my way to get first blood.
I was honestly shocked. How could I have missed these things that I walked by, ran by, even shot at time and time again? These things, places, and paths just outside of the high traffic areas had stayed invisible to me, even though I counted myself among the best of the best. The only thing that had ever gone through my mind about these maps was the utility. The hallways existed to get me from point A to point B with as many angles of engagement as possible. Suddenly, I was faced with sharks that I'd never even seen before, despite being right outside a massive window that I'd walked by countless times. Suddenly, it was clear that I was on a prisoner transport. In the world of this game, I was fighting for the entertainment of others in the same footprints that had once hauled convicts to their likely resting place. Suddenly, these things I'd never seen before felt more legitimate than the rest of the game. The things burned into my mind were artificially created, designed to be a game. The things I had found were designed to be a world. A reality apart from our own.
And so back to Freelancer. Back to Discovery. After all was said and done, I knew that world, right? I'd flown my countless trading trips, I thought I'd visited every system in every house (except Gallia because the Lynx is not fun to fly), I'd been to every base. I knew that world, I knew the fastest route from one point to another, I knew how to get what I wanted with work and determination. Then I found myself with a weird objective. Keep flying hackers but stay out of the core liberty systems where all those people resided. The answer was simple: stay in the border worlds. I could get to the Bretonia border through Alberta, Drake, and Inverness. Kusari border was Galileo and Kepler. And then I went towards the Rheinland border, using the NavMap to path my way through a system I'd surprisingly never seen anyone in on the player list, and had never been in myself. I got out of the jump hole and was dumbfounded. It was quiet. It was dead or dying, and quite frankly it was empty. I left the ice asteroids I found myself in in order to head to the other jumphole, just trying to get the path marked, and entered the other asteroids on the other side. The second brainwave hit me. I saw the lighting, I saw the asteroid shape, I saw the far off star of a familiar color, and it all clicked. In front of me, over by that star, was Bering. I was far, far away from Bering, but closer than being in any other system in the game.
Once I reached the jump hole, I put off going through. I went back to find everything else in the system. I found a Junker base. It wasn't even really a base. It was just a depo to store stolen things. A rest stop, and the only source of life in the system. It didn't hail NPCs, there was no chatter at all. I mapped the planet Taymyr, read its infocard and all. It was just a random planet, hurtling along this empty trench carved in the asteroid fields by the brown dwarf. I found the RES Dallman, a dead husk of a ship sent to explore. Silent and empty, just like everything else in the system. I found Tiksi, another dead husk, the corpse of Taymyr's travels. The deep pink of the brown dwarf, another husk in this system, played a beautiful portrait with the pink cloud and the planet Taymyr. I, myself, was prepared for my enemies to hunt me in this place, to leave death after death in a system that was already a graveyard. That wasn't what I got. I did try, a few times, to bait an enemy into Laptev to fight, but as soon as I came over they simply left. As I kept visiting Laptev, it became very clear to me that I wasn't just scaring them off, or that they just didn't know where the Jump Hole was. They didn't want to be there. There were no trade routes, no battles, no NPCs to speak of there. It was almost like a second Discovery Freelancer, with no spontaneous attacks, no activity, no life.
Here's the thing, though. (Get ready for the gigabrain, poetic reveal of a lifetime). I felt more alive there. I felt like I was closer to being the character I was playing, I felt like I was more immersed in that world. I felt like the seconds, minutes, hours I spent there were more real, almost to the point of reality itself. There wasn't any nearby patrol of LABCs come to take potshots at me. I had a firm grasp on a feeling, a sensation of loneliness that I imagine people who fly a lone fighter through space just to catch a train and make away with goods and money would feel on a regular basis. Under this pink sun, separated from both my comrades and my enemies, from the people I loved and the people I hated. Temporarily, yes, but it was a real feeling, a feeling of reality as well, something that most other systems just don't impart on me.
If you expected the normal Godslayer style "Fk you, Fk you, everything is bad", sorry to disappoint. I'm trying to make an actual call to the progression worshipping people in charge here, who think that these changes always mean something good. Whether its the Omicron changes, or the removal of Laptev, sometimes the change is fine on paper, but kills the subtle things in the game. I earnestly think having mostly empty and out of the way systems is complimentary if not supplementary for the game. Systems like Laptev, beautiful systems like the old LXP 48N system, they should be in the game, accessible through a little determination or simple circumstance that leads you to them. Those Omicron-number systems, old Guard systems, even old factions like the guys who lived in Omicron 82. They don't bring much to the action of Discovery, but they bring volumes upon volumes to the inaction of Discovery in ways that words cannot describe. They add to the atmosphere in subconscious ways, finishing the separate reality of the game world. They are necessary for the universe to feel like a universe, and not just some simulation that we play pixel-empires in.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Apologies for text wall, cba to format. Also apologies for deviation from my more predictable character. Regular, angry, spastic Godslayer will return in a few hours.