Hey there boys and girls. I've been excited to announce this for a long time. Me and @Impyness, and a collection of other developers, have been working on a new mod for Freelancer for some time. This mod is called Aftermath, and we're here to tell you a little about it. You can ask questions on our forums or join our Discord.
What is "Aftermath"?
Aftermath is a mod, and community, for Freelancer currently in active development. Drawing inspiration from Freelancer and its long lineage of mods, including Discovery, Aftermath is focused on delivering a new and improved experience in a multiplayer roleplay setting, with plans for many new high-quality features alongside a laundry list of quality-of life improvements, all the while maintaining the combat and setting that made Freelancer the game we know and love.
What's the setting of Aftermath?
Aftermath is set in 815 AS, fourteen years after the close of the Nomad War. In the wake of the coverup orchestrated principally by the Republic of Liberty and Rheinland, the Houses are in a permanent state of uneasiness - internally, those in the know fear for a second attack from the Nomads, despite the victory of the Order at quelling such a threat. More broadly, however, there are fears that the great Rheinland invasions - defeats that have left the house broken and rebuilding - are but a warning of things to come. Eight hundred years of near-bloodless, unparalleled growth and expansion has finally reached its limits, as habitable planets and exploitable resources become rarer, and draw ever closer to political boundaries. Conflict appears ever closer on the horizon, and it is here our players begin to make their mark on Sirius.
What does Aftermath change, besides the story?
We are planning a series of innovative features to reinvigorate the aging Freelancer engine and breathe new life into the game. Immersion and intuitive, fun gameplay are high on the list of necessities for our project, and as such we've already laid the groundwork for numerous new features - not the least of which being a fully working custom UI system, which allows us to integrate many of the addons and plugins necessary directly into the game, thereby improving quality of life tremendously. In the video below, you can see a small demonstration of our intended TLAGSNET feature.
The video below is a proof of concept only.
With this, we hope to develop a set of features that brings Freelancer in-line with some of its competing, modern-day equivalents; things like in-game bounty boards, trade-lane and gate monitoring, casino games, in-game player ship sales, unique mining methods, smuggling, House laws, and passenger hauling are just some of the features we hope to integrate directly into Aftermath seamlessly alongside our custom interface.
If this mod sounds like something that interests you, you can head over to our discord at https://discord.gg/HH5Fagp