I am not enjoyer of fancy, long and purposely meaningless texts so I'll be brief: I decided to make this small research to understand why people still being attracted by Freelancer 19 years after its release.
For me it's simple:
1) Freelancer modding is easy, although primitiveness makes me hate it often. Editing multiple files to do simple things (like editing extra .ini just to edit nebulae appearance in the system) is something I really wish never happened to Freelancer.
2) Gameplay. It's very simple yet enjoyable enough. I don't like that Disco's gameplay went toward tryharding and getting sweat during fights, but I understand it was unavoidable with some players playing the game for years or even decades now. I still value enjoyable fights with people of average skill, where I don't have to roll my head over the keyboard to WASD, EK, and other fancy stuff just to survive for longer than 10 seconds.
3) Aesthetics. Game is still beautiful and despite being DirectX 8 game can offer eyecandy stuff, although it requires skill, materials, taste and time. Yet, it's possible.
Modern games do not have mechanics of freelancer which makes it one of the most unique game to exist, I do play for PvP and I still enjoy it after all these years
It might seem simple but there are lots of stuff to learn,like i recently learned, countermeasures can launch auto, if it is selected in weapon groups, never knew this
so yeah, gameplay for me
Most people, myself amongst them, play Freelancer for the story. The vanilla game, even after 20 years, offers a unique take on space-focused games both from the way the player interacts with the story and the story perspective itself. From the first mission to the very last, the game keeps you focused on completing them and makes sure the player remains aware of the progress made. It's a great concept and as the second sentence says, one that remains largely unrivaled.
I, however, disagree with the points risen about gameplay. While story is indeed the forte of Freelancer, gameplay, and at large, PvP, is highly controversial, to put it that way. For the singleplayer, it's amazing. Easy controls, vanilla has progressively-better ships, NPCs are not hard to deal with, and the interface is easy to understand. For a multiplayer game, on the other hand, it is awful. This is just my take, but, I'll rather take the cookie-clicker nature of EVE any day over the clunky snub PvP that takes place in FL. Cap combat is just as bad, with ships not balanced for the game at all. It is cool to see that people enjoy the gameplay aspect of FL, but the PvP aspect is horrid for the average person not willing to pour in hundreds of hours.
As for Disco itself... eh. The main reason people play it is because they're too attached to the game, a matter that in turn leads to constant drama and lobbying at the first mention of roleplay consequences. I have myself largely given up on playing after several attempts to continue story in a reasonable manner were just pushed aside by the players due to the aforementioned reasons. The same "why do people still play in 2022?" goes for the majority of the "average players", who play just to haul PoB supplies and trade for more credits as their main activity. It is what it is. I largely expanded on the points already made, in any case.
I have to agree with Groshyr's points here for the most part. Gameplay and aesthetics, for sure.
I can't really say much about the modding itself, but i was pleasantly surprised that we can customize info-cards, have player bases and so many more additions compared to the vanilla experience.
As i am still mostly a newcomer here, i may not be burdened by years upon years of difficult relations and beef - but that is a given in any roleplaying community i'd say. Hard to keep that out.
This one is just, on first glance at least, comparabily small today.
Yet i have to admit, that i have been somewhat tricked by the player count. I already feared i might not get as many interactions as i had hoped for, people mainly digging the PvP and hauling items from a to b.
But here i go, having RP encounters left and right. For which i am highly thankful.
To sum it up, FL is a childhood game of mine i always like to think of fondly.
Being able to enjoy it not only alone, but with others, so many years after its release is truly wonderful.
At first, back when I was a teenager, I liked Freelancer because it was a game about a space merc that shot all kinds of bad guys and saved humanity from alien threat. The few alien structures in the game looked amazing to me. I also wished to see more cool secret systems after exploring the vanilla game.
Disco definitely gave me some of that. Neutron stars, black holes, deep Nomicrons, the Shrine, new systems controlled by all kinds of factions, new systems that actually felt like uncharted frontier or plain hellholes (Omicron Chi, you are missed dearly), new station designs, new tradelanes even.
Unfortunately, what was given was in multiple instances taken away. I really want those things back because I loved them. I'm not the only one who did.
I mostly ignored Houses, unlawfuls and corporations when I played vanilla. I was more interested in the main story and fighting Nomads. Years later my interests shifted away from Nomads but now the future seems somewhat shaky.
I like some concepts. Hopefully I will be able to explore them before they get permanently removed or before people just leave them behind forever.
I liked the combat at first because it simply wasn't too difficult. Vanilla NPCs gave me much less trouble than an average player can nowadays. In multiplayer I lost nerve cells instead of getting dopamine. Main issue for me is that movement in Disco is extremely spastic by my standards, I feel terrible most of the time.
Another part of the issue for me is that FL/Disco is a very pure space shooter. We don't really get active/passive abilities the same way RPGs/MOBAs handle them (combat more often than not revolves around abilities in those genres), we don't get random events like in Space Station 13 or Rimworld to spice things up either. Even our capital ships are just overfed freighters and we control all of their guns manually.
I don't like combat, so I just skip or avoid it.
Trading is kind of a chore. I tried to spice it up by taking a Zoner Whale and forgetting about traditional trade routes. I went all over the place with FLCompanion calculating the best route from whatever station I visited. Hauling everything from contraband to rice. At least it's less boring this way and I still get credits.
I don't know if this thread is meant for disco or vanilla but I'll say a thing about the vanilla storyline.
My favorite thing is that the story is not limited just to the space and the missions. Next time you're playing it, read all the news in the bar, so many fun little things. For example, the Order attack on Donau was not the only attack, later in the storyline they kill some Rheinland diplomat(Gunther Schulz) on Curacao , near the end LSF director (Aemon Bonerille) goes missing, most likely infected, and bunch of other stuff.
User was banned for: Compromised account
Time left: (Permanent)
I really liked vanilla PvP. It offered the twitch shooter, quake-like experience of very fast-paced, high-intensity gameplay. It really never got boring for me, there was always something new to learn, you could always aim better, strafe better, move better. This coupled with HHC tryhard, somewhat toxic attitude of the late 2000s was really addictive, to the point where I could just spend the entire night at the PC shooting germans and russians, very fun stuff.
I like Discovery for the freedom it affords when worldbuilding. Yeah, the entire Sirius is already set in stone and its history and lore is driven by the story devs, but there is a lot of liberty of how you choose to portray small-scale environments, such as planetside cities, districts or even countries. There are creative limitations that you have to fit into obviously, but that really bolsters creativity. That's why I enjoyed making factions so much, I guess. A lot of it was the worldbuilding. The dynamic of meeting people in game and then typing out forum stories or even just random diaries, comms and things like that I also found really enjoyable and interesting. I also quite liked the Discovery snub gameplay circa 2017-18. I remember hating on nukes early on and then switching my perspective on them 180°, I liked them a lot.
Also some quirks like the "bugged" Sunrider hitbox that made it a ship that was not completely terrible were interesting. I think most of the pvp changes after that, things like aux slots, CD changes, and especially changes to mines ended up being detrimental and lessened the fun I had from pvp.
The biggest problem for me these days is that since I have much more limited time to spend on entertainment than I used to, I prefer to pick up something that gives me guaranteed dopamine. I can go play League, some RPG like Skyrim or Witcher, any random game from Steam, and I'm guaranteed to have something to do. In FL I can just log, fly around for half an hour, meet absolutely nobody and log off. That's really annoying, especially when random encounters with people were what gave the most fun. Even camping Manhattan you are unlikely to see anyone.
There are other things that I don't like about disco, the lack of impact for individual players, the wars over pixel assets that happen between factions, the balance that changes every other week seemingly for the worse. But the biggest one is the lack of guarantee that something is going to happen when I actually reboot into Windows and start the game.
![[Image: yaMOial.png]](https://i.imgur.com/yaMOial.png)
