Reasons to love and hate Freelancer in 2022

[HanCloudstone]

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.

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Currently schizoposting from Omicron Chi