Reasons to love and hate Freelancer in 2022

[Corile]

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.

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Reflections on the Revolution in Gallia
Custodi // High City of Heraklion // The Cult of Archangels
Log Filter // Post Creator // Manhattan