This game has been with me all my life. No other title can compare, I probably have 10 times the hours in FL than I do in the next game on the list.
One of my first gaming memories was when I was still in kindergarten and my stepdad was playing it. It was from a pirated CD-ROM with "FREELANCER" written on it with a crude permanent marker. Some time later I wanted to play it too but I couldn't figure out how to launch into space because I didn't know any English and couldn't understand that I had to go speak to Juni at the bar, so I started loading some of his older saves where the ship was already in space and tried to figure out what to do. Eventually I figured it out and managed to complete the entire game on my own. I spent a lot of time grinding the traderoute of Luxury Consumer Goods between Manhattan and Baden-Baden in the Anubis that you got at the end of the campaign. I played the singleplayer campaign countless times but I never figured out that you could go beyond the tradelanes to find anything there, and it was before the internet so there was no one to tell me about it.
Sometime later (when we got internet at home) I started joining multiplayer servers. One of the first ones I played on was Just4Fun (J4F) which was just a casual PvP-centered place. I looked through the playerlist and I saw a lot of people in Omicron systems where I had no idea how to get to. So I messaged random people asking them what ships they were flying and how to get to Omicrons, and eventually one guy told me the location of the Omicron Beta JH in Sigma-19 and I logged on my singleplayer save and went there, docked and got immediately vaporized by Outcasts in Class 10 ships.
Eventually I gave up playing on J4F, I still couldn't speak very good English and the server had a feature where if you pissed off the neutral NPCs by shooting them, they wouldn't ever turn back neutral, even after you docked and relogged. I joined Hamburg City (HHC), before it required the mod and it was there where I saw people flying with [PL] and [Division.PL] tags (who I later learned were completely different clans ) and I could actually ask them for advice in a language I would understand. I was still a child at that time but I managed to grind up to an Eagle with nomad guns with some friends I made there and we started doing PvP and missions in Omicron Alpha and Gamma. I was getting pretty good at PVP, but HHC had the best players there were and most of the time my pastime was doing missions in Omicron Alpha. I think I must have spent over 5000 hours in that system alone grinding missions, which I then blew on loadout changes and ammo because I couldn't figure out that you can have multiple characters.
Eventually on HHC I joined a pirate clan S.T.E. and later joined my Polish brethren in Western Alliance's 317th squadron, although by that time the game was mostly dead. I left FL for a while until in ~2014 while doing something completely unrelated I stumbled upon Spazzy's channel on YouTube and asked him if he wanted to do a YT series where he teaches me the server.
) and I could actually ask them for advice in a language I would understand. I was still a child at that time but I managed to grind up to an Eagle with nomad guns with some friends I made there and we started doing PvP and missions in Omicron Alpha and Gamma. I was getting pretty good at PVP, but HHC had the best players there were and most of the time my pastime was doing missions in Omicron Alpha. I think I must have spent over 5000 hours in that system alone grinding missions, which I then blew on loadout changes and ammo because I couldn't figure out that you can have multiple characters.