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**Sombs** · 10-10-2024, 10:24 AM,

Discovery 5.2 Escalation Dev Diary #4 - Fluff

To me, Freelancer and Discovery have always been more about the details and the atmosphere. People are playing this game not just like your average Steam game, where you play for hundreds and maybe a thousand hours at best and have seen everything. Discovery is a sandbox, and the roleplay environment makes for a bottomless pit of time consumption. You can play in any way you want. Casual, arcadey space combat? Sure, log your snub, kill all red you see, log off, call it a day. Just in for exploring space? Can do! Love space trucking? Grab your powertrading 5k and ship away! Want to make your own faction? Just put it out there!

There is a bit of everything for anyone and everyone. That's the true beauty of Discovery, and the very reason why opinions on what the game needs simply can't be unified. The extremely wide variety of ships, factions, systems, gameplay mechanics and self-imposed goals simply give every single player a different idea as to what Discovery is for them, what people enjoy, what they dislike and what they want to do. You can mock them, but some people find satisfaction in treating their PoBs like tamagotchis; some get into very deep roleplay with their characters; some spend hundreds of hours just having duels in Connecticut; and some people are obsessively attached to the lore of faction X, system Y and ship Z.

That also goes for the entire dev team. And that is good! This variety, despite often resulting in arguments and sometimes even conflicts, is the reason why even after two decades of Freelancer, nobody is able to force you to play the game the way they want.

People play what is fun to them!

To me, the fun always came from exploration. From the discovery in Discovery. From the little fluff. The small scale. Freelancer throws you into a world of giant Houses with enormous military power, with laws and battleships and campaigns of warfare against other factions. But it also provides tiny stories. Edison Trent is a small guy, a Freelancer. And to me, these small guys, these Freelancers are the heart, the blood and the soul of Discovery.

As such, I usually focus on providing exploration and small scale stuff whenever it's possible.

Exploration

Adding exploration content to the game is a tricky thing. People have been complaining about a lack of discovery in Discovery ever since previous developers removed one system after another. When I was invited to join the dev team, I saw an opportunity to rectify that. As a lot of you already know, 5.1 added a bunch of secrets to the game. Absolutely small scale, like a few bigger asteroids that you'll notice when paying attention to the backgrounds of this and that system. A bunch of irregular formations in the bigger nebulae. New anomalies for the people who love scientific roleplay.

While some people already made forum posts about their discoveries, many of these things are still unknown to most people, and that's great. A lot of these things are not easy to find, on purpose. You people spend an incredible amount of time in Discovery, and if there are still secrets out there, there is still something to do for you. Because of that, I don't announce new exploration content. Some can be found with third party tools like the Online NavMap, some through rumours, and some by working with friends. So, why not grab one or two and visit some systems you otherwise wouldn't visit?

Achievements

Any modern day game has them, one way or another. These otherwise completely pointless little badges provide motivation to play the game in different ways, apart from what you would do regularly. Now, Freelancer is 20 years old. I'm sure if we pestered Aingar enough, he and all the other code monkeys of the general Freelancer community would find an elaborate way to add achievements to the game. After all, we've been getting one feature after another that was thought to be impossible to add to the game!

But until that is the case, we'll have to make due with what we have, and I think I found a fun little way of motivating people to explore the game a bit more:

Colony Conflict Collector Cards!

Let's not focus on the awkward name I chose for them, and rather look at the idea.

What we're looking at here are ingame commodities. They are hidden all over Sirius. Hard to find - don't expect hand-holding. They don't give you any benefit, they aren't worth much, they aren't part of any PoB recipes. They are, in the most literal sense, collectibles. In-roleplay trading cards. Want to show off how good of an explorer you are? Find them! And keep them in your inventory!

Of course, you can datamine them, just like people datamine the locations of new codename wrecks and what not. That's your prerogative, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

However, here's food for thought: We patch only so many times a year. Some people have been going for these within 24 hours of the 5.2 patch already, and usually, people complain about patches taking too much time, and that there is only so much to do in the meantime.

Well, how about instead of datamining these things, you try to find them in a more natural way? Nothing beats the feeling of casually strolling around and then noticing something weird in the distance - the feeling of making a discovery. Find exploration alone boring? Just grab a friend or two, do a scout patrol and look around for new stuff!

Fluff

The Distress Bacon, now available at Newark

The feedback for Barrier Gate Ramen has been quite positive, and it was quite noticable that people enjoy the idea of these very small-scale fluff objects in space. There is no harm in having them, and they add a little bit of flavour to stations, other than just history and reason of existence. Rumours usually do a good job at adding flavour to bases, but not everyone reads them - there are simply way too many, and some of us have a shorter attention span than others. These little clickable objects in space simply tell you with a brief description about what's going on, and I think that's cool and good.

Because of that, we now have Barrier Gate Ramen, Bodos Wurstbude (New Berlin), The Distress Bacon (Newark), the New Tokyo Bazaar and some other things. Thanks to @jammi, we also have been blessed with the Synth Foods party ship in locations like Stuttgart and Deshima. If you ever needed a reason to shoot Synth Foods transports, you have one now!

... and Jammi has more ideas...

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Second Hand Ships

Freeport 6's Auction Extension, Tau-29.

Obviously, we have a forum section all about people buying and selling ships from another. However, all of that is usually happening outside the roleplay environment, and I've always missed some sort of foundation for in-roleplay ship trading. After all, people are flying from one station to another, sell their Kestrel and buy a... Tigershark! Or a Drone! Or a Bustard. But what happens with all those ships that got sold?

While the auction house is not selling any ships itself, this little extension to Freeport 6 - the most drama-free Freeport in Sirius - it can be used as an in-roleplay location for trading ships with other characters. While I don't expect many people to make use of it, it is at least something to think about when trying to get ship X with a roleplay explanation and some background!

Final Thonks

We're cooking. Antonio is back from an extended break, Jammi hasn't reached the burnout yet, and I'm working on some cool stuff, too. We have no idea when 5.3 will come out - whether this year or next year - but there are some pretty interesting things planned for 5.3. But, you know, "interesting" as in, actually "interesting" and not the kind of "interesting" you'd say to someone who's showing you their Warhammer 40.000 figurines.

Depending on the feedback, chances are the Colony Conflict Collector Cards get more sets to find in various ways. Tell me about your findings - but try not to spoil the fun for others!