I remember reading tips & tricks about hidden jumpholes and such in a gaming magazine, printed on physical paper, which I was a subscriber to at the time.
I don't remember when I played the game first, but I do remember that I needed to lower difficulty in .ini files. The game was amazing for that time. After some years, I had nostalgia and downloaded it to play once more when I accidently found out it has popular mod with full servers. And thus I became part of this community.
My dad "obtained" it for me (just as he did many other games) when I was in my teenage years. I played the hell out of it and then went online with it. Playing on servers such as Asylum 51, Ioncross, and Asgard. Even during my tenure in the military I played when I had the time and even wrote stories here during my deployment to the desert.
It's been a staple of my gaming "diet" for a long time. True, I only came back to playing recently, but I'm glad I did. Freelancer is a timeless classic that has, as of yet, been replicated in an online format.
The demo for Freelancer came in my dad's new Gateway computer. The demo was limited to just the first few missions and then it turned into a sandbox of either the New York system or Liberty (4 systems back in that time). I played just the demo for about a year until we got the real game.
I would have lan parties with my dad and step brother, just hours of missions, popping transports in trade lanes and selling the loot to Buffalo, doing point to point freighter transport runs. They eventually stopped playing so I took my adventures online to the Vanguard Federation of Freelancers (originally Hunter's Association, HA5). A guy named Achilles made a mod as if the Nomads took over house space, only the Omicrions had safe haven. It never really took off but it was a lot of fun to have a dozen of us role into New York and pick up refugees from Manhattan.
I joined the military in 2008 and took a long hiatus from Freelancer. I tried out Discovery back in 2014 but PCS and deployments got in the way. Left the military in 2016, focused on college for a couple years and started playing seriously in 2018-2019.
I don't play nearly as often as I used to, mostly because of the toxic player base. However, this game is legendary to we, it's cult followers. The only issues I have with this game is there is no Freelancer 2 and Freelancer 1 was never finished. So many space sim enthusiasts don't even know it exists. Microsoft had the golden egg and didn't cook it, but put it in a closet and forgot about it.
It ain't about what you are capable of, it's about what you're willing to do.
(03-04-2023, 04:43 PM)SnakThree Wrote: I don't remember when I played the game first, but I do remember that I needed to lower difficulty in .ini files. The game was amazing for that time. After some years, I had nostalgia and downloaded it to play once more when I accidently found out it has popular mod with full servers. And thus I became part of this community.
150 a 200 members what I remember
If you wanted to play on the weekend, you had to be there early, because the server was full in the evening and you could hardly get in.
No Matter How Good You Are, Don't Ever Let Them See You Comming
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.
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) 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.
