It can be about SA if you want it to be, and I feel the mode should allow for whatever style of play the individual player wants. Having targets that are literally impossible to SA would be terrible for the many prestige objectives based on SA, wouldn’t it? Plus while SA isn’t a rating, and I can’t believe I’m having to repeat this for the 1000th time, especially since I said this to you before, there is still a rating system that rewards more SA-like play.
Plus even if you didn’t care for SA, there’s still the fact that getting into open combat is a recipe for death and in many cases the more SA approach way is the better approach for survival, never mind rating, especially in hardcore. And also there’s the NPCs that could be randomly selected that aren’t designed to even be killed and would only usually occur in troll contracts that I mentioned (Herald behind the glass in Colorado, the back-up tango musicians, etc.)
Am I the only one who finds it a bit weird that we now have a load of ICA Assassin ratings, yet in this mode 47 is a Freelancer and thus is not working under the ICA anymore?
Yes, that one is a little strange actually, especially when IOI removed the ‘ICA Approved’ heading on the opening cinematic cutscene as it didn’t find the theme of Freelancer.
This is what I’m talking about
Photo from the original Freelancer how to play trailer (released Oct 2022) stating syndicates have ICA approval to be eliminated. Also, this was used in the Closed Technical Test gameplay.
I’ve just mentioned this in the Spring Roadmap thread, but it’s a shame the unlock isn’t tied to how many Campaigns you’ve completed in either Normal or Hardcore mode to be fair? Depending on the players experience, both modes require you to put the effort in, so it’s a shame we couldn’t obtain it that way? Or even have players get the GOAT challenge to unlock it, which is eliminate 2500 syndicate members. Good way for players to keep playing Freelancer!
I just think at the moment, especially with the bugs and stuff in Freelancer, Hardcore mode is rather a problematic route.
Yeah I find it rather strange to tie an unlock to HC before considering some balance changes to improve it, which makes me think this was probably planned way before the Freelancer release
My guess is that it’s implying that those ratings are so good, it’s clear that this was a job pulled off by a former ICA agent. Only they were ever this good. That’s how I read it.
The full merces loss on death is a really, really bad idea. It takes forever to get your stuff back after that, and since you generally gain less merces in HC as it’s harder to go for a perfect run, the best way to earn that money back is to switch back to normal for a while. This makes the whole thing grindy and tedious, not only unforgiving.
Besides the prestige objectives are 100% RNG and hardly balanced at all. Yeah sure I’ll take SASO over a headshot with the Silverballer?
Very much disagree. It’s not like youre losing all your weapons when you die, atmost 2/3? alongside your freelancer tools. You can get those weapons back within 2 syndicates (since the 1st reward crate already gives a legendary weapon), and freelancer tools are cheap af.
And money is completely pointless when you have your weapons (which you should have before attempting hardcore anyway).
Absolutely nothing wrong with them being rng. Sure you could divide them up into 3 different categories, and youd always get 1 out of each so you have a more fair/balanced choice. Im all for that.
But them being rng isnt a problem at all
That’s assuming you don’t die again, get stuck in a death loop and lose weapon after weapon. It happened to me in normal at some point and I almost quit playing Freelancer from the salt, had that happened in HC I would probably have uninstalled the game :x
I dunno, since the whole premise of the mode is to have mandatory prestige objectives I feel that makes the difficulty vary extremely wildly without the player having any control over it. But then I probably haven’t played HC for as long as you did so that’s just the opinion of a player who “tried to play it”.
This feels like some mumbo-jumbo, but I will rotate my analog sticks, press the L&R Triggers and bumpers, press all the buttons in no particular order… Seems like it gets it past the loading bottleneck and spurts on ahead. That didn’t sound right.
Which platform are you using? I’m playing on Steam and I sometimes get crashes during those loading cutscenes (if the music gets cut, you can bet the game’s gonna crash in 5 seconds), but I can’t be sure that’s not simply caused by my potato PC deciding it had enough :x
Sure, and that’s how I play regardless if I have the PO or not. Even if I have ‘kill 3 guards with an smg’, I still proceed to kill the SA style.
I say no because at the end of the day, this mode was made to play as you go. Meaning you won’t always get what you want. There’s no restarts (based on design, not with altF4). You play on the fly. You have a target that doesn’t move, go around the map and find items, crates, and get the things that could potentially work. If it doesn’t, oh well, that’s the freelancer life. You’re going in blind.
I just want that in-between mode in the middle of normal and Hardcore where it’s very much the difficulty of Hardcore or very close to it without the mandatory prestige objective. That’s all and I’ll be happy.
