I’m going to start Hardcore after the patch in May, but there’s no chance on this earth am I completing a showdown in Colorado 
2 Likes
watching frote’s streams has helped me learn how to cheese hardcore. during a campaign, i always selected whittleton as the showdown, and got the house spawn three times in a row. i was extremely lucky
i shot the suspects through the window and got the target every time. speedrunners are pro at exploiting the game
Sorry for not knowing if this is an issue in the regular version of FL, but… I’m not wondering if there’s a softlock on that exit in Sapienza, but rather to see if there are any invisible lock-on points like in the linked post/screenshot.
Edit: Eh, well, is there actually a softlock on that exit? 
Well. I finally did it. I reached level 100. Had an interesting time on the final showdown that pushed me over the edge in Whittleton Creek.
I had objectives to accident kill the leader and poison them, but I was one proc away from finishing off Head Over Heels (10 push kills) and Puzzle Master (25 accident kills), so the accident had to be a push. The problem is that the target was holed up in Cassidy’s house and never left. People came and met him in the house, but he never set foot outside of it. I had originally come into the level wanting to seiker the target but in a house full of guards with an assassin trailing him and a lookout wandering about it just felt too risky, not when I was this close. Then I remembered Cassidy’s house has a fumigator. So I ran to the murder basement and picked up some poisons and then fumed the house with emetic. To my surprise everyone left the house except the target who stayed in the upstairs bathroom to puke. I ran upstairs to grab him and cringed at passing up the easy drowning kill, but I really wanted my push, so I dragged the target around the bathroom a bit and realized that the window there just leads out onto the front porch roof. The drop won’t kill. I dragged him to the back of the house where both open windows lead to the back porch roof. No drop kill there either. So I drag him back to the center of the house and realize, I can throw him over the railing next to the stairs. To my surprise, that didn’t kill either. Now I have a suspect on the bottom floor and I’m beginning to worry about how much longer the puking will last so I quickly drag the target into the backyard and hide him in the bushes. Everyone comes back from puking and I’m planning to drag the target out into the frog sanctuary and dump him there, but there’s a guard and some guy talking who will spot me if I exit the door to the yard. So I preemptively shoot them and then poison Cassidy’s house with lethal. Everyone inside dies. All the guards responding to the dead guy at the frog sanctuary drag the bodies back in there and die. Finally, it is ALL clean and I drag the target into the frog sanctuary for a kick into the pond.
Level 100 achieved.
11 Likes
Guess if I wanna use the cannon I gotta lure them to the spot were Caruso plays golf then get them to stay there either by knockout or by neverending used flash phone pick-up glitch. The work to set this up would be well worth it as there’s nothing more satisfying then eliminating your target with an antique cannon. True I could use an explosive to fire the cannon after weapon luring the target over but it’s not the same as manning the cannon myself.
1 Like
Anyone hyped about the Freelancer Prestige Challenge coming in the next patch?
- Yeah! Let’s go! I’m in the mood for a challenge.
- No!.. Just… No!!! I worked so hard for all those weapons!
- Meh, no biggie. I’ll do it. It won’t be much different than when I started fresh.
0 voters
I doubt there’s any “hype” for it. I think it’ll be interesting. Of course, there are trophies and/or rewards for it.
Having watched a video commenting on it - I can see why some will absolutely hate it.
1 Like
I did the showdown on the final level of the campaign in hardcore mode. Allow me to give some tips…
-
Take a banana and a grapevine before you start.
-
Depending on where you start either get a standard soldier disguise or the spec-ops disguise.
When you go for the soldier in the field, use a slip trap to be 100% sure you are not spotted pacifying him.
The spec-ops is easy to lure with the water tap. -
Get the elite soldier disguise at the shed; make sure the masked freak is away; place a weapon to get rid of the soldier outside and then pacify the elite solider inside the shed.
-
Go to the room inside the house where the hacker is playing the video game. Creatively take them both out to obtain the hacker disguise (I use the Kalmer for the soldier and then melee the hacker).
-
Suspects in Colorado are quite buggy and stand still. Bump into them or otherwise distract them to get them moving. If they don’t move after the distraction, it means they are waiting for a meeting with another ‘freezed’ suspect. So just move on until all of them are on the move and doing their routine.
-
Take your time to indentify your target. If their routine is close to the water tower (reliable emetic poisoning to the bathroom there), you are lucky! If not…
-
Follow another suspect with whom your target has had a meeting with. Use a slip trap to pacify them. Be aware to do this as far away possible from Lookouts and other suspects. A slipping accident has the least chance of triggering an evacuation, but it is still not 100% safe.
-
Take the phone and make the fake call inside the bathroom of the water tower.
-
Now the rest is up to you to creatively finish the job there.
I go for the emetic gas device, then distract the assassin by dropping a weapon and then do my thing in the bathroom!
Hope this helps!
Happy gaming! 
2 Likes
I am surprised by some of the hate for prestige mode. For me, the struggle of not having enough weapons and having to gradually build up was a really enjoyable aspect of the mode. I am looking forward to going through the build-up again, along with the bonuses it brings.
3 Likes
I think it’ll make me come to Freelancer for a bit more, but I don’t think I’ll be engaged enough to do all the Prestige levels. The funny thing is getting all 5 of the Prestige levels and collecting all the weapons 6 times still won’t take the 100 campaigns needed for Top Dog.
Does it reset your money too?
Yeah your money gets reset to 0, but you get higher base payouts in missions with each Prestige so it should be faster to recollect he weapons (assuming they don’t also increase prices at higher Prestige levels)
That would contradict the whole premise of leveling up.
1 Like
In my personal experience, the limiter for weapons was the availability of them, not the required currency.
Yes, if you were trying to get a specific weapon, then currency could be a limiting factor, but if your goal was simply to fill the weapon wall, then any purchase/discovered weapon is “progress”.
In any given mission, you could only obtain (aside from finding weapons on guards or just “in the level”) so many weapons due to the inventory limit of the supplier. At the end of a syndicate you get one more in the reward crate.
Filling the weapon wall, to me, isn’t as impacted by the Merces you earn as it is by the limited availability of them. Even if you buy out the supplier every mission, you’re still talking dozens of missions to complete everything aren’t you?
3 Likes
I don’t know if “hype” is the best of word. But I think I’m one the most enthusiast here about the prestige.
The weapon wall was never really a gameplay progression. When I built it I saw much more impact with the mastery unlocks, especially the max gear capacity enhancements. The only impact I saw was with the legendary/epic payouts. And by the time they arrived, they were useless.
What the weapon wall did though was make go to the suppliers, go for the safes, go for “well I need 10.000 M to buy a weapon, better do payouts”. All of which disappeared once it was finished. It made me go into the maps to steal items, and during the better run strategise to bring back two long weapons at once. In short, it’s what make me engage in the mode.
I really want to play that again. Doing it with all the mastery unlock will be a bonus.
I also think that Hitman is now out of the “have some hype” period. And I’m more than fine with it. A bit of an off ramp for the long play. The five level of prestige will be for me a good middle of the road motivation for the end of the year. Which is what I wanted (and to be honest what current Freelancer is in effect not)
Hitman won a long time ago. This? This is maintenance.
And I mean that in the meliorative.
4 Likes
Considering all weapons are being confiscated I think we can count on a huge price increase.
1 Like
I don’t have a full weapon wall yet, but I could be getting close. Then I might hang onto it, since it’s nice to know I have a full arsenal I can pick from freely.
The Prestige system doesn’t totally interest me in taking away all my stuff however I might use it once just to get a little boost in XP and Base merces.
Hopefully someone can tell us how much it increases for each Payout level, but I assume it won’t be anything major on the first level. I’d say it’ll be 20/40/60/80/100% increase from levels 1-5 (if they’re feeling generous in giving players a full Double, Permanent Freelancer XP bonus to the people who can make it to Lvl5. Now that I mention it, it sounds a bit game-breaky. Maybe 50-70% is the max.)
3 Likes
What game is there to break, exactly? Many people doing the Prestige challenge will already be at level 100 and the primary chokepoint on regaining a weapon wall isn’t money, it’s being able to carry two long guns at a time out of a mission and limits on how many things a supplier will stock at once. After that… it’s just number go up. The functional gameplay difference between earning 5,000M and 5,000,000M per mission is honestly not as much as you might think.
I’m making my way through a Hardcore campaign, and so far have been very lucky with kill-condition-specific Prestige objectives.
However, I just entered Isle of Sgail with a Collateral Kill Firearms objective, bringing only a shotgun.
Can it be done?? I’ve just tried it with my 1 of 2 targets, and I couldn’t kill more than one of them.
I experimented with a bunch of other guards I had KO’d nearby… still nothing.
Did I screw myself with this objective?
1 Like
I mean game-breaky in terms of levelling (even if there’s no incentive to levelling up your profile)
IOI has a set limit right now on amount of levels, and depending on how big the XP bonus is (and Freelancer is pretty meaty in terms of XP already) they may need to make more levels available before long.
Collateral Kill Firearms requires you to kill non targets with firearms within a second after killing a target with a firearm. I think. I always do that with the Striker to kill the non-target with the same bullet, but the UI behavior makes me think it works with any firearm if quick enough.
I think Shotguns are able to do it with the same shot if you have the target’s head and another one’s in your aim.
4 Likes