Freelancer is officially going to be free content!
Release date: January 26th, 2023
Two observations:
- Free. I told you all it was going to be free.
- Steam only for Closed Technical Test? Thatās a crock of horse shitake mushrooms.
Also, I guess cue all the āIOI lied again!ā posts now since it wonāt be coming out this year tooā¦
Holy crap!! I was right! Freelancer preview this month (and many months after that!!)
Wow. I still donāt think we should be expecting a Year 3 from this announcement, but the fact that theyāre STILL Taking their time to release it is very good news!
January 26, 2023 babyyyy!!
Early next month, weāll be selectively inviting HITMAN 3 players on Steam to jump into the Closed Technical Test and put it through its paces.
Hereās a volunteer
JANUARY!!! fuckš why
Quite possibly the worst move in human history.
This is good news! Money system!
Seems to be a lot of work going into the mode. Honestly Iām not even mad at the release date. It will be well polished then. And at least now we have a date.
PC only testing though Oh well
Itās not in Year 2. Itās (Year) Threelancer.
Well, nice to know so now I can stop feeling antsy about it when itāll be released.
Yeah, uh, I totally gots it in Steams! Where do Iās signs up?
Edit:
Me feverishly looking up my PC specs, seeing if it can run Hitman 3ā¦
Hopefully the testing at least works on the demo, would be annoying to have no chance at testing the game simply because I pre-ordered it on Epic
To be honest, I donāt mind the waiting, but in terms of marketing, this release date looks really bad for the public eye. Itās going to annoy many.
I guess they picked Steam for beta testers because they plan on moving forward on steam+the steam version of Hitman 3 is still somewhat new, so maybe if the Steam version is polished, then it will be easy to polish EGS as well.
But then again, I donāt know what Iām saying, soā¦
Edit: also Steam VR
The two versions are pretty much identical copies of each other, and steam vr works on the epic version
The release date is unfortunate, but they prepared for this delay well.
We have a definitive release date.
We have windows for multiple reveals and videos
And a technical test on the horizon letting you actually try it out
Plus itāll be free!
That more than makes up for another 3 months!
Also : as is said, all (edit : most) the locations will be in it from day one.
So Ambrose might have been added. This wasnāt present at first. (Ambrose was supposed to arrive second). This alone is more work.
Very excited to lift the lid on some of these details - and more to come! Weāre gearing up some nice updates to lead into the release in January. Hopping on to reply to a few comments hereā¦
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Yes, itās free. Itās coming via a patch.
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Technical Test. Yes, we want this to make the launch smooth and make tweaks (not major changes) that we canāt properly test on a small scale. Itās āonly on Steamā for ease. More platforms = more complexity and Steam is pretty well geared for this sort of thing. We know that excludes some players/platforms and we donāt feel great about that. But we gotta make tough calls sometimes and this is one of those. Itās not possible to sign up, weāll be in touch. āSelectively invitingā was written for a reason.
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Money System: Thereās going to be more depth shared on how the mode plays in the Road to Freelancer #2 update scheduled for October 27 (as per the blog post)
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Year 2 / Year 3: We consider Freelancer as launching within Year 2, as thatās when it was originally planned. Year 3 is still TBD.
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Release Date: This is best for the mode. As the blog says, weāre now adding pretty much all locations into the mode and that takes time. We want to launch strong, so the Technical Test and extra time gives us the best chance.
Most! Most locations!
Carpathian, ICA Facility would be out, I would gamble.
Thereās very few locations that donāt fit thematically to be āFreelanceredā, to coin a phrase. Those specifics will be rolled out in the coming weeks. So happy to finally be able to open up about some more nuggets of this mode.