Freelancer | Patch 3.170.1 | Bugs and Imperfections

With how long we waited for this thing since being announced, and the reason we were told it had been delayed so many times, we expected better. The purpose of Freelancer is player immersion? Well, the illusion is broken off of the many things listed herein.

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Yeah it’s good to be comprehensive, don’t get me wrong, just turning around like “what did they spend all this time on, if not the card swiping sound effect for the consulate doors” is a v silly attitude. They spent the time making a whole game out of another game!!

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OK I “solved” the fuse problem by… removing my van from the garage then adding it back :thinking:

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It just occurred to me that it would be awesome if suppliers sold ammunition. Here are my arguments:

  • Lots of people complain (correctly) that suppliers become pretty useless once you acquire all/most tools and weapons.
  • It is not uncommon to take a weapon to a certain map and don’t find the corresponding ammo within it. (for example, if the player takes a sniper rifle to New York).

Selling ammo would solve both of these problems, plus give Merces more utility in the future.

Thoughts?

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That would be a realy good thing to have when I bring the ICA tactical white shotgun, it comes with only 7 bullets and no spare ammo

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This is a very minor nitpick but it’s a quality of life improvement I would enjoy.

Could you maybe just add a “Start Freelancer” button directly to the Freelancer button on the main menu? I find it a bit tedious that when I want to play Freelancer I have to first press the button that says “Play Freelancer”, then I have to press the button that says “Safehouse”, then I have to make sure I don’t accidentally press the button that starts a briefing video of what Freelancer is instead of the small “Play” button next to it.

I already know I want to play Freelancer, I already know what Freelancer is. Please make it slightly less annoying to start Freelancer. At the very least please integrate the “How to play Freelancer” screen into the same screen as pressing “Safehouse”. I really don’t think we need 2 separate screens for these.

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LOADING

Right, Right, X

LOADING

X

LOADING

Down, X

Now you may play Freelancer!

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How is it that seven years after the game releases that there are NPCs that can see you perform illegal actions through walls, floors and ceilings? How is this still a thing?

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Because IO pick and choose what they want to fix - usually going for the easier stuff over the ones that are likely way more complicated to fix. After all, many bugs that were reported shortly after H3 launched are still in the game (and even ones that were reported multiple times during H2’s life). There are just too many things that are so old at this point that you just have to accept that IO won’t do anything about it because they likely would’ve by now if they had any intention.

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But they have fixed this before… in certain places. How the hell is the root cause of this nonsense still happening? They know what causes it and have made corrections before! You’re telling me that by the time they got to Freelancer -basically the 4th game in a seven year stretch - and they’re still making this error?

I know I’m fighting a losing battle on this, but I refuse to surrender: how hard is it for people to have some standards?!

(sigh)

But, we don’t have the time or money for rational solutions.

Sadly it just seems like they don’t care anymore as much as they appeared to in the past. Otherwise they wouldn’t have shipped Freelancer in the state it’s in. I don’t know about other platforms, but the overall game performance on PS5 is fucking terrible now. Things are popping in right in front of 47 worse than a PS2-era game.

They got it to the point of good enough and shoved it out. :disappointed:

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I dunno, it might make them remove the Freelancer intro window. Like the intro videos to the missions and targets, I like to listen to it when I’m playing it like a “story.”

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Keep that menu with the video when you select Freelancer from game modes, but directly launch the mode in the safehouse when you select it from the title screen - that seems like an easy fix to me.

Which is precisely why they might get rid of it in an effort to accommodate that request. IOI has a record of missing the mark on easy, or at least rational solutions.

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Glad to know I’ve helped. Thank you, friend.

Well the fuse problem is back for no apparent reason, only now I can’t take the battery from the garage either :x

There’s also a really annoying bug that keeps switching two paintings (the one near the ladder in the bedroom, and the one on the left of the gym) to something else than what I’ve set. It seems like it happens whenever I gain mastery so maybe that’s the source of the fuse bug as well?

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Why does pausing the game and exiting to the safehouse have a harsher penalty than simply leaving the mission before all the targets are killed?

If the area isn’t alerted and you leave, all remaining areas become alerted. If you exit, the remaining areas become alerted and you lose all your tools.

Shouldn’t the penalty just be the same as leaving early? :thinking:

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I say the penalty should be simply returning to the safehouse and that particular mission is reset to the beginning, at least if you haven’t done anything like kill a target or take Merces from a safe or couriers.

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Hooo boy, first of all, thank you @gabriel4602152 for making this thread, you are really doing the Hitman community a huge service. I have a laundry list of bugs/imperfections, and since I’m playing on the Xbox, I’m luckily able to make a clip when something happens and share it here. For starters, I’m playing on the Xbox Series X; brand new, just got it at the beginning of December.
No idea if these have any bearing, but these are the display settings of my Xbox as well:

  • 4K UHD display resolution
  • 120 hz refresh rate (even though I think Hitman only hits 60 fps max)
  • “Allow variable refresh rate” is set to “on”
  • HDR is active

Now on to the bugs; I’m just going to link to the clips below, and I’m going to list them by order of severity.

Suspect AI

This is the BIGGEST one to me, because it absolutely gets in the way of the main gameplay and progression systems of Freelancer mode. Simply put, sometimes the Suspect AI just, doesn’t work. Here’s some examples from Berlin:
Berlin Suspect AI loves motorcycles
Berlin Suspect Enamored by Table
Now, these two suspects WERE performing their actions prior to this; I witnessed both of these suspects wandering around, doing secret meetings, and performing their tells (the woman stuck standing at the table was eating pizza at another table, and drinking a beer at the bar). After the motorcycle guy had a secret meeting, I followed him afterwards, hoping to knock him out. He wandered into the garage, and then just…did this. Indefinitely. Distractions didn’t work either. I went back to the woman, and discovered she had stopped doing her behavioral tells as well, just standing idly at that table in the bar area doing nothing.

Now the obvious problem with this here is, with the two suspects both having the same physical tells, and with them NOT performing their behavioral tells anymore, there is NO WAY from this point forward to tell who is the actual Leader is. I’d just have to guess and hope I got the right person. Totally, totally unacceptable, and extremely random. Now I don’t know if this has anything to do with what happened, but as you can see I also had several optional objectives completed at this point, and several suspects were knocked unconscious as well. I’m not sure why any of that would break Suspect AI, but I thought it was worth mentioning just to be safe. Speaking about Suspect AI…

Burner Phones. Just the whole gameplay feature.

Huge, HUGE problem with the burner phone feature in Freelancer. Specifically, in the fact that it barely seems to work. In Dartmoor, I had this happen:
Impolite Dartmoor Suspect
Placing a burner phone and hoping to achieve my Prestige Objective, I was very confused as to why only one suspect showed up, turn around, LEAVE, and walk past another suspect who was actually walking to that area not because of the phone, but because it was part of her scripted AI path. What exactly happened here? Aren’t the burner phones supposed to attract all suspects to wherever it was placed? Sometime afterward, I clipped this:
Dartmoor Suspects finally Learn Manners
For whatever reason, THIS time the two remaining suspects did decide to go to the burner meeting location, netting me my prestige objective. Notably by this point, the actual Leader was sussed out and killed; that and the fact that I completed another optional objective appear to be the only differences between the two burner phone attempts. No idea if that has any bearing on this at all, but again thought I should at least mention it.

Next, we’re going back to Berlin, specifically the mission from the previously mentioned bug with broken suspect AI (you can even see the woman suspect still stuck at her table when I go into Instinct):
Part 1
[Rude Suspects in Berlin pt 1]
(https://gamerdvr.com/gamer/twentyskidoo/video/171997511)
Part 2
Rude Suspects in Berlin pt 2

Again, we have the burner phone placed, and the Suspects are all ignoring it, either stuck in place, as in the woman’s case, or just merely moseying along their scripted routes in the man who walks past me’s case (also, no idea how that guard/assassin found that shotgun, but I may have just missed how and when he saw it).

Had another instance with burner phone problems in New York, didn’t get a clip, but it was basically just more of the same problem; several suspects on map, and placing burner phone in the bathroom only lured one or two at a time. Sometimes one would show up, wait a little bit, leave, and then another suspect would show up, and do the same thing. I had multiple burner phones in my inventory at the time that this was happening, and I saw that I couldn’t activate another burner phone after because “Meeting was already taking place” (or something of that nature), even though every Suspect was ignoring the already activated/placed phone and nobody was even in the same room as it.

X-RAY VISION NPCS!!! BACK WITH A VENGEANCE!! (Npcs seeing through walls. Again)

I really thought we had this issue taken care of, but nope, it seems like its back, and its back HARD. Three examples below:
Dartmoor NPC with the best phone camera on the planet
New York NPC sneaking a peek through the bathroom wall
Sapienza NPC and honestly I have no idea where or who this was

Suppliers who are too into their Roles

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I originally had a clip here of the janitor supplier in New York seemingly ignoring 47 when I approached him. Another user pointed out that this was actually probably working as intended, as a NPC entered the room behind 47 while I was attempting to interact with the supplier. I am replacing that clip with a more noticeably bugged interaction with a supplier)

In Whittleton Creek, the supplier disguised as a baker did this:

Whittleton Creek Supplier is committed to the bit
Someone else playing on my Xbox had a serious issue in Whittleton Creek, where the supplier disguised as a baker in the garage just would. Not. STOP. Kicking the tires on the car in the garage!!! He was like this the entire mission, even when other NPCs were not present. This happened everytime the baker was the supplier for Whittleton Creek, so even coming back on another mission didn’t fix him.


End of Report (for now)


I have several more I’ll post later, but starting off these are definitely the most egregious issues for me. In my opinion, Freelancer Mode should NOT have launched in this state, and I’m extremely curious as to how a mode thats been cooking in the oven for this long could come out so sloppy and broken. The Berlin Suspect AI breaking was the final nail in the coffin for me, and I’ve actually stopped playing until IOI actually decides to make this thing a finished product. Once player and mission progression starts breaking, then the game stops being worth the hassle.

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No, its just one, I’m sure.

I quit Freelancer once while having a prestige objective active, and it stayed on when I was collecting all my gear and choosing the location to go to – but I got a warning that I hadn’t picked any Prestige before leaving, when I arrived, it showed that I hadn’t picked any…

Its just a visual error.


On Showdown Missions, the basic Time Trial Prestige objective will still give you a ~1-minute-45secs timer, as if it’s a 1-Target mission.

I get the game’s logic behind that – 4 ‘suspects’ but only 1 ‘target’ but it’s ridiculous for the kind of mission you’re dealing with.

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