Re: Controls. I’m not sure if there’s a way to swap shoulder camera angles (without aiming). Also the placement toggle… I could probably explore the options more. I don’t know if those are there.
If you mean shoulder swap and placement hold/toggle, they’re in the settings.
Phew. Prepare for a wall of text. Let me apologize in advance, but I like to explain my critic extensively 
tl;dr: I like it, one big problem, in general awesome.
I’ve played roughly three hours. First two Syndicates down. First few rooms unlocked.
Let me give you a first impression, with more details to follow when I got further.
~
First, the big Silent Assassin Question. This seems to be a very controversial thing already and I can imagine that this will be debated heavily.
I for my part thing that by far, and I really do mean by far the best idea of freelancer is the removal of silent assassin rewards.
This offers more freedom of approach and I think it is extremely important not to reward a specific way of playing because people will always try to get the best score or play the best way etc. So if you reward silent assassin, you will instantly cut the freedom - even if only subjective.
Silent Assassin has its place in the campaign and the other game modes, but Freelancer is too big and offers too many different challenges. In this specific case I think it would hurt the mode more than it offers. Giving additional goals like killing a few guards with a shotgun, for example, also incentivizes silent assessing gameplay.
And in only the few hours I’ve played Freelancer now, I already realized how much more options I saw for myself. How much “bigger” my gameplay got when I just didn’t have to care about keeping silent assassin.
Again, I know that I don’t have to do this, but I just don’t have to think twice about things like for example, pushing someone over an edge. Why would I do that? For no reason other than for fun! We all had our kill all runs. We all had our stupid runs in which we did something like that and just reloaded or restarted.
But now, no reloading or even restarting, also massive (!) punishment for failure… So, why not give us the option to play around more freely. I mean, if I do something just because it’s fun, isn’t that the best way a game could go?
→ No focus on achieving Silent Assassin = best. change. ever. Please keep that.
~
Now for the gameplay itself.
I just read that you keep weapons and lose tools in case of a failure (I missed that in the video as well). This is good news, keeping weapons I mean.
Also I already wondered if the prestige weapons on the left side are permanent because we unlock them with freelancer mastery? So, if we take one of those mastery unlock weapons with us and fail, will they be gone? If yes, how could they be earned back? Maybe they become a pickup in the levels after that, but maybe they are permanent and cannot be lost. The latter would be a great thing because that would mean that after mastering Freelancer we would always have a basic toolset available, no matter what we lost before.
But here comes the big problem: After only a few missions I already see myself keeping weapons in my Safehouse, not using them.
That’s what I feared and it already happened. I collected a silenced SMG. I bought a sniper rifle. Now, of course, I will never ever use those weapons because I will always think, “let’s finish this campaign and they will be saved in my safehouse”. And after the campaign, I will think, “let’s not take them with me because they were really rare to find and expensive. And if I fail, they will be gone.”
So, I can tell you here and now that I will start every mission ever with no starting items. Maybe a generic pistol I know I can get back in every level. But I would never risk losing a silenced pistol, an electric hacking tool or any other useful item! Because there is always another way. I will never require them to finish a mission and therefore I will never risk losing it in case of a failure.
This is a massive problem.
And as I wrote in another thread before, there should be some way to take back lost weapons. Maybe for Mercers. And maybe you can only reacquire one lost item of your choice. But we need some way that make us take a legendary weapon or a very useful item like the lockpick with us without fearing its loss.
High risk, high reward is one thing. But in this case, I think the gameplay loses a lot of its potential by taking away the fun of experimentation because of the too high risk. Losing something completely is basically the highest risk possible and that is just too much compared to the reward.
If you had a Sieger Ghost 300, would you really use it for a mission or would you always think “maybe next time I need it more”? I certainly would and that makes the whole loadout concept useless to me 
~
Other than that the game is okay. I mean I like it and it’s good but it’s nothing special. It is randomized contracts mode —
— aaaaand that is totally fine! It’s not specifically awesome, it is just generic Hitman gameplay. But generic Hitman gameplay is one of the best things in recent years in gaming. So freelancer just being okay is a high praise and huge compliment.
Leader system? Great!
Money system? Cool idea!
Safes, assassins, couriers? You have added more features than it might seem at first, and everything works wonderfully together.
Loading screens? I did not even think about them but they are awesome!
I also like that you unlock the safehouse in small steps, so it’s not overwhelming and you will get something new every time.
~
One more thing about performance: The safehouse performs horribly on my PC while the levels run fine. No game breaker, but it would be nice to see an improvement here.
One thing I always wanted to ask you and maybe now is the correct time: In some levels you can see low quality textures before they are fully loaded. I understand the technical aspects and in general that’s totally fine, but on several occasions, this really looks ugly when seeing a close-up right at the start of a map.
For example the race leaderboards at the start of Miami, or now in Freelancer the world map, first thing you see every time you get back to the safe house.
I understand that on computers with better hardware, this might not happen. But maybe you could add any kind of “texture prioritization”? I mean that you could tell the game that the world map, for example, has the highest priority and should be fully loaded at first. Right now the opening between every single level is a highly pixelated, unreadable mess for a few seconds and while not a big problem it really weakens the impression.
Dear iOi:
Nice work. Like it. Keep it up. Please allow saving in Escalations and Holiday Content. Love you.
Not neccessarily, though I do understand the sentiment. I rarely care whether or not I earn Silent Assassin, for example.
It only took me zero missions to start doing that. I think there needs to be a way to “bank” weapons or something so you can use them without fear of losing them, but only after doing something. Pay for permanency, reach a certain level, whatever.
There is a fairly high Merces prestige objective for Silent Assassin…
I also think building off of @Dribbleondo’s thing about too many mechanics in the showdown missions, it’d make a lot of sense to have different kinds of showdowns. Looking at gameplay it’s a little silly that there are just all these people who are bald, eating candy, wearing earrings and sunglasses roaming around. A good way to spice things up would be to have a variety, either you get this kind of showdown, or you get a showdown with multiple leaders who are surrounded by guards roaming the level but are marked on the map or you get one again but instead of roaming he is a dweller in a very specific SMALL area and can either be a suspect or just a marked target. So for example two leaders in Whittleton who roam the streets or one leader in Bangkok who just dwells in a single hotel room or floor with a heavily guarded hostile zone. Stuff like that
Edits: and this could lead to potential to make certain syndicates alter the map in fun ways. Like a drug syndicate having areas of the map rented out to make product, or an assassin syndicate arming more NPCs and arming guards with better guns
another question, are the lookouts in the maps snipers or just enforcers who can notice you immediately or long distance? Are the assassins instant aggro npcs?
another ‘nuther question, but what happens if u kill the wrong suspect silently?
Perfect way! Really, this is a perfect solution. If you want to, you can get a reward, but that’s optional so much that you can chose to get the same reward for another gameplay style.
Really good way to solve this!
Having no rating at all besides the objectives is really confusing for my mind. 
I always tend to do something, then look back and realize, that was needless. Then again I can’t just “untrain” that behavior because there might be additional objectives that require me to do that.
I think it is easier to play this mode if you keep your own MO aside the objectives. In the end you don’t feel bad for picking a harder way but more proud instead.
Yea thats a dream come tru for me as someone who used to love playing Hitman and just flinging rubber ducks at my targets feet or sniping them. Im gonna untrain myself so hard lol
Three words: Oil and water.
Things that should be balanced:
Losing 33 % would be a good compromise
I agree that adding 2 or 3 zeros to Merces numbers would make them feel more… realistic? Even if its not a real currency.
Also could we have a map for the safehouse as a quality of life change? Its bigger than I expected and at first I was getting lost in it… Maybe a dynamic map that wont show the rooms you haven’t unlocked yet?
Oh and one last thing! I feel like safe are way too common! They should feel special and reward big number of Merces! Almost 2/3 missions have a safe…
After playing a bit of Freelancer for about 6 hours (and probably also ruining my sleep schedule), this mode is pretty fun. I haven’t encountered any server issues in my playthrough. Though it hurts when you stuff up and fail the whole campaign in either an Alerted Territory or a Syndicate Showdown. So far, manage to get to beating my second syndicate, after failing like 3 Campaigns. This mode is brutal!
Positives
Negatives
But either way, those are my thoughts. Freelancer is quite a fun mode.
In a ‘Jerry Seinfeld voice’ I yelled “Noooo! What do you mean? It’s the safe house, that shouldn’t count!”
Even this screen says nothing about using keys. Yeah, I know it’s still unlocking a door. Touche IO, touche. 
And I was so careful this whole time, up until I wanted to check what the arms dealer had for sale. Come to think of it - even the other door from inside requires the safehouse key.
Edit: Perhaps this is another example of a trade-off. Don’t do 1 thing (good), but do the other (bad). Get something from the Merchant (good), but use a key to get to him (bad).
Edit2: Then again, visiting the merchant wasn’t a requirement. 
First thing I really don´t like - timed objectives. Hide in a closet/crate, change disguises (every 2 minutes and 30 seconds)… It´s challenging but it´s not fun. I don´t want to hide, I want to play the game. If you want to add a time limit for a big reward that´s fine. But why this stupid gimmick? It feels like a step back. Remember Sticky Pistol from the old escalation in Hitman 2016?
60 GB - still downloading for me… Is it good?
Here are my 0.2 Merces.
Currently it’s a bit hard to understand what you can keep from what you find in the missions. For example I left Dartmoor as a walking armory, carrying two different shotguns found in the level and I could add both to the safehouse. I left Mendoza with a handgun and a sniper rifle, both also found in the level, but I could only keep the handgun.
On non-widescreen resolutions (I’m using 1280*1024) the side of the screen gets cut off when you choose weapons in the safehouse or from vendors. It’s not really that troublesome in the safehouse, but when buying things from vendors, you can’t see the price of the items on the edge of the screen. Maybe the price could be added to the bottom of the screen near the item name?
Speaking of vendors, they kinda feel at odds with the timed objectives (you don’t really have time to find them and browse their stuff when you’re fighting against a time limit) and it’s a bit weird to see random people selling weapons in the street everywhere. While I would prefer something like a post-mission screen where you could buy gear instead of the vendors, I understand it would probably be too much work to change that now that the mode is almost live.
The mission timer (when activated in the options) in the safehouse feels really odd 
(but that’s only a minor immersion issue).
Losing all your tools when failing a campaign feels too harsh, especially when you take in consideration that they’re harder to come by than most weapons and that a lot of optional objectives depend on them being available (“poison a target”, “blind a guard”, “open a safe with explosives” etc).
According to this post you can easily identify which suspect is the right one during showdown levels since they can’t be put in containers when KO’d, unlike the other suspects. I think it undermines the whole concept of those levels, since they depend on identifying the suspects with clues, and if possible no living suspects should be allowed in containers regardless if they’re the right or wrong ones.
A couple of typos I noticed in descriptions (“it’s” should be “its” in the first screen)
One thing… After completing the first Showdown, I returned to the safehouse… And there was one hallway where you had 2 different spots to pick a motivational poster… I chose 2 different ones.
Sometimes you just need a little push in the right direction (this was on the right)
&
Names are for friends so I don’t need one. (this was on the left)
I exited the game. Upon returning… at some point I came by the same place where the posters should’ve been, but only 1 poster was there. “Names are for friends…”
Wait, you mean if we do a kill all run, the next time only the targets will roam the ghost town? XD
I think you can keep everything that has a coloured badge like “rare” or “epic”. Non-labeled items get lost. Which I like, more on that later
Am I the only one who’s game crashes? When I click on Play, sometimes it crashes even before finishing loading, and sometimes after it’s finished loading and cust scene starts playing. Never Saw more than 3 seconds of cutscene.
Edit: Tried one more time and it crashed with this message:
edit2: Tried again and was able to walk around the safehouse and start a mission. Crashed on words: “Welcome to Sapienza”
