Official: H3 Freelancer Closed Technical Test feedback Thread (CTT)

They work like regular objectives, turn the objectives to always off and they will go

Again, not the point.

Thank you, that will come in very handy once I have all weapons and tools.

in booming voice

Rise my soldiers, let IOI know our dissatisfaction!

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I’ve still got this feeling we’ll get one large lengthy freelancer newsletter in early Jan to compensate for the ones IOI have missed.

At the end of the day, anything could have come up at the studio which has caused a delay of the newsletters, but I suppose it’s best to have IOI focus on finalising Freelancer so we can have a a fully polished game mode ready for launch I guess :slightly_smiling_face:

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I have two really minor issues:


Can you please add color to liquid in Antique Sedative Syringe? I’m glad you brought it back, but that clear liquid seems off. I guess godd would be if you used yellowish liquid like is in Modern Sedative Syringe.

Can you use correct version of Lethal Pills, like ones you unlock in Season 2, instead of ones you unlock in Season 3, so it matches other pill jars?

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Okay, so I FINALLY finished the Freelancer CTT Video I wanted to do explaining my thoughts better from the posts I made on this thread. This took a while to put together, in part because I had to sift through and memorise 31GB of stream footage…twice over (due to my 3 week PC death experience), and I had to record other games for comparisons and such.

Anyway, enjoy!

Oh, and if anyone here has epilepsy, you may wanna skip 16:27 - 16:59 as it has sped up footage.

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This is a great video with a lot of good points that reminded me about my own experience. I would like to point out though that Yuki’s guard is actually quite possible - for a non-push kill he’s the one who enters the sauna area with Yuki (she can then be pacified) or for a push kill, you can push him over the railing by the stairs leading to Yuki’s suite. Alerted (meaning he’s an enforcer) or not it’s still possible with a thrown item distraction :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s still very per-finnicky. I’d rather they just not use guards for main targets/ NPC’s with tiny routes as they’re just inherently limiting for the reasons I gave in the video.

Either way, thank you =)

(Also, apparently Yuki does smoke near the ledge I highlighted, but I didn’t know that when I recorded that a month and a half ago.)

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You have it bang on about ‘No consequences for actions’. I totally agree with that.

If anyone else doesn’t want to watch his long video, this part here is what you should all watch. It’s so on point.

It should start at 11:47 (ironically). Scroll there if it doesn’t for you.

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Partly why this video is segmented the way it is is specifically for this kind of “watch this part” discussion. That and they were bullet points from my posts from my time on the CTT that I posted to this forum anyway, it just made sense to keep it like it is.

Unrelated, but something I’ve also noticed is that I thought opening all traditionally locked doors would be a more controversial change; either people don’t seem to mind this observation, or I have it bang on there too. I expected pushback from the checkpoints idea (which I did get on reddit, someone claimed it would apparently make the mode less replayable… somehow.), but the locked doors thing has gone surprisingly under the radar.

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Great video, one of the best I’ve seen on Freelancer!

I didn’t know about the no consequences, that sounds kinda strange. I was hoping they would have swat/enforcers enter a level like in blood money if you are too aggro.

I disagree on the doors, there are still opportunities to open them such as using heavy firearms. Not ideal but I prefer the puzzle aspect of not having too many options for freelancer specifically. That way you really have to choose your resources wisely.

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Thank you for the kind words, I did try to make it as informative and as obvious as I could with the footage I captured.

Sadly nothing of the sort happens, though I wouldn’t be entirely against that; that’d keep things a bit more interesting if you decide to kill everything with a head and a heart.

It may be worth knowing that doors being open was a thing on Ghost Mode in H2, given the whole PVP thing; it makes sense you wouldn’t want to distract the player; so game-mode specific door unlocking isn’t a new thing. That said, you do make a good point about shotguns opening doors and such.

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You make some good points but:

Going on a kill spree risks putting you in combat. Putting you in combat risks dying. How desirable you find this depends entirely upon your choice of syndicate. Whilst stealth is a core mechanic of the base game, it very predictably made assault weapons a pointless part of your arsenal. Freelancer avoids this precisely by enabling you to opt for a violent playstyle if you want to.

You then go on to complain that the consequences of getting killed in an alerted territory or showdown terminate your run, which you point out as a form of frustration - however, feeding into my point above, the primary reason for this to happen to you is playing fast-and-loose.

You cannot, on one hand, claim that Freelancer is too easy because you found it trivial to go on a murder spree with impunity and then complain when that impunity turns out not to be quite as universal as you believed and delivers a fairly solid blow to your progress.

Other than that, I did enjoy the PAYDAY2 comparisons and you were pretty much on-the-button with the suggestions you made there; though I suspect we’ll find that ship has already sailed.

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The issue with that logic is that Combat in Hitman WOA is segmented; you can literally just flee from one area to another and hide (and sometimes, not even that), something which I tried to show in the video. I did add in the caveat that, so long as you have decent map knowledge, dying in combat won’t be an issue. And really, if you’re playing freelancer, you probably should be aware of the games’ maps and many of its intricacies. My main point was that having no penalty for killing civilians is a baffling design choice,. not that combat-oriented playstyles are bad.

Outside of being the loudest possible substitute for lockpicks, I don’t think they should ever be part of a wider meta. I do like that you can unlock them, specifically so people can mess about with them, but i’m not surprised they got sidelined; this is a stealth game, players will always preferred silenced weapons anyway, so their underutilisation is expected to some extent.

You can still do that in the base game; hell you get specific “play style” rankings for doing so, and it’s much less risky. I don’t expect to get S/A when using obviously loud weapons in a game focused on stealth and sneaking around.

If you go back and look at the footage of my streams for better context, that was not why I was outed; On the showdown I showed, it was because my eyes were darting around attempting to focus on the modes’ extraneous mechanics. Not only that, but then they decided to flee, meaning I had to A: work out wtf to do on the fly, and B: try and kill anyone to get to the target (which I actually did do, I just failed to escape). Before that point, I was being as stealthy as I could be, so these missions can go tits up pretty quickly if you err in any way, stealth or loud.

Yes I can, because a game mode this complex is going to have different aspects of the game, albeit related, that I will take issue with. I can still think combat is easy, while saying that showdowns are unintuitive and outright unfair for the player to play against. The game gives you no time to react in showdowns if things go wrong for any reason; the showdown targets just magically flee leading to lack of reasonable time to react for the player, even if prior to that point they were being stealthy and such. One slip up, and you’re screwed.

I sense you may be right there; though It may help to know this script was recorded and finalised mid-November, hell most of the editing was half-way done, my motherboard halted progress for three weeks, and making daily videos wrecked me creatively. I did voice these concerns back when the CTT was live (a lot of the video’ script is almost word-for-word what I wrote on the forum), so It’s not exactly new info for IOI to see.

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I’m confused. In GM there wasn’t any lock picks, so unlocking all doors made sense. Doesn’t Freelancer have lock picks!? What purpose do they serve if all doors are unlocked already!?

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Agreed. Doors that are already locked should still be locked in freelancer. The mode should be about figuring out a route. Lockpicks, crowbars, key cards, scramblers or even bombs used to open doors add to your inventory capacity and is also part of the preparation aspect of gameplay. Making all doors open also degrades the capacity aspect.

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Well yes, but they weren’t always available, and a lot of the older maps had a lot of locked doors. As I mentioned with Ghost mode, it’s more of a “don’t distract the player” kind of thing.

That’s not being taken away! There is still a lot of the preparation aspect of gameplay; choosing prestige objectives, what weapons to take, what contract to do, whether or not to go for safes/ side objectives, so it’s not like the game mode is lacking in the preparation area, and It would not degrade the capacity aspect either. The game mode is already complex, having less complexity can often be a good thing.

The caveat I had in my video was that this should apply only to traditionally locked doors, not keycard-locked doors, partially because the former were just everywhere on the 2016 maps and it made getting round a right pain, and also because keycard locked doors usually have a good reason for it (ironically it’s the inverse in a lot of the H2 and H3 maps), so i’m not against those sorts of doors being locked up.

Doors that are usually locked in regular missions stay locked in Freelancer, in fact there’s even a “don’t unlock any door” objective :slight_smile:

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It’s like I never commented at all.

You didn’t mention that objective in your post as far as I can tell, and it’s an interesting challenge to figure out a route that doesn’t involve breaking doors open, which seems to be what 47saso47 is interested in.

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