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

[n00bdragon]

GAME RUINING BUGS:

• You lose half your merces whenever you log out of the game, even if you log out inside your safe house. This penalty is fine for quitting in a mission, but it shouldn’t be applied in between missions.
• Showdown targets not matching their descriptions at all. About half the time they match correctly, but multiple times now I have had mission targets that violate one or more of their supposed “tells” (such as wearing a hat, having earrings, sunglasses, etc). Worse, usually one of the suspects WILL match all the clues, but when you take them down you find out they were merely a suspect. The behavior tells are similarly wildly inconsistent.

LESS GAME RUINING BUGS:

• Sometimes safes do not appear to spawn all of their clues. I had a safe spawn in the attic of Paris near where the guard sits at several computer screens. I ended up killing everyone on the upper floor and scouring the entire building for half an hour and never found the third safe code clue. I even searched the floor below in case it was spawning in a sphere.
• Jason Portman was one of my targets on Hokkaido and managed to get himself onto the roof of the building.
• The shoe shining bench in the hideout doesn’t work.

GENERAL FEEDBACK (after 13.5 hours of playtime)

• The whole system feels like a really fun and fresh take on the Hitman formula. I absolutely love how Silent Assassin isn’t a thing here and the emphasis is on “just roll with it”. A lot of the most exciting parts of this mode are when things go sideways and instead of restarting like in any other mode you just have to figure it out. That’s great.
• Randomized chests throughout the levels often feel kind of bad when they contain a bunch of items you can’t even take back to your base or make any special use of in the map (often just random melee items). Some of these can be hard to get to and when you spend five minutes working your way into an area to get a golden idol or a branding iron that’s pretty lame.
• Pickup chests should probably appear on the map and not just the HUD. It’s fun stumbling across them the first couple hours. Then it just becomes a matter of “ugh, where is that thing again”? Especially since I don’t believe their locations shift (much).
• Couriers are great. Perhaps the amount they drop could be displayed on the map though to help people decide if it’s worth it.
• Losing ALL of your tools when you fail a campaign is brutal. Losing the stuff you brought on the mission is expected. Losing stuff inside your safe house feels like robbery.
• Expendable tools feel unpleasantly transient. I never feel a desire to bring poisons or explosives because it gets “used up” and then I can’t get it back. It might be nice if basic poisons and explosives could be bought inside your safe house for 5-10 Merces or something.
• In later missions (the fourth syndicate especially) the maps just become way too crowded with a sea of enforcers, suspects, lookouts, and assassins. It’s a mess. Some areas can feel like the streets of Mumbai except everyone can see through all disguises and wants to kill you.

[Courier6]

@n00bdragon

Losing ALL of your tools when you fail a campaign is brutal. Losing the stuff you brought on the mission is expected. Losing stuff inside your safe house feels like robbery.

I agree with this sentiment. Losing a campaign is already a big deal from the loss of progress and time (especially if you died and lost a lot of your merces and equipped items), losing gear that you weren’t even risking in any way and properly stored feels unfair and illogical.

[jan342]

Sometimes in Showdown missions it is really hard to see if a suspect wears for example an ear ring. For those of you, who have an Nvidia graphics card, you might want to try Ansel. Ansel is basically an ingame photo mode, that is activated by pressing Alt + F2. Then the game freezes and you can move the camera freely. Press Escape to get back, when you’re done.

More info here: NVIDIA Ansel Plugin - The In-Game Photography Tool

[Leakerman]

@schatenjager

Losing so much progress, Merces, and equipment for failing any part of a contract is too punishing. We can complete 15 straight maps and then lose all of it for failing the final contract. It’s too severe.

@schatenjager

Mastery earned weapons should NEVER be lost, especially if there is no readily apparent way to earn them back.

I feel like you just dont like roguelike games

[Leakerman]

@n00bdragon

Losing ALL of your tools when you fail a campaign is brutal. Losing the stuff you brought on the mission is expected. Losing stuff inside your safe house feels like robbery.

I feel like that’s the point tho. I do agree with a suggestion from earlier to have an option to buy back your entire inventory for a small fee and to nerf the amount of payment you lose per death

[Khakiasp]

Freelancer day 2 feedback

Though this day was more positive overall there’s still a lot of things i currently think need tweaking and/or straight up changing to make this mode the best it could be.

Let me start with the positives, now that I’ve unlocked most of the safehouse I have got to say that it is absolutely the best part of Freelancer. The atmosphere to the meaningless interactions you can do all around it add so much to 47 and to the feel of the mode as a whole, the developers really succeeded in creating the perfect safehouse for 47 and they should be proud. But, the progression to unlock stuff is far too slow and I think you should by default unlock atleast one thing for the safehouse per mastery level. And i also think that some parts of the safehouse need some more polishing, for example I would love to see how far the targets are in the gun range, or to pull targets towards me with the press of a button. But for this closed technical test, It’s as perfect as can be.

I also want to retract part of a previous statement about made, I don’t think you should be awarded bonus merces for silent assassin anymore. Due to there being syndicates that award silent assassin play by having merces challenges, I’m quite frankly amazed that i missed that on my first day of play despite how short that play session was. Though i still think the player should be awarded a flat amount of merces for each assignments

Now for the bad/needs improving

This is a minor gripe, but i find it really annoying to have to place back basic firearms like the bartoli, hacklr and hacklr w due to me picking them up in the mission. I think if you already own a gun or tool you picked up in the mission it should automatically be put in the corresponding rack.

Which brings me to my first suggestion for all the weapons and tools. Why not allow the player to get duplicates of certain tools to negate the super heavy punishment that is set currently, from what I’m reading many players find it frustrating to lose everything if they fail a campaign and that could be mitigated if they could develop a back up of certain tools. Though i can also see how this would break the gamemode.

Second bad thing, The final stages of a campaign get way to fucking tedious for their own good. having to take down 4 syndicate members and looking at 12 possible suspects for a leader is just ridiculous and not a fun way to up the difficulty. Add in that for the suspect they may have associated assassins/lookouts and each map just becomes overcrowded and not fun to traverse. I even nearly failed a run because i got spotted by a lookout i couldn’t find causing the main target to flee the location. Luckily i managed to kill the target while they were running.

which brings me to my third point. Lookouts and assassins are either useless or in the case of lookouts, ridiculously stupid and can spot you from a mile a way. Assassins are useless either way, they do far too little damage and are hampered by the same idiotic guard ai that can be easily dispelled off.

But lookouts need a change because often i don’t know where i got spotted from or what i got spotted for which causes them to tell the target to run and its very frustrating. Though 90% they do absolutely nothing.

Though this day was far more positive my main consensus on freelancer is still, eh couldve been worse.

[Kent]

Some thoughts.

I’m having a hard time putting the game down. It is addictive to grind for rewards, and the Safe House has feel to it I love. Seeing your gear in the three cases, and not in selection grid really makes such a big difference in the feeling of accomplishment they give (though I noticed there’s a lack of diversity in duck colors. )

• Challenges pop way too rarely. As it is, every time one pops I sort of go “oh yeah, that’s right, there are still challenges in this”. Doesn’t give the same rewarding dopamine hit.
• Base pay per mission, if just a little should be implemented.
• The probability of getting a fiber wire needs to be buffed. I bought one (or got one in a loot crate) in my first campaign. Lost it when I flubbed the final showdown, and now I’m at my second final showdown and I haven’t even seen a single fiber wire through the entire campaign. That shouldn’t be possible in my opinion.
• I agree with the camp that thinks the losses you experience if you fail are a bit too much. In the very least there should be a few protected items (like the fiber wire).
• Losing all of your gear in the three cases is beyond painful, and while I think failing should hurt, I think this is just too much,

My suggestion (even though I know it won’t come to pass, since it would mean a bunch of extra development) would be to have a laptop store in your safe house for some core items.

Bugs I encountered:

• Binoculars blend in safehouse.(binoculars do not line up with 47s hands, causing him to look like the things he can see further by making circles with his fingers).
• Areas show up as unlocked that weren’t. When I tried to activate them, nothing happened.
• The game can’t “remember” what vehicles are unlocked and in use. I switched from the default car to another one, and in one cutscene 47 still left the house with the default car. Same goes for the boat. 47 once left the house in a helicopter I hadn’t activated yet.
• Once I got informed that the bedroom was unlocked. It was not.
• Bodies produced by accidents and lethal poison being discovered fails you the “No Bodies Found” optional objective. Maybe it’s on purpose, but it’s also confusing as fuck.

@Khakiasp

This is a minor gripe, but i find it really annoying to have to place back basic firearms like the bartoli, hacklr and hacklr w due to me picking them up in the mission. I think if you already own a gun or tool you picked up in the mission it should automatically be put in the corresponding rack.

Agreed 100%. This is a small thing, but would increase quality of life immensely.

[Dribbleondo]

@sleepey

It only fails the objective, not the mission. There will always be more merces!

For me it was “timed - silent takedowns”, and it said that it’d fail the mission. If it meant it’d fail the objective, then that was not clear in the slightest.

[George_the_Aspie]

What I don’t understand is this business of failing a ‘campaign’. Is this akin to starting the story over again in Grand Theft Auto: is the safehouse bare and locked up and as though you’d never played Freelancer?

[schatenjager]

No. There are two categories of items. There’s your “weapon wall” which contains all the handguns, rifles, SMGs, snipers, etc. and those are semi-permanent. Failing a campaign doesn’t affect those (but leaving them in a map does).

The second category is tools like poisons, explosives, lockpicks, etc. If you fail a campaign, those are gone and you have to locate them/earn them/randomly receive them all over again.

The safehouse is based on mastery. Once you earn a mastery level, you’ve got that and the associated safehouse upgrade (if there is one) is permanent.

[schatenjager]

Maybe. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever played one before.

I feel like when you earn something, there’s a certain point where that should be permanent. If we could “bank” items, or if the Boss portion of each campaign section saved whatever you’d earned at that point, it would work better in my opinion. Losing stuff that you didn’t even take with you seems ridiculous.

[Serious_Pony]

@Khakiasp

This is a minor gripe, but i find it really annoying to have to place back basic firearms like the bartoli, hacklr and hacklr w due to me picking them up in the mission. I think if you already own a gun or tool you picked up in the mission it should automatically be put in the corresponding rack.

There is a hidden way to do this - just drop your items on the floor in tue safehouse and they get teleported to their racks. Found this by accident and that’s been my go-to way of placing things.

Barely takes any time to discard

[Dribbleondo]

Day 2 of Freelancer: I…have some thoughts.

Like yesterday, this was streamed on Twitch, and Youtube upload will be available tomorrow morning (Youtube HD takes YEARS to process); for future reference, here’s a playlist of the VODS with fancy thumbnails.

Right, down to business:

Prestige objective titles are, and I use this word with no amount of pleasure IOI, fucking unhelpful. Some can be obvious (SA/SO the contract, Break open a safe with explosives), but some lead you on to think one thing, but you get a bait-and-switch, and your expectations are completely different (timed silent takedowns, Hide and Seek). In a Rogue Like game, the player chooses to accepts the risks of doing objectives because they know the risks. Three envelopes that you cannot open to see what the tasks are is not good design for this sort of genre.

I still don’t like the reward crates. I’ve already said why in the first days’ post, but the tedium of getting weapons you don’t/can’t find a use for was very prevalent. “Emetic poison the target”…the crate Diana sent over gave me sedative poison. That isn’t great.

Something I forgot to talk about yesterday were Map elements. As of now, there’s no way to see crates, safes or couriers unless you’ve “found” them. Please change this so they are omnipresent icons on the map ala the merchants. It’ll be less hassle for the player, as blindly running around the map that pads the play session is not fun, believe me.

To go to a positive point, I’m starting to get a feel for the mode now, i’m finally tuning into IOI’s reasoning for things. I still dislike Silent Assassin just taking a backseat, as the whole game was otherwise built around that rating. In the stream, I was of the mindset of “there’s no consequences for anything I do – If someone see’s me do anything illegal, I can kill guards and civilians, they can get spotted laying on the floor, and it won’t matter!”, which is ass-backwards to the proper game. There’s “freedom of approach” and then there’s “throwing core stealth game concepts the game is designed around into the bin”; freedom of approach should not mean compromising the core puzzle aspects of the game, otherwise I may as well be playing…well…Hades. That said, trespassing is now very lenient (think the SA rules prior to their rework in H2), so at least something good came out of this.

I dunno, maybe I’m the old man who’s yelling at the cloud.

The punishment for failing any mission is just too severe. I was the under the impression that failing a syndicate hit would put me back to the previous one, and not what it does in-game and just wipe four hours of gameplay off the face of the earth! Losing items you were carrying makes sense, losing half your Mercers makes sense, but losing stuff in your safehouse? Did 47 get robbed or something!? Why did a mastery unlock get removed?

Look, Roguelike games are about randomisation and risks and a path that can be reset if you fail (hell, it’s part of Hades’ narrative). But that game, and hell, most RL’s I know are not stealth games, they’re usually fighting or hack ‘n’ slash games that are usually rather quick. Levels in Hitman take a LOOOOONG time to do anything simply by the nature of the genre. It’s not a good first experience to learn your hours of playing is all for naught, save for mastery to open up arbitrary parts of the safehouse.

I finally got to see the upstairs of the safehouse and…fuck me it’s pretty. Like, well done art team, you absolutely deserve the praise you’re getting here. It’s only really marred by the aforementioned arbitrary mastery unlocking.

I’m glad my complaint of the syndicate hits being too claustrophobic with mechanics is something people seem to agree with. I got outed because there’s so many things to think about, and I just didn’t see anyone on the minimap. And, really, is that surprising? If my eyes are darting all over the place to check the other mechanics, then i’m gonna focus less and less on stuff I think I know from the base game experience.

Assassins and lookouts should be removed. They cause too many issues with the balance of the mode, and often back people into a corner, literally so in my case.

Right, that’s all for now. Seeya tomorrow!

[schatenjager]

Upon further reflection, I’m not sure that Freelancer is a Roguelike at all. Per the “Berlin Interpretation”, a Roguelike has the following attributes:

High Value Factors:
Random generation of levels: No
Permadeath: No
Turn-based: No
Non-modal: No
Emergent Gameplay: Yes
Resource Management: Sort of, but not in the same way most dungeon crawlers have
Hack and Slash: No
Exploration required to identify items: Sort of, but not identification - collection rather.

Low Value Factors:
Single player: Yes
Enemy behavior similar to player: Sort of, limited capacity at best
Tactical: Yes
Takes place in an actual dungeon: No
Status display: Sort of.

That isn’t very many criteria met. Is it somewhat Procedural? Yes, but it’s not a Roguelike by that definition.

[TheChicken]

@Serious_Pony

Found this by accident

Did none of you get a pop-up tip about this? I did (maybe it only appears though if you drop items in the safehouse)

---

I’ve noticed you can’t place down items in the safehouse, probably would just teleport them into the racks, but it would be nice to organize a collection of things you might want to bring, or set up some good shots on a table.
Can you place items upstairs in the above-ground safehouse?

Part of my playthrough yesterday did have me longing for a simple Menu-Based Preparation phase, where you can pick items and guns to bring from a list.
It would help save time calculating the math of your inventory limit and time running around the place.
The Departure Table seems pretty isolated, with there only being a button to leave on the edge. The Bag next to it should let you assemble an arsenal from there…

[Melusca]

@Kent

The probability of getting a fiber wire needs to be buffed. I bought one (or got one in a loot crate) in my first campaign. Lost it when I flubbed the final showdown, and now I’m at my second final showdown and I haven’t even seen a single fiber wire through the entire campaign. That shouldn’t be possible in my opinion.

There’s a sthetoscope in the infirmary that always spawns (but maybe you have to die once for it to appear? I dunno) and counts as fiber wire.

[TheChicken]

I found the stethoscope from the start, its always there IIRC

There’s also a newspaper in the Bathroom.
Does every room in the safehouse unlock some basic respawnable item you can pick up?

[Dribbleondo]

Yep, it always spawns.

[Melusca]

TBH most of what is classified as “roguelikes” nowadays don’t follow the Berlin Interpretation in the slightest apart from “randomly generated things” and “permadeath” 30 years ago these would have been called “arcade games” not “roguelikes” >_<

[93-126]

If you complete the toolset, the supply crate rewards nothing. It’s just empty. I think it could reward some merces in such case.

I also found that even though the mastery menu says the bedroom is unlocked at level 24, the door says 31, and the room won’t be unlocked at 24.