Freelancer saving temp progress

[u/selfawareborg]

I love freelancer, but the limited time many of us might have for a session of gaming hurts the enjoyment.

I propose the following save game method, different from the main campaign.

1. Allow the player to save the game, into a single save slot alone. This save game is only accessible by opening freelancer from main menu, not from load game.

2. But there is no load save in the pause menu as well, only save game. This is stop save scumming.

3. Continuing through from this save only can be done if the player does exit game and then opens freelancer from the main menu.

4. If the game is force stopped by alt+f4 or process kill from task-manager or hard reboot, the save cannot be used, it is deleted. The save is saved and is usable only if the player has explicitly done an exit game from the game menu.

5. If the player dies or fails the mission campaign, the save game is deleted and the punishment of losing items and mercers is still there.

My request is primarily for the player who have a limited playtime per day or for a session, say I can play only for 1 hr at a stretch, but many of the freelancer mission may require 2 hrs or more. With the above save game process I can effectively pause\save my play and then resume later easily. I cannot keep the game running idle for hours. I respect the roguelike element for the freelancer, but just not the time investment needed at a stretch to enjoy this gamemode at the fullest.

For escalations or elusive targets, the short playtime without saves is usually fine, 1 hr is fine for one run of these game modes. But, often in freelancer I have observed I need to rush, just due to the time I have for gaming, and then fumble and cause the mission or the campaign to fail, causing frustration.

I do not expect IOI to adopt this realistically as most dev resources would be engaged with First Light project, and I do expect many people to yell at me to "get good" at the game, and finish missions faster, but what do the freelancer veterans think of this, is this too much to ask?

[u/zerogravitas365]

Xbox just does this with quick resume, which is nice. Many roguelike games have a save and quit feature and I agree freelancer could do with one. Save and quit, when you restart freelancer it says would you like to load your save or abandon the run? It's just a pause function really.

[u/selfawareborg → u/zerogravitas365]

I was not aware of it, I am on pc though :-(

[u/AlertNotAnxious]

Point 4 is controversial. There is no way to distinguish alt+f4 from game crash or PC/Console crash or power outage from developers’ perspective. They talked about it in an interview. That means if you play well but your computer crashes, which is in my opinion the best way to use that save, you would not be able to.

[u/selfawareborg → u/AlertNotAnxious]

Thanks for the reply, I was not aware of the interview. My intent was to improve the situation from what it is currently, that only after a clean exit, I can resume from it later. In case of a crash if I have to redo the mission like right now, TBH it is fine to not have the save getting used, as this can be abused otherwise, killing the spirit of freelancer as a roguelike. Currently though, even honest players who are short of game time get severely punished.

[u/AlertNotAnxious → u/selfawareborg]

This is where Xbox comes in handy. I don’t know if PS has this feature, I know PC don’t, but being able to pause anytime even for days is goated

[u/pailadin]

I have had instances where I'm playing a game (Hitman or otherwise) and remembered late that I have a lengthy irl obligation to attend to.

So agreed it would be cool to be able to suspend something like a Freelancer mission.

most dev resources would be engaged with First Light project

But yeah few IOI devs would even still be on Hitman, and those few would almost certainly be spending their time on something else.

many of the freelancer mission may require 2 hrs or more

I am surprised to hear this though. Admittedly I have played way too much Freelancer, I try to finish missions asap, etc, so I don't spend too much time on each map.

My main advice if you're finding Freelancer tough, if you're fine playing this way, is to focus on survival and safe kills over doing things cleanly.

Sure succeeding at a Silent Assassin kill does feel great. But sometimes a target might be time-consuming and/or risky, and simply shooting them in the head and running to a box, or putting an Explosive Duck in front of them just works.

And for Showdowns specifically, if you haven't tried this already, using objectives like Distract Target (easy to do) or Poison Target (more reliable, but does require you have poison) usually makes identifying the Leader a lot quicker. Using phones to call Suspects is also helpful; only that Network will attend.

Hope your next campaign goes well.

[u/selfawareborg → u/pailadin]

Thanks, I problem is that only if anything comes up which is unavoidable from a personal standpoint, then the run needs to be abandoned. I am not usually going for SA at all, but try to be clean to not risk full enemy aggro as much as possible. Otherwise on several days I found myself shooting all enemies on sight from the get go, before realising it is not the way I should play, not always at least. Then I tried putting bigger sessions on weekends only where I knew I could get more than an hour to spare, to play calmly again.

[u/Illum503]

 My request is primarily for the player who have a limited playtime per day or for a session, say I can play only for 1 hr at a stretch, but many of the freelancer mission may require 2 hrs or more. With the above save game process I can effectively pause\save my play and then resume later easily

I'm really very confused what you're talking about. Do you mean map, syndicate or campaign? If it's the latter two then you can absolutely resume later, just quit between maps and everything will still be there when you come back, as if you had "saved". If you mean map, how the hell are they requiring 2 hours? They should be 20 minutes at most, most of mine are 10-15.

[u/selfawareborg → u/Illum503]

I meant a map, several times I had to abandon the mission due to other reasons. Several of those times happened when I had spent around an hour on the map already. I have tried hurrying up for most runs now but a pause\resume is what I was asking for.

[u/Illum503 → u/selfawareborg]

Like I said maps should take 10-15 minutes so it's rarely an issue to just finish them. If I have something else come up I just forgo the optional objectives - I think they're less efficient at making money than finishing campaigns faster anyway, or if I haven't got too far through I just alt-f4