And let’s keep it that way. Recovering from one prestige is difficult enough, and I gotta do ten as it is to get all the challenges. Adding more challenges behind it? Fuck a bunch of that.
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I’ve gotten to level 8 in Prestige and it’s exhausting. I don’t care anymore about objectives. I don’t care about Merces (other than I need them to keep buying weapons over and over). I don’t care about Silent Assassin or any rating anymore. I feel like all I’m doing is hunting for suppliers, safes, and Merces couriers to buy more weapons. When you get close to getting all of the weapons and tools back the suppliers have nothing in inventory and it’s just grinding to finish campaigns to get the one weapon crate reward.
At this point it feels like I’m playing “Agent 47’s weapons addiction simulator”.
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True. I’m almost at level 5. It’s boring to collect all the weapons and then getting them away to collect again. For 10 times.
How do you think I feel? Unless I’m completing a challenge that requires me to ignore them or makes them impossible, I have to do those things, so it takes me way longer. I’m still collecting everything from my very first one, and I did that a month ago.
People are still working on the prestige changes? I got to 10 within a month of it being patched in.
I’ve only done like 2 or 3 prestiges so far. My interest in Freelancer and WoA as a whole has dwindled by the time prestige got added, and at that point I was mostly hopping on once every few weeks on average to do a syndicate or two if I felt like it on a given day.
Plus most of the time I just prefer taking my time getting SA POs, perfect runs or satisfying kills (well, up until I mess up, at which point things get uglier) over trying to efficiently farm Merces and missions.
1 Like
I’m at prestige 9, the first 7 (from 2 to 7, I already had a full wall when it was implemented) I rushed collecting everything I could from the maps and taking notes of what I had, prestige 8 and 9 were done naturally from reward crates or buying weapons I needed for an objective.
1 Like
I only did my first a short while ago and am still working on it. Of course, I’m actually playing the mode, not rushing through it, so I’m getting everything back at roughly the speed at which I originally acquired it in the first place. And I want most of the other challenges to be completed before i prestige further.
2 Likes
I am on Prestige level 1 on both my main and alt accounts.
I like the idea of wiping your stash and starting over. Few items, but your mastery of the mode has increased. However I do think there are some poor design choices, like the scarcity of certain items at vendors.
I also don’t have that much time to play these days, and load times on the PS4 are long.
I expect I will play Freelancer for years, assuming the servers are up. I’m not in a rush.
4 Likes
Personally, I think it goes back to how I attacked this mode originally. I rushed through mastery when Freelancer originally released and spent almost every minute of my free time for that first month or so getting to Level 100. Then I kept playing, focusing only on completing challenges. At present, the only challenges I haven’t finished are the Level 10 Prestige challenge and (I think) the two highest count ones (employee of the year and the other one for doing some stupid number of syndicates but don’t quote me on that). As a result, the sole thing I’m playing for is those last few challenges.
I don’t particularly like contracts mode and Freelancer, while providing more variety than the normal game, is really just a glorified automatic contracts engine. There are no mission stories, no opportunities, no cinematic kills, etc. Grinding for the sole purpose of getting weapons back (that you’ve already gotten several times mind you), is just getting tedious.
3 Likes
Oh man, forget that!! 
We need it like ASAP!
Prestige is far too mundane. I like playing Freelancer knowing I’ve got my full weapon inventory behind me. It becomes a bit of a grind chasing around for your weapons and sometimes you loose focus on the actual mission at hand on occasions in my opinion.
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Prestige got me back into Freelancer after I had gotten bored from not needing merces anymore. Doing all the objectives is more fun for me but without needing merces I was just quickly killing everyone and leaving the level. Filling up the weapon walls again is fun and I’m enjoying getting more efficient at doing it every level. That said, once I get to 10/10 prestige, I don’t know if I’ll have to the motivation to keep doing it and playing Freelancer to get Top Dog. I’m only 49 campaigns completed now at level 6 prestige.
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You’ve essentially hit on all the points I had back in June. For a game mode that is apparently trying to be infinitely replayable and getting people out of their complacent gameplay styles the base game offers, the other systems within freelancer are at complete odds with this goal. Freelancer tools being taken away from the safehouse, the prestige system that perverses gameplay motivation, and a mastery track that gets more and more grindy, to the point of player exhaustion.
Freelancer has a good gameplay loop, I still enjoy playing it, but not the same extent I had done before June because I get tired of the mode really quickly. Ironically, the base game being more consistent and less random means it’s better fleshed out gameplay-wise, as the targets and other kills feel a lot more interesting to tackle, and more replayable.
1 Like
That’s my inherent issue with contracts mode. The normal maps’ main targets are “interesting”. They have complex routes, multiple paths based on what happens in their environment, mission stories and opportunities for the player to figure out, and they interact with their environment in unique ways. Normal non-target characters don’t.
They have routes, sure, but it’s typically somewhat minimal and it’s always far less complex. They don’t interact with their environment in the same ways. There may be one or two unique things any given character does, but by and large they are far more passive.
Outside of some tricks and glitches, many of these non-player characters are not interesting to target. The player community has done some amazing things creating some interesting missions out of these characters by asking us to take them out in unusual outfits, using unusual weapons, or putting other restrictions on the situation but the targets themselves are usually not very interesting in the way they are programmed.
Freelancer, necessarily, uses these same target types (even when they’re injected into the map - they’re not, and cannot be given manpower, as interestingly programmed as the normal map targets). It was bound to get tired eventually.
4 Likes
I still love playing Freelancer and I’m still consistently playing it a year after launch. I find it’s such a more fun experience when you have all your weapon inventory and you’re not having to grind for your weapons after activating Prestige. I’ve done Prestige once, but I won’t be doing it again anytime soon.
2 Likes
At least contracts mode feels more like an alternate mode to mess around in, freelancer meanwhile has deliberate balance decisions and mechanics that make it stand out more – heck it’s designed to be this brand-new alternate game mode that completely flips the script. But…gameplay-wise it feels quite crowded with extraneous mechanics. Couriers serve little purpose other than to be fetch quests, safe’s are almost never worth going for unless you’re in the early-game, and all these side objectives do is saturate the gameplay, which doesn’t help the modes’ longevity or making it feel fresh in the long term.
And for all of Freelancers’ good points, the more you play it, the more the monotony starts to rear its ugly head.
And it sucks that I feel that way.
Mastery level 100, at last, and the final suit along with it. Now just the challenges and their trophies await.
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All of that changes completely when you activate prestige though, since suddenly you start needing merces again.
1 Like
Sure, but that’s the only time they’re worth going for. Any other time, you can basically ignore them as the merces or XP gained from intercepting them is often not worth the hassle on later levels. Their value to the player doesn’t scale well, and that is a problem for the replayability of freelancer. And even then, anytime you prestige, you do lose all your weapons and Merces, but to counter this, you level up slightly faster, and you get an increased merces value rate which, if anything, exacerbates the problem over time.
From what I’m reading on the hitman wiki, the Merces you get extra does decrease the more you prestige. But only up to level 6, where it levels out again, and you’re then stuck with the same problem of having more Merces than you know what to do with (only now with a permanently increased extra payout!) and only serve to save you from failed runs and buying weapons back.
Prestige-ing is a good system, I wanna make that clear. I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all. But its intentions don’t really gel well with either the current state of the Merces economy or the gameplay loop of Freelancer.
You balance the monetary economy of a game by focusing on the coin value from the offset, not by adding in hard-reset mechanics to curb the problem.
4 Likes
That all depends on your mindset while you’re playing. I play Freelancer like I do the rest of the game: as a story. 47 is trying to bring down the syndicate, and to do that, not only is he killing its members, he’s also robbing their safes and intercepting their couriers transporting the rest of the money. Between losing members and losing money, it’s what forces the Leader out of hiding. It’s all part of the challenge and the story. The only time I don’t got for the couriers is when there’s a Do Not Pacify objective.
4 Likes