r/freelancer

With the recent surge of AI-assisted coding, almost anyone can start a project and set ambitious goals for it. Lately, there has also been a noticeable increase in Freelancer remasters, remakes, reimplementations, and similar projects.

And on the surface, that is a good thing. It is nice to see people interested in rebuilding or modernizing Freelancer. But I think people should also be cautious about where they place their expectations, especially when a project relies heavily on AI-generated code.

AI can be surprisingly capable in the short term. It can implement features, fix individual bugs, and produce something that appears to work. The problems often become apparent later, when the project grows. Poor architectural decisions accumulate, systems become tightly coupled, regressions start appearing, and the codebase gradually turns into something that is difficult to understand or maintain.

I am not saying this without having seen it happen.

I've seen people submit PRs to Librelancer containing extremely poor AI-generated code. They were trying to contribute, but in all cases the changes ended up causing more problems than they solved, breaking unrelated parts of the project or introducing code that clearly had not been properly reviewed. Sometimes it genuinely looked like the code had been submitted simply because Claude said it was correct.

I've also seen most people whose PRs were rejected go on to create their own Librelancer forks, heavily develop them with AI, make large promises to the community, and eventually watch the whole thing collapse under its own weight.

And this isn't exclusive to Librelancer. The same pattern is appearing across independent projects. This does not mean every project using AI is bad, but there are increasingly projects making enormous promises, producing impressive-looking progress very quickly, and then disappearing when the technical debt catches up with them.

So if you suddenly hear about a new Freelancer remake, remaster, or reimplementation, please do some research before getting caught up in the hype. Look at the repository. Look at the code. Look at who is developing it, how long they have been working on it, whether there is an actual technical foundation behind the promises, and whether what they are proposing is realistically achievable.

Be cautious about where you place your hopes.

It is very easy to announce a project. It is much harder to maintain one for years and actually deliver what was promised.

Don't believe everything you read simply because the screenshots look impressive or the roadmap sounds exciting. Find out what is actually behind the project first.

Proof of concept for new idea of SP-freelancer gameplay. This is NOT story-script-driven gameplay. Everything is based ONLY on level design: some amount of locations, divided by death zones, and unlockable teleports

In this video you can see

1. Context-based voice by NeuralNet: enter location, leave base, planet destroyed, loot acquired
2. Cutscenes, played inside extra virtual room (you can watch cutscene or leave room and continue mission)
3. Hidden teleports: after cutscene you will be automatically teleported to next location
4. Megacannon working without any story script - just fire on "generators" and make MegaCannon functional (this is cropped version of mission, in release version you also need to acquire "megacannon energy" in this system, it will be returned back later)
5. Find next key inside planet wrecks
6. Open final base by destroying of enemy fighters: every kill will increase rep to hidden faction (need to set less amount of destroyable ships later)

So... this is script-less-lancer and seems like it working. Some "skyrim-lancer", because without script you have no story-restrictions and can play game in any way.

But... as always. Skyrimlancer:

Expectation: a lot of possibilities

Reality: a lot of loadings (because I can't make teleports and keys without jumpgates and docking with bases)

Also. Internationalization already supported. But at the first is need to create main script and missions. This is only prototype

Main objective of this gameplay structure: make more FL and make it cheap as possible. Looks like it's still FL, not perfect, but ultra-cheap and not based on dangerous infinite 13 mission. I really afraid to make "crossfire-like" architecture, because it adds many restrictions and can broke game anytime

I know it's possible to get the single player running but I'm not sure about the multiplayer. Has anybody got any insights on this?