What is Aftermath?
Aftermath is a mod for the 2003 game Freelancer that draws inspiration from Freelancer’s vanilla gameplay and themes as well as its long lineage of mods. Development so far has focused on a series of innovative features that focus on overhauling and improving Freelancer’s core gameplay systems, including unique takes on trading, smuggling, mining, exploration and a completely new approach to player progression.
This will all be tied together with a modern UI replacement for Freelancer’s dated interface and heavy integration with our website, allowing management of multiple ships, assets and player groups from a web interface outside the game.
We aim to deliver all of this with a high level of polish along with regular content updates after release. Aftermath is intended to be played in a multiplayer roleplay environment and there are no development plans for singleplayer at this time.
What’s the setting?
Aftermath is set in 815 AS, 15 years after the events of Freelancer and follows through with the assumption that the Nomad threat was successfully covered up. While relations between the houses normalized somewhat in the immediate aftermath of the war, there is now a great deal of suspicion and mistrust between the houses, who are also struggling to contain dissident factions, crime and their own internal political struggles.
Where can I find out more?
We post regular blog updates on our website, as well as here on ModDB. If you’re looking for something a little more personal, we have an active and friendly Discord community that you can join by clicking here.
The Aftermath Developers are also on Twitter, YouTube and Patreon.
Articles
Hello there everyone! It's time for another blog! Today we'll be going over the new factions in Aftermath.
Due to the wish to keep things mostly in-line with vanilla and trying to follow through with the time progression since we're trying to keep the amount of new factions low, however there are some cases where they are needed to fill a roleplay or gameplay niche. The two factions we'll be going over today are the Red Sails, a Bretonian based pirate faction and the Sons of Ymir, a Sigma / Omicron based unlawful group dedicated to going after the GMG and Corsairs.
Red Sails
First up, the Red Sails. This is an emergent pirate group whose sole focus is on making money. The reason we decided to add this faction is because story-wise most of the houses have been heavily damaged following the Rheinland War, and although Bretonia was mostly spared there would still be enough turmoil to allow for the existence of such a group. They are not wealthy or particularly powerful, but this decentralized group are oriented towards pure piracy. They also fill a gameplay niche, with most other houses having a faction or organization that is heavily involved in the pirate trade. This isn't the case with Bretonia as both the Molly and Gaian factions have political motivations for being unlawful. By adding the Red Sails we provide players a pirate avenue without any political association.
This is Port Nassau, an asteroid base belonging to the Red Sails. Given their background as simple pirates and thus lacking the civilian support of the Molly movement or the Gaians, the Red Sails are probably the least equipped Bretonian unlawful group. Unlike the other two groups though, the Red Sails are purely profit oriented and only tend to pick fights that they are sure they can win.
The Sons of Ymir
The second faction that we are adding is the Sons of Ymir, a loose group of Rheinland supported individuals who attack the Corsairs in an attempt to steal Artifacts from them. Due to the jump routes that need to be taken for this, along with the natural Rheinland bitterness lingering from the 80-year war, the GMG are also targets for the group. From the gameplay side of things, with Nomads and the Order being unplayable there aren't any Omicron / Sigma based unlawfuls aside from the Outcasts and the Corsairs. While we could add more life to the Omicrons by expanding the Corsair / Outcast presence there, these two factions already have a significant presence through the rest of Sirius. We won't be removing them from the Omicrons in any way, but we felt that a local faction might serve this purpose better.
Pictured here is Aruba Station, one of the Ymir bases located in the Omicron Theta system. The faction presence will mostly be along the Sigma - Omicron route and focus on traffic in that area for piracy targets. The station itself will serve as a base of operations in the region for them as well as storing artifacts which are in high demand in Rheinland.
With the two new factions explained there is also a bit of new information regarding blogs. There has been a bit of radio silence on this front with real life getting in the way of things for a lot of people. We probably won't be getting back to a regular posting schedule anytime soon, but we'd like to put more posts out a bit more frequently!
Dublin and You: The Gold Rush
News 1 commentImpyness discusses what's going in Dublin between big bad Bretonia and the Mollies Sovereignty Movement.
The Land of the Giants
NewsAsh takes a quick glance at the big corporations that will feature in Aftermath.
DIY Starships
NewsAsh introduces some of the new ship manufacturers being introduced with Aftermath.
Post a comment
Profile
Icon
Game
FreelancerDeveloper
Aftermath Development TeamContact
Send MessageHomepage
Forums.aftermath.spaceRelease date
Mod watch
Follow
X
Tags
Embed Buttons
Link to Freelancer: Aftermath by selecting a button and using the embed code provided more...
The mod is dead. The devteam disbanded in August and their Discord is gone.
Is there any new news on this mods development?
This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.
This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.
Since when are corvettes capital ship classes? Sorry but they are just a bigger version of fighters ===> Homeworld
Going by naval definitions, a corvette is traditionally the smallest class of vessel considered to be a proper warship. I think we mixed gunboats and corvettes up a bit in the blog though as they should really be the smallest capital class!
If you scale them against Freelancer fighters and look at how they fly, they do play a lot like very large fighters though.
Xvs.Y PvP - new idea for indie gaming :D
Joke.
All the blessings!
Something similar did author Gibbon in Genesis mod.I suggest you check unless you already have.You can find amazing and excellent interior in Orion mod I think!That idea or proposal for vast space and distances is number 1 !
It should be considered that the layout of the planets and all celestial body's follows the Heliocentric law, not random like the original version
Thanks Great Jobs
Making Freelancer's systems into 'realistic' ones would be a monumental task!
While we're not looking at re-ordering things at that level, there has been talk of scaling some planets up to make things feel a bit more like you're flying around the vastness of space and a bit less like you're cruising between brightly colored billiard balls!
I don't think scaling up the planets would be a good idea. If you do, then the planets would start to feel more like moons of each other, since the space between them will be smaller. Also they'll take much more space, so if you need to go around one, it will take much more time. And what about the sun? Are you going to scale it as well?
If you make the planets bigger, you'll have to scale pretty much all other objects as well in both scale and distance from each other. But then you'll bump into issues with the floating point numbers, when they become too big (I don't think that those issues are solvable). And you'll have to increase the speed of the ships to account for the increased distance, but that would impact the combat and the interception of other ships as well...
In short, I think that the original Freelancer did a great job at balancing the size of the planets versus the size of the system in both the visuals and the navigation department. The planets still look big up close, can be selected from a distance and the player can easily orient themselves from pretty much anywhere in the system (except when flying in nebulas). Flying might take long in some occasions, but not too long, and opens the opportunity for combat with pirates, police or other factions. Space feels big but not too empty.
This is correct. We're a bit far into development to start rescaling the entire game, but there have been discussions about increasing sizes of certain planets (mostly gas giants) to give some systems a bit of distinctiveness/wow factor. I quite like the reduced scale Freelancer does, even if it is a bit strange to think about logically!
Bringing the freelancer's universe system more closer to the true laws of the universe, there should be no obstacles, and it will make a more amazing gaming experiences.
Btw thank for great work
Years ago FLCE added Newtonian Physics to the game, while it was alot of fun it also was alot of work for both the admin and players alike just to change systems. Not everything should be carried over from the real world.