Can we expect some Freelancer fixes in place?

The Freelancer is, most of the ships are receiving updates because it's existed long enough that we can start to understand how those drastic flight model changes have affected the game. I'm able to start making real plans for what to do about it. The Freelancer is one of the ones that's going to be affected by it. Always give feedback, but it's not the worst on my list. If that doesn't jive with what you've seen, definitely the Cutlass is higher up on that list. There's just a number of ships that aren't performing the way we want them to.

Well, and also the Freelancer, this is its first pass at being a flight-ready ship. We're also still seeing it with the Constellation: even though that's viable in the Crusader map right now, there's still, for any of our ships, a lot of ongoing balance tuning, still getting the component rework going, so every ship is still going to have changes and balances.

And that's not even to bring up the bugs. We're running into a lot of issues where mass is just being misreported, and we don't know why. But that basically means that, when the Freelancer was revealed to be a tenth of its mass, and that's why it was so insanely fast. The Freelancer racing was so funny to watch on YouTube. It wasn't actually an issue of a misplaced zero. It just wasn't actually reading that value for some reason. We shuffled it around, and then it worked, and we don't know why. My code doesn't work, and I don't know why. Now my code works, and I don't know why. So we still have to actually track down that problem. There's been a lot of percussive maintenance on the ships recently to get them to work properly. We've got John working overtime to really figure out what's going on. But not just the flight behaviors are being updated, but also I'm scheduled to be doing a full weapon revamp, going through all the DPS of every weapon on every size, bringing those in line with our design goals now that those are really explicitly defined. So that's going to affect all the balance again, so have fun.

First all the weapons will change, then all the shields will change. Oh, then armor will get implemented, and that'll change everything. So there's so many moving parts to these ships that it's completely impossible to get it razor's-edge perfect in a first pass. It's like, okay, put it out, sand down the rough edges, do some more work, keep refining, keep refining, keep iterating. And that's really the way you hit a good balance point with the game.