Discovery Freelancer is a difficult thing to define, but the most academic way to put it is that it is an extensive modification to the long-defunct Digital Anvil space simulator title Freelancer. Narratively, Freelancer is a campy science fiction story about vanquishing an alien race which is capable of possessing and manipulating humans, told from the perspective of mercenary Edison Trent as he becomes involved with a special operations group flying under the banner of one of the governments in the game’s setting, the Sirius Sector.
Discovery Freelancer, or “Disco” if you’ve played it long enough to be come jaded, roots its lore in the ending of Freelancer, so you might also call it a sequel if you’re feeling generous.
While the game’s community now prides itself on being an immersive roleplay server with a focus on coherent development and quality original content (storylines, characters, models, textures, star systems, etc.), it was once a wild west of Malcolm Reynolds impersonators, Star Wars and Homeworld asset imports, and “super soldier experiments” (almost invariably furries). The original developers of the mod have long since departed the community, but a gradually-changing rotation of players have carried on in the years since it was first released.
But Disco is not the paragon of community-driven game development its curators hope it to be. I say this as a player who spent many years, off and on, playing, and I even held a short tenure as a developer. The problem does not lie in the development structure—the teams are broken out into functional groups with mostly-open lines of communication between them. You still get some quarreling and some pissing contest power-plays between the “managers” of the functional groups, but it does work. Not quickly, but that’s primarily a factor of the team being unpaid volunteers, some of which have been living under siege in Ukraine for the last two years.
No indeed, the difficulty with Disco’s storytelling lies in a major component of its community structure. Unlike most mods, Disco is multiplayer-only, owing to two facts:
- Many of the changes to the game’s assets result in the singleplayer campaign being unbeatable (due to significant changes in the power of ships and weapons), unplayable (due to certain assets being removed), or just buggy.
- Disco is not just the mod, but also the community and the server too.
While there have been a few different Disco servers, only the main server, for which the mod is built, gets access to all the mod’s features—the FLHook commands, forum and Discord integrations, and other plumbing that help to connect one’s experience in the game environment to the external player environment.
Why would that be necessary? Well, for most games, this is just a matter of tweeting screenshots and publishing replays to YouTube, but for Disco, this is how the game is written. The developers do technically have the final say, but much of the moment-to-moment storytelling is told by the players in the form of forum posts made in character as some entity in the game’s world—as a government official opening a bounty board, as a pilot making a claim with a screenshot spun as diegetic gun camera footage, as an escaped slave making a home on a remote space station run in part by abolitionists. Such posts have many names—records of in-game interactions are message dumps; messages sent between characters or organizations to make threats or treaties are communications (or “comms”); and personal memoirs, histories, or other narrative background are (rather generically) stories—and they range in quality from badly-spelled self-aggrandizement to thoughtful and well-paced short fiction.
And, when meeting certain conditions, these stories can be codified into the mod’s storyline.
I’m sure that this sounds like a roleplayer’s utopia to many—a story that responds to players’ actions in the long term, having effects on an interplanetary scale, has great potential to be meaningful. In that way, it’s like tabletop game, but with graphics and mouse flight space combat. The thing about tabletop games, though, is that they tend not to have more than about ten people (ideally, only about half that), while Disco at its peak has seen server loads of over two hundred players simultaneously, with hundreds more rotating in over the course of a month or a year.
The numbers are considerably less now than they were a decade ago, but aside from the middle of the European night, the server remains active, with plenty of players and factions vying for a slice of the story to be told their way—often to the detriment of another’s.
Faction actually has two different-but-related meanings in Disco, disambiguated by the words “player” and “NPC”. An NPC faction appears in the game with stations and AI-controlled ships, and each player has an entry in their reputation sheet showing that faction’s opinion of them. Most of these are vanilla (i.e. from the original game).
A player faction is a group of players roleplaying with a common in-universe cause and name. They may play as (a part of) an NPC faction, or they can roll their own backstory and cause (within reason). Player factions come in two flavors—official and unofficial. Official factions have met the requirements for endorsement by the server staff—a combination of in-game activity, forum presence, a sum of in-game currency to demonstrate their seriousness in contributing to the play environment, forum threads describing their mission and whether they’re taking recruits, and being tolerated by enough of the voting staff to clear a majority. Unofficial factions do not have the endorsement of the server staff, either because they aren’t seeking it, or because the staff won’t grant it.
(If I went into all the ways that pettiness obstructed the function and fun of Disco, this essay would be a lot longer.)
With such endorsement comes certain benefits, which have changed over time, and there was a time when officialdom, as it’s known, granted factions a seat in the developer chat, wherein they could ask for changes to the story, faction diplomacy, equipment, or anything else that fell within their faction’s diegetic sphere of influence. The current state of affairs doesn’t resemble cronyism quite as much, but there is still an “official faction requests” subform where faction perks can be executed.
But the means of influencing the game from outside the developer chat is not held solely in the hands of official factions, as individual players may submit “player requests” as well, so ideas can be brought to life on staff assent, if the player is a known good-faith actor and the explanation of the idea is clear enough.
I’ll level with you—this is not an altogether terrible idea. It’s a kind of crowdsourcing, and a lot of players are motivated to make the game better because it’s a game they play all the time. With these systems, players that care about their community can contribute without needing the writing, programming, or design skills necessary to be a developer. Official factions are a good way to shepherd new players into established roleplaying conventions (if not necessarily good roleplaying conventions, but about tastes there is to be no disputing), so maybe rewarding this kind of community-building with some influence in the execution of the game is a fair trade.
But if the pattern is one of trading community activity with in-game standing, the next step in the pattern is special roleplay [request], or SRP.
A player who engages in sufficient in-game and forum roleplay, the latter of which doesn’t always need to involve other players, can have a special ship in game (this is often just a matter of otherwise impossible combinations of equipment being hacked together by the server staff, but a rare few players received their own unique ship models), and may even be recorded as a part of the game’s lore in infocards or in-game objects (e.g. a shipwreck floating in an asteroid field).
This is a terrible idea. Playing a game is already supposed to be a fun and rewarding experience; the additional extrinsic benefit of having a unique ship (and possibly being canonized) does not actively feed back into any other gameplay loop. Indeed, the SRP process requires so much forum activity, it’s arguably a detriment to in-game activity. Every minute spent on Disco’s forums is a minute not spent actually in the game, interacting with other players. It has fomented entitlement and served to retain many players whose goal is not to have fun with other players, but to have more stuff to themselves, to fly around in their experimental fighter craft with an overpowered (and lore-unfriendly) combination of weapons that gives them the competitive edge in a dogfight, although others simply float by, interacting only the minimum amount to justify having logged in at all.
This is the eventual conclusion of a game whose developers do not limit those who can hold the power of worldbuilding. A game where every player can, in a small way, be a developer will eventually develop into a dog’s breakfast of pet projects and thematically incoherent ideas. It invites hardcore players who wish to sit upon a throne in their own private kingdom.
You might call it an issue of fairness or equity, but really, I think the issue is more one of integrity. A storyteller can only yes, and themselves so far, and if you say yes, and to enough people, you’ll eventually have an inconsistency. Agency is important for keeping players engaged, but worldbuilding and design are not spheres in which players typically have agency anyway. There is no good argument for letting the players steer the ship (so to speak). It’s important to know when to say no. A good developer or storyteller should know what experience they want to create and strive toward its creation. Giving any player who can meet a few arbitrary requirements the chance to override even small pieces of worldbuilding or design is a threat to the health of the story. It’s a sickness, and it attracts the wrong kinds of players.
It’s hard to know whether Disco would have many players left if these incentive systems were removed and players were simply expected to play. There hasn’t yet been a multiplayer space sim that scratches the same itch as Disco and provides the same intuitive and user-friendly control scheme, so perhaps it would live anyway, but if your game invites people to ignore your story to tell their own, what does that say about your confidence in your own story?
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P.S.
My apologies to anyone reading this with a screen reader. WordPress strips my HTML definition elements (<dfn>
), so I’ve had to make do with emphasis (<em>
).