Trivia / Freeman Guerrilla Warfare

• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Freeman was created by Chinese and Ukrainian developers, with the official English translation made in-house, supposedly from the Russian localization, which itself was based on the Chinese original with some machine translation seemingly thrown into the mix. The end results are exactly as you would expect, with the various UI messages and character dialogue ranging from goofy but hilarious to complete gibberish, prompting some players to start fixing it via modding. The end results are especially baffling because the developers recruited native English speakers from the community during the early access run to proofread the localization database.
• Creative Differences: Following their return in February 2021, the three original founders of KK Game Studios admitted to the community on their Discord server that they are unhappy about how the release version of the game turned out, as it strayed too far away from the game's original, more battle-oriented concept. They claimed that the additional emphasis they put on the World Map (and the army and resource micromanagement that implies) was mostly due to the creative differences between the original founders and later hires, resulting in tensions within the developer team.
• Dummied Out: Towards the end of the game's early access run, Freeman received a technical update that mainly aimed to clean up the codebase by refactoring most of the game's sub-systems, and even re-writing some of them from scratch. This resulted in several features present in previous builds suddenly disappearing, much to the community's chagrin. These included the following:
  • Originally, the game's player customization system was slightly more detailed, allowing you to equip various gloves, knee-pads and shoes as well. While the names of these items are still present in the localization database, these items (and the ability to equip them) have been removed, with gloves merged into certain upper clothing items, while kneepads and shoes into lower clothing, respectively.
  • In earlier builds, the recruitment screen let players hire entire squads with equipment. For the full release, this has been changed so that players can only hire individual troops, either with or without equipment (the latter being much cheaper). While a sizable chunk of the community disliked this change due to making troop management much more time-consuming, just as many liked the fact that they could fully customize their AI troops as well.
  • Following the 0.220 update, vehicles were introduced to the game, both into the World Map and the FPS battle module. In the former, players could buy vans and trucks that increased their movement speed (as long as the party size was less than or equal to the number of passengers the vehicles could take). In the latter, this allowed players to lead not just troops, but light armored vehicles into combat as well. Both of these were eventually removed before the full release, the rationale being that the AI couldn't use the overworld vehicles properly on the World Map (thus giving a notable movement speed advantage to players), while battle vehicles also brought on a plethora of combat balance issues, physics glitches and pathfinding errors.
• Spin-Off: Freeman was supposed to get one with Her War, a hardcore military survival FPS focusing on Victoria and the origins of the Valkyrie Female Fighters faction. As the studio was forced to let most of their employees go due to bankruptcy in November 2020 (leaving only the three original founders in place), this project has been postponed indefinitely.
• Video Game Remake: Freeman will essentially get one sometime in 2021, as the developers plan to completely remake the game, making its gameplay closer to their original vision than it is now.
  • Technically, the v0.220 and v0.80 iterations can also be considered remakes of their preceding versions, considering that they all introduced substantial visual and gameplay changes compared to their predecessors.
• What Could Have Been: While the game was planned to be an Action RPG / management sandbox from the get-go, it was originally envisioned as a Third-Person Shooter in a Space Opera setting, with players being able to explore a futuristic solar system, visit inhabited planets, and fight off pirates in cool space battles. The game was announced as Freeman: Star Edge on IndieDB and Steam Greenlight in January 2017, but following an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, the developers decided to Retool the game into a First-Person Shooter / Action RPG hybrid set in a contemporary Eastern-European island nation (mostly because the squad-level ground battle module was already in place). The public Alpha build of the game is available on IndieDB.