20 years of freelancers: Community celebrates with HD graphics mod

Freelancer, the successor to the space flight simulation Starlancer (Release 2000), was released on March 5th, 2003. The mammoth project was developed by Digital Anvil, a developer company that was founded in 1996 by Chris Roberts (Star Citizen), among others, sold to Microsoft in 2000 and finally dissolved in 2006. Chris Roberts developed the basic idea for freelancers, but it quickly became clear that the ambitious plans could not be realized without an external field. After acquiring Digital Anvil, Roberts left but stayed with the project as an outside consultant. However, Microsoft scaled down Roberts’ vision, but the game still took significantly longer to develop than planned. The community celebrated the 20th birthday with new screenshots based on the HD Edition and the Genesis Mod.

Freelancer HD Edition

For a number of years, the legacy of Freelancer has been preserved and maintained by the developers of the HD mod, among others. For space fans, Freelancer is still one of the best representatives of its genre, which is why it is not surprising that the fanmod Freelancer HD Edition enjoys continued popularity and is regularly provided with new updates by its developers. The last patch that the Mod updated to version 0.6was released in August 2022 and brought with it various revisions for HD textures and bug fixes.

Freelancer with HD Mod

Among the highlights of version 0.6 of the Freelancer HD Mod were updates to the installer, which now automatically detects the optimal resolution. A choice between window mode and full screen is now also available. The main part of the update, however, are various improvements to the HD textures of various content, including planet surfaces (including sky and sea), ships, character models, asteroids, explosions and interiors of planet bases.

If you want to install the HD edition of Freelancer, you can download the mod Download it for free from the ModDB website. A clean installation of Freelancer is required for the mod to be usable. It’s enough to download the mod and run the relative installation file to be able to play the space game in HD resolution.