Freelancer's campaign is 48 missions. Then it ends. The credits roll, you're back in control of Edison Trent, and you fly around Sirius with no follow-up on anything the story raised.
The Nomad storyline is the one that stings most.
Here's what the game actually shows you — carefully, only what it shows, not what fans have inferred. The Nomads are energy-based lifeforms native to the Sirius sector. They were here long before humanity arrived. The five Sleeper Ships launched from a dying Earth and colonized their space. This reframe — that humanity is the intruder in Sirius, not the Nomads — is planted deliberately by the game and never fully developed.
The campaign reveals that the Nomads have been infiltrating the four houses for an unknown length of time. High-ranking figures in government and the military across all four houses were hosts. The infiltration was systematic and patient. The Nomads weren't attacking Sirius — they were quietly taking it back.
And then there's the Dom'Kavash. The game implies — does not confirm, implies — that an ancient alien civilization called the Dom'Kavash created the structures that exist in deep space, that they had some relationship with the Nomads, and that their civilization is long gone but left things behind. The game raises this and then the credits roll.
That's not a flaw in the writing. That's a sequel hook. A deliberate one. Somebody on the design team had ideas about where this went, and those ideas didn't survive the scope cuts and the studio changes.
What makes the Nomad storyline genuinely interesting — and not just frustrating — is the ethical complication. By the end of the campaign, the player has been killing Nomads to defend humanity's presence in a sector that the Nomads are native to. The game doesn't resolve this. It doesn't tell you whether the Nomads were malicious or desperate. It leaves that open.
A sequel set in the aftermath of the campaign, with a Nomad/Dom'Kavash thread running through it, would have had something to say. That game was never made.
Discovery Freelancer has built its own extended lore around the Nomad and Dom'Kavash thread — and it's impressive work, genuinely interesting in places. But it is fan content, clearly labeled as such. It fills the hole, but it can't fill it the same way an official continuation would have.
The hole is still there. It's just better furnished now.