Star Wars: Squadrons

I'll wait for some gameplay and a bit more detail (the price point is worrying), but I'm all for a new Star Wars single player game.

I absolutely loved X-Wing and TIE Fighters back in the 90s, about damn time they've made another game!

pixelburp wrote: »

"Game Engine Footage", ha. Nice use of semantics. I mean it's clearly not "in game" 'cos nothing looked like real gameplay. Do we know what engine this is? Are EA still forcing teams to use Frostbite?

That's not really semantics, it's an important distinction and should, at this stage I hope, be understood for what it is - a cinematic trailer whose only purpose is to give a rough indication of what they're aiming for with the game.

Engine wise it'll most definitely be Frostbite but following the studios previous work on Battlefront II, I don't think it'll really hold them back for a title like this.

Deleted User wrote: »

It's EA though. Hard to get excited by anything they make. You just know they'll **** it up somehow and try to bleed the player.

Jedi Fallen Order and the CnC Remastered offers some hope. Yeah, there are shítty practices and (probably) a toxic culture of exploitation over the years, but two of their most recent releases have showed signs of improvement in delivering their products and how they treat those customers.

Deleted User wrote: »

It's EA though. Hard to get excited by anything they make. You just know they'll **** it up somehow and try to bleed the player.

Think they got so burnt by Battlefront 2 that they're moving away from that approach. They have the billion dollar cash-cow that is FIFA Ultimate Team and that goes largely under the radar, so I think they're trying to stay in the good books of the public right now.

They eventually did a great job with Battlefront 2 and the space combat aspect of that game is the perfect foundation for a game like Squadrons. I'm optimistic.

I dunno how many people here played the old X-Wing and TIE Fighter games. TIE Fighter in particular is one of my all time favourite games. I've waited like... 25 years for something like it. And this looks A LOT like it.

I'm tempering my expectations here; while there's some nods to the Lucasarts games (e.g. power management), there is a whiff of a more arcade experience than I'm hoping. The great joy of the original games was the variety of missions and I'm not sure if that will translate into 6v6 multiplayer experiences. I never cared for it in X-wing vs Tie Fighter myself. Also, as cool as the battlefront VR mission was, the combat and control was pretty poor.

Oafley Jones wrote: »

A button for routing power between shields/weapons and engines. A button for how much of your shields should be fore and aft. A button for what sequence you wanted your laser to fire. That was as technical as those games got.

pretty much

I'm not looking for DCS level of complex air modeling

At the moment the gameplay trailer has def moved it into the want catagory

I play a lot of flight sims in VR, IL2 battle of stalingrad sits quite highly on my top vr games just for how damn good it feels to play that in VR and this looks to hit the same spot.


But on the *is it Tie Fighter level?* I am seeing 1 hit and 3 misses



It does look like they are replicating the between missions briefings and narrative as gameplay element with the player experiencing them in first person and being able to actively look around. Which is an excellent modern update of the almost point and click adventure like animated segments that held all the inter mission stuff of the original

Thought it looks like with all the gameplay in cockpit that they will do some form of the shield/engine management but it looks massively simplified down to 3 items and possibly a basic shield/engine management. Not fond of the very simplified secondary weapons systems and Not massively fond of the components setup being a bunch of perks that offer brief power ups or unique attacks.

I am also worried about the flight model, it really looks like with EA Motive involved that this is rolling off the star wars battlefront 2 flight model which is based off the battlefield flight model and....well that's not a good flight model.

And I'm worried about the mission structure, a big part of the pacing of the original games was there was a lot of mission variety, the trailer is selling heavily on set pieces and diverse combat areas, while I'm hoping for a mission inspecting cargo for contraband that suddenly goes wrong when the smugglers make a break for it and we have to chase them down.


the structured multiplayer sounds good, with cross play it would be nice to find 4 friends and actually work together on it rather then randoms.

Though if I dont have friends playing it then I imagine trying to play structured multiplayer with randoms could be painful.

The game will have a "hardcore" mode apparently, where you can turn off the UI and rely solely on the instrument panel in your cockpit. And for added realism, you can disable custom bling, so that your team-mate's purple X-Wing won't break immersion for you.

From PCGamesN.

jackfrags is doing his usually shilling for EA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGSkCalsisU

But it does look like it's a much much simpler model of the tie fighter series. Very basic power management pretty much on the level that Oafley Jones said. Maps feel a bit small. The flight model does look a bit different to the battlefield system. There looks to be some more control.


Have my concern about the multiplayer modes.

Hmm

I had a very frustrating start

So I'm an avid VR flight sim guy, got my x52 pro joysticks, my htv vive etc setup for Il2 vr gameplay. Pretty excited to play Squadrons so I boot it up in VR.

First there is some wierd audio issue, I cant seem to get audio for any of the initial logos etc and the game on initial launch goes through player customisation and then puts you straight into single player campaign's first mission.

No chance to look at any of the keys etc, just plopped in.

Go through initial cutscenes and getting in cockpit, everything seems fine, then it tells me to press button 11. Which throws me for a loop. Impressive that it recognizes the joystick, annoying that I've never kept track of the joystick button numbers (in fact on the x52 the buttons are lettered not numbered) so it's kinda hard in VR to work out what button it is so confusing bit of fiddling to finally get into the game


and the joystick controls are dog****

the flight stick is not reversed so it goes against every other flight and space sim in terms of pulling the joystick back send you pitching down not up and it put the roll to the twist and the yaw to the Y axis. Its more often the reverse of that.

Problem is for some reason during the initial flight you cannot escape to the menu, so I'm stuck bouncing my fighter off every ship we pass struggling with the controls while smacking every key possible to get to the menu. I give up and ctrl alt delete out of the ****er and restart.

Spend time fixing the controls, go back into the tutorial. Things are better, but not brilliant.

I am going to need some time in non vr mode with my joysticks deadzones to get this right because the ships feel very loose in terms of joystick control, I found it very easy to loose control of my tie and my ability to track targets was pretty useless.

I might try it with one of my game controllers instead to see how it goes, otherwise it's a lot of tweaking that I cant do in game to get the joystick to feel right.

Otherwise visually impressive and all my other big complaint is that despite being built from the ground with vr as an option they never learnt one of the most basic vr control methods for handling menus etc, just look at something to select it. It's something a lot of vr titles use when they dont use motion controllers. centre of your view is a basically a locked mouse cursor and if you keep yourself looking at something for 2-3 seconds it's counted as a click.

Much easier then trying to have us use a mouse or buttons while in vr.

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

2nd impressions

with an xbone controller the game handles a hell of a lot better. Disappointing, it does not look like the game has any in game tweaks for joystick curves which is why it handles like crap on the joystick.

But if you got a controller it'll play much better and its not the most immersion breaking, still fantastic to play in VR, visually great and mostly been fun. It's very much somewhere between rogue squadron and Tie Fighter.

I understand your frustrtation, EA did the same with Battlefield V... They had about 15 minutes of campaign to play, BEFORE you were able to enter the menus and customize anything. The majority of users in Discord and Twitter were cursing the design and the designer, but DICE never changed that, and now, I see they are doing almost the same.


As for the controller scheme, I am lucky, as my stick has number on it and I don't use a VR, so I could see which button to use. Also, I changed to "Invert flight" and switched X-Axis with Y-Axis, to proper flight.


Apart from these, it is really fun and hard at the same time. I spent couple of hours in Practice mode where you can add enemy squadrons and fight alone against them.


I didn't have high expectations from this one, just the revive of our childhood memories, but so far looks ok and the DEVS respond real quick in Reddit bug reports. Hopefully, they will keep the game tidy.

My son is getting a PS5 sometime next year and I got him to try it on my PC.
Although I am using a Joystick, I gave him the gamepad, so he can learn to use it, and be ready later.
But for some reason, it is not recognized as Controller, but 2nd Flightstick and as a result, the mapping between my J and his C are shared... This is a bit ugly, us his Yaw is on the vertical axis and there is no button 12, which is the default to start mission...
Also, he cannot change the throttle, I couldn't find any combination that allows him to...

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

A common cause seems to be that the game struggles to seperate controllers if more then one are plugged in when on PC. So that might be the issue affecting your gamepad.

Try unplugging the joystick before booting the game?

I would, but we take turns and I am trying to teach him fly...