Better Than Life

About thirteen or so years ago, I was introduced to the British sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf. To briefly summarise it for those who have not seen it: David Lister, third-technician aboard the mining vessel Red Dwarf, is locked in stasis for illegally bringing a cat on board and ends up waking up three million years later after a radiation leak wipes out the rest of the crew.

Since the show started production in the 1980s, a lot of the general tech used on the show over the years is a hybrid of now-outdated technologies and predictions of how tech would evolve in both the near and far futures. For example, VHS tapes still exist but are now triangular. Sometimes their guesswork has come rather close to coming true even in today’s technological age. I can easily see the ship computer Holly being a logical evolution of smart devices like Alexa.  

A couple of episodes focused on the future of computer games. The episode Better Than Life introduced the Total Immersion Video Games, which put players directly into the games themselves. These have seen numerous different interpretations in the show, ranging from a small bike helmet-type device to large booths that players stood or reclined in, but the most notable is in the 1993 episode, Gunmen of the Apocalypse. In this episode, Artificial Reality games were shown being played using a headset and special gloves.

Roll forward twenty years, and this headset is one bit of tech which has become very real and publicly accessible. Virtual Reality is still quite a niche category in gaming, but it has been making more of a steady foothold over the past couple of years.

Since purchasing Squadrons, my curiosity for how it would look in VR got the better of me and so as of Christmas Day last year I now have my very own headset. Today's post is dedicated to giving it a bit of a review.

Star Wars: Squadrons' second Content Update

Just under two weeks after its previous free update, Squadrons received its second such update last Friday. This update was, for many, “the big one”: it contained three things that many voices in the community had been requesting pretty much since the game was announced. The A/SF-01 B-wing and TIE/D Defender join their respective navies, and there is now the ability to create custom and private matches of any kind.

There are other things as well, of course, but these are the primary things to focus on.

Star Wars: Squadrons' first Content Update

Star Wars: Squadrons received its first major content update last week on Wednesday the 25^th of November. While the developers were always treating it as a complete package at-launch as an homage to games like the X-Wing series, they also stated that any if there were to be any future updates they would be dependent on how well it sold.

The amount of pre-orders for the game proved to them that they had a serious audience, and so they arranged to get out not one but two free major content updates before the end of the year. The first contained components for all four ship classes and a new map alongside the expected balance changes, while the second… well, let me just say that fans of two specific ships are really looking forward to December.

Since I have already written about Squadrons in the past, I think that it is fitting that I also cover these content updates as they come. I was always going to write another post about it once December 25^th had come and gone for… reasons… but it is always nice to have extra things to write about!

A Comparison between Star Wars: Squadrons and The Old Republic's Galactic Starfighter

When evaluating how much I like all the Star Wars films, one of the things I often look at is what their sequences involving starfighters are like. Each of the films has at least one, and some are among the most iconic sequences in their respective films.

This is not to say that I feel a decent or even great starfighter sequence automatically makes such a product “good” as a whole. For example, one of my least favourite Star Wars films, Attack of the Clones, has a sequence which I would probably just place outside of my top five. Sure, the film scores more than a handful of points for it (most of which go to the glorious sound design of the seismic charges!) but nowhere near enough to make up for the majority of its flaws in the grand scheme of things.

When it comes to Star Wars games, I tend to view things just a little differently. Unlike with a film, where a starfighter sequence tends be expected as part of the main plot, starfighter experiences in games depend heavily on the game in-question. Either the entire game is built around them (Rogue Squadron, TIE Fighter, X-Wing), they’re a compulsory part of some campaigns (Battlefront II, LEGO Star Wars), or they don’t feature at all apart from maybe some turret sections (Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Knights of the Old Republic, The Force Unleashed). In the rarest of instances, they are present but are so much of a side thing that you can play the entire game however you want without once having to encounter them (The Old Republic).

Thus, while I still look out for them, I do not always include “has a decent starfighter experience” as part of my criteria for evaluating a game. For example, SWTOR’s original starfighter experience is anything but “fun” to me, since it is purely an on-rails shooter. Furthermore, it eventually ramps up the difficulty to an obscene level and thus becomes impractical as an activity. 2014’s mini-expansion Galactic Starfighter, on the other hand, brought in an entirely different starfighter experience which I still am a huge fan of to this day.

I was therefore quite excited to learn that EA would be publishing a new Star Wars game which focused purely on the starfighter experience. Squadrons is basically a massive love-letter to the starfighter experience from the developers, and it can easily be regarded as “the modern X-Wing game”. It also shares several similarities with SWTOR’s Galactic Starfighter mode. As such, I have chosen to dedicate today's post to a comparison between both games.

To some people playing Squadrons, this choice of comparator will be more than a little bit odd. There have been several starfighter-based games across the years, and many of these will be closer in spirit to Squadrons than Starfighter. However, I have not played all these games and it has been well over a decade since I have played those which I owned. Due to changing focus away from the PC to the PS2 and PS3 between 2004 and 2011, I believe that I can say with confidence that it would have been over sixteen years since I played any game which can be deemed “more relevant” for comparison purposes. Thus, even if I were to pick those games up again, I would still refrain from focusing on them as it would be wrong for me to present myself as a voice of experience after a gap of nearly two decades.

This should go without saying, but this is not meant to be a comprehensive review of Squadrons as a game. Any bugs, game issues, or specific story details will not be discussed. This is purely meant to be a comparison between one game and another for the features that they include.

On with the show!

Looking Forward to Star Wars: Squadrons

Star Wars features many things which speak to its audience in different ways. Whether it is the characters, the duels, the lore, the settings, the stories, or the weapons, there will be something that everybody will cling to as what “defines” Star Wars for them. For me, this must be the starfighter battles. Growing up, I absolutely loved the space battles at the end of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi and in games such as Activision's Battlefront II I spent so much more time in the space modes than in any ground battles. 

Indeed, long-term readers will have noticed this bias seep through a couple of times in the past. When discussing EA’s take on Battlefront II, I wrote exclusively about its mode Starfighter Assault and compared it to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s own space Player-vs-Player mode Galactic Starfighter. While I have rarely written about GSF itself on the blog, it remains one of my favourite activities in SWTOR to this day.

When news about a starfighter game being published by EA were leaked a few months ago, I was immediately hooked by the idea. It has been an awfully long time since we have had a game focus exclusively on starfighters, the last one being (according to Wookieepedia) Flight of the Falcon in 2003. That said, prior to this point there were quite a few games which were dedicated purely to space and low-atmosphere combat: X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, the first two Rogue Squadron games, and Starfighter and its sequel Jedi Starfighter.

Point being, it has been almost two decades since a game dedicated purely to starfighters has been released. Yet here we are, less than a month away from the release of the newest addition to that line-up, Star Wars: Squadrons. While I can never claim to have had a lot of experience in its spiritual predecessors such as X-Wing, I have at least played them. I was, I feel, too young to have properly appreciated them at the time (7 or 8), and I haven't got around to playing them since. I really should do that.

There are numerous things which have me interested in Squadrons as a game beyond its base principle, so I would like to use today’s post to demonstrate just what I am looking forward to.