Star Wars games today.

[Dangermouse]

Tie Fighter? Yes, please. JKII? Yes, please. Some modernized remakes of these games on Steam / Steam-equivalent would rock.

I still dig up Star Wars Rebellion/Supremacy every now and then to dust it off and let it breathe. Also, I might get smacked for saying this but the original Star Wars Pod Racer game was pretty sweet.

[Stark]

Would you want TIE Fighter 2 to have high speeds and lethality or more glacial slapfights decided by Sidewinders I mean 'concussion missiles'?

[Dangermouse]

Would you want TIE Fighter 2 to have high speeds and lethality or more glacial slapfights decided by Sidewinders I mean 'concussion missiles'?

The first. I hated those never ending turning battles against Tie Advanceds/Whatevers trying to lock on with your magic,death-seeking advanced missle thingamajigs.

[CaptHawkeye]

Then the game you want probably wouldn't be TIE Fighter again. Those games where characterized by their own bizarre interpretation of dogfighting in Star Wars. If they want to make a game that's interesting then they need to actually watch the movies and concentrate as much as possible on minimizing down time. It's not all that hard to do either, the later iterations of Rogue Squadron sort of took a step in the right direction....and then took two steps back with the "TIEs have no shields" and "escort defenseless objective" nonsense.

[Stark]

The first. I hated those never ending turning battles against Tie Advanceds/Whatevers trying to lock on with your magic,death-seeking advanced missle thingamajigs.

Man I'd forgotten about the ADV missiles and torps. Watching them fly at very slightly faster than a TIE and chase them across the screen and then ultimately miss was pretty ridiculous.

And man you could make a flight game in SW that's about position and situation more than turning and wearing down shields really easily... but I don't think TIE Fighter fans would like it. Getting behind an assault shuttle and pounding away for 30s was FUN, right?

[VF5SS]

I forget but wasn't the Missile Boat the move broken thing in the games because it had like a hundred missiles? Even trying to balance it out with just one gun and the goofy SLAM system, it just sat around and shot people with two or three missiles each and then called for a reload from those Tugs.

[Vympel]

The Missile Boat was the ultimate iteration of TIE Fighter combat - luckily they did get rid of it in favor of going back to the TIE Advanced, IIRC.

I liked TIE Fighter a lot, but nothing about me liking it had anything to do with "this is so much like Star Wars". For the most part, it was fun, though it had its flaws - but it shared the same problem as pretty much every other space combat flight sim of the 1990s-2000s (after which the genre promptly shit itself and died) - and which has already been pointed out: everything was just too damn slow. Ships fly around no faster than cars in traffic. If your sense of speed in a space sim isn't at least as fast as the WW2 dogfight clips which George Lucas used to create Star Wars dogfight scenes, then you're doing it wrong.

Similarly, space sims in general (and Star Wars in particular) should have moved away from the annoying "oh noes my hull is at 1% yet I'm still ok" bullshit and implement an actual dynamic damage model. Take a page out of WW2 flight sims book - dynamic damage to your spacecraft, holes and shit, damaged systems that don't magically self-repair (well leaving aside R2 units, but within reason please).

[VF5SS]

I think a lot of the fun with Tie Fighter was more the atmosphere and thrill of being part of the side with the cooler uniforms. Just like Wing Commander, it was very big on story and tone so the gameplay could be awful but our young imaginations smoothed over the gaps no matter how frustrated we got with repetitive problems.

To add to Vympel's point, I think it's interesting that flight sims of the time had a much better damage model than any space sim. Some of my most vivid memories of DID's EF-2000 game was taking AA fire or a missile and having half the wing of my plane missing with clear little details visible on the exterior.

Also, R2 repairing Luke's X-wing was way exaggerated by the game makers. All he did was stick his little prop arm out and do uh something that didn't affect the battle :<

[Nephtys]

X-Wing Alliance could have been a decent successor and worthy good game. The *idea* (not execution) of personal family grief caused by the empire is a good star-warsy theme, but it was just painful to see. As Rebels, you basically rolled around wrecking everything in sight instead of fleeing and getting little victories until that terrible Battle of Endor stage.

What's the deal with slow flight sims, I wonder. The only one I can think of that was 'fast' at all was... that godawful X-COM Interceptor game. Freespace plays like bumper cars, and X-Wing isn't much better.

[Stark]

X-wing is significantly slower and not helped by everything ELSE being slow too, from missiles to other ships. Turns out the genre is all about hit points and not space. :v. As you say pretty much the whole generation of games was glacial in pace (probably because it let them have scale sizes cheaply) and featured absurdities like multi kilometre ships with twelve guns that each requires 50+ hits to kill a fighter. That whynthere were so many ESCORT MISSIONS.

We can perhaps blame Wing Commander, because it kept the ranges short where it could show off the bitmap ships, and everyone else followed along the 'turn to get behind then shoot endlessly' trend. Most of the stupid mechanics in these games (laser energy, lol) is only required because of the huge amount of fire required to achieve anything.

[VF5SS]

It was all pretty self defeating. To encourage space dog-fighting you had slow laser bullets which meant you couldn't hit fast targets at long ranges. Keeping the ranges short meant you needed to keep the player and enemy ships slow enough to handle in close combat with the traditional WW2 fighter in space setup. This is especially true when the guns are fixed forward and aiming is completely manual as the ships can't be too sensitive so players can effectively line up shots. The low lethality was to compensate for how easy it became to shoot people.

Just due to how basic the engine was with mission requirements, they wasn't much else that could be done except throw more enemies at the player so they could dump laser energy into shields and feel clever for thirty minutes.

Maybe the bigger problem is space fights in the vastness of space are fucking boring without any scenery to blast up.

[Vympel]

To add to Vympel's point, I think it's interesting that flight sims of the time had a much better damage model than any space sim. Some of my most vivid memories of DID's EF-2000 game was taking AA fire or a missile and having half the wing of my plane missing with clear little details visible on the exterior.

Yeah, this sort of stuff enhanced the play experience, and for some reason every space sim shuffled like zombies in one direction.

For a more recent example, did anyone spit the dummy and hate it when they were flying in say, Il-2 Sturmovik and a stray bullet from the Stuka you're trying to shoot down busts through your canopy and the screen goes black, because your brains just got splattered all over the cockpit? Fuck no - that was awesome. Experiences like that, and nursing a damaged bird through a mission stick with you.

Just like Wing Commander, it was very big on story and tone so the gameplay could be awful but our young imaginations smoothed over the gaps no matter how frustrated we got with repetitive problems.

True - and I just finished Wing Commander 3 and 4 again recently (got em off gog.com) and the flaws were - well wow. That said, the DVD quality movies in GOG.com's WC4 were worth it

[Stark]

I think you're forgetting the doublethink. People might say Xwing was a 'simulator' but it was a space 'sim' so it was dumbed down for consoles and boiled down to very simple mechanics. I don't think most of those people wanted an il-2 experience where revving the engine too much would snap the wings; but there are plenty of action/accessible games that are more Star Wars and less shield tanking bullshit. Ironically those games were derided as not being HARD SIMBOZ enough, not like Xwing.

[VF5SS]

Well it's the same thing as the Mechwarrior problem

which you guys probably know my thoughts on already :v

Back in the 90's, some nerds convinced all the other nerds that any game with a first person in cockpit perspective that featured excessive knob fiddling or poorly optimized controls was a "simulator." The logic was basically, "well my friend's copy of Flight Simulator has lots of buttons that do things so he can fly, therefore because X-Wing has lots of buttons so I can fight that must make it a simulator! I'm hardcore!" while ignoring that the real life aircraft being modeled in the other games have a lot of knob fiddling because they're not vaguely defined super space craft that ignore the laws of physics :3

[VF5SS]

remember when Luke and Wedge had to defend a slow space train with their equally slow space fighters?

Gonna be in the next special edition

[CaptHawkeye]

It takes several consecutive hits from Proton Torpedoes to blow up walkers...

Really, the warhead that blew up the Death Star can't kill a chicken walker? I'm really convinced most of Lucasart's developers never even watched the movies.

[KhorneFlakes]

It's really not a wonder biowank fucktards from outside the galaxy kicked their asses when you put it that way.

[VF5SS]

There's some funny scaling going on there too. Those walkers look gigantic compared to the X-wings.

The real problem is just how the gameplay always boils down to slowing yourself enough so you can ping enemies enough times with your pew pews. The infamous Sullust level is just that magnified to its logical extreme.

[PainRack]

Here's the thing. How would one model a new star wars simulator with missions?

We have realistic damage being proposed.

What about weapons? The space combat in the movies itself was quite........ dumb as it was. You have fighters swarming a bomber that relied on straight shooting to blow them out of the sky, with a targeting sensor that provided no range and some weird location beacon. The TIE T&T had some wings that shifted wildly due to jamming, before locking on, and the guns will swivel and track on to the target even after it had locked on.

And that ignores the extremely campy nature of AOTC and ROTS combat. Smart missiles that feature absurd tracking mechanics, pulling wild gs and speed, only to explode so a swarm of droids can latch on and tear your ship apart anyone?

[VF5SS]

Yeah the buzz droids were pretty stupid padding for that scene. They could have done something equally cinematic with less "here's a toy you need to buy" overtones. Regardless we're heading into the issue that Star Wars combat was only intended for short length battles that are part of an overall story and not the focus. Attempting to extrapolate things and expand into bigger engagements (while borrowing from other space battle franchises) just leaves things feeling muddled and confused.

Ideally a good Star Wars space combat game would simply work within the framework of being "cinematic" but should try not to devolve into a bunch of QTE's. Speed and momentum should play a role with quick objectives that could be solved in multiple ways besides just blast something.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah the reality is the ideal Star Wars game is closer to Shadows of the Empire or Battlefront in construction. (Not necessarily execution.) The LEGO games especially Clone Wars figured out that Star Wars is a lot of generalized action, not just pew pew fighters or super human dudes doing backflips.

[Bellosh101]

I'll always think fondly of the X-Wing games, but I agree that the dogfights could have been more swift and lethal (you know something is really off if a fighter can survive a direct missile hit and fly like nothing was wrong). At best, all that shielding should do is allow a fighter to survive one or two glancing hits without having engines shut down or wings breaking off. TIEs can remain shieldless for gameplay purposes (assuming shields don't help pilots all that much anyway), but TIEs should make up for weak shielding by having vastly superior speed over Rebel fighters just like as demonstrated in ANH's Trench Run. It's quite funny in the X-Wing games when you can transfer everything to your engines and leave TIEs behind in the dust..... too bad TIEs don't have shield energy that can be transfered to engines in order to pursue the Rebels.

On that note, the only power configuration in SW space-sims that pilots should deal with is how to arrange the shields (just like in ANH); all that other stuff can take a hike. The challenging part of the game should not be about if your laser power lasts long enough to take away 100 HP, but whether you can maneuver good enough to deliver a lethal 2-3 second barrage of fire at a bogey without getting killed in the process.

[Mr Bean]

I'll always think fondly of the X-Wing games, but I agree that the dogfights could have been more swift and lethal (you know something is really off if a fighter can survive a direct missile hit and fly like nothing was wrong). At best, all that shielding should do is allow a fighter to survive one or two glancing hits without having engines shut down or wings breaking off. TIEs can remain shieldless for gameplay purposes (assuming shields don't help pilots all that much anyway), but TIEs should make up for weak shielding by having vastly superior speed over Rebel fighters just like as demonstrated in ANH's Trench Run. It's quite funny in the X-Wing games when you can transfer everything to your engines and leave TIEs behind in the dust..... too bad TIEs don't have shield energy that can be transfered to engines in order to pursue the Rebels.

On that note, the only power configuration in SW space-sims that pilots should deal with is how to arrange the shields (just like in ANH); all that other stuff can take a hike. The challenging part of the game should not be about if your laser power lasts long enough to take away 100 HP, but whether you can maneuver good enough to deliver a lethal 2-3 second barrage of fire at a bogey without getting killed in the process.

I like the little power-mini-game but only in relation to shields it should be simplified and dynamically transferring power done away with. Instead use equipment if you want upgrades. If your running a mission system some high end custom job parts to make you that little bit better. Like swapping out your .303s for .50s in IL-2.

But yes to high lethality combat. X-wings should be able to take three full up shots before the shields shut down and shut down for awhile. Give us damage modeling, hell take advantage of the space nature, let me choke to death because my air supply was knocked out and and I kept fighting rather than bailing out or activating my emergency suit or even better let me paste myself because my kinetic dampener got hit, something that to my knowledge only the Honor series gets into when your talking space combat and pulling 200g+ moves because your anti-gravity widget lets you ignore gravity inside it's bubble, well what if it's hit? Best hope you were not in a sharp turn or your paste.

[Stark]

Uh I think I stead of hitpoints it's be best to actually do what those sims do and use glancing hits for damage. Modeling shields as mitigation rather than hitpoints would be superior in a sim context as well.