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Star Wars Squadrons: Return of the X-Wing

Artificial Girl said:
I legit don't understand why they don't give us more diverse rebel characters.
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I genuinely think that there's a kind of bad faith calculus on the producer level with stuff like this. They want the props for having diverse characters, but consider them actually sticking around to be unimportant or even undesirable. From that perspective making most of them imperials is perfect. Because since they're the villain they'll probably be shuffled out of the story one way or the other anyway.

Also, more minority camp guards could easily be the point. That they believe that loading up the Empire with minority characters will offset the political implications of the empire as a whole.
 
I think its also a bit of the 'both sides have to be equally playable' thing, where the rebels and empire need to be equally valid choices for one to identify with during play despite one side being literal fascist space nazis. So that means sprinkling in minorities for the Imperials even though its totally thematically messed up.

Artificial Girl said:
I legit don't understand why they don't give us more diverse rebel characters.
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And then someone comes up and goes 'but the Rebels have ALIENS! Don't you see that makes them even more diverse1!1"
 
Considering the old, old stereotype of the Empire was a white male human, military only, things have changed a lot. Aliens is about the only part that is less represented in the Imperial ranks, even though they did have Grand Admiral Thrawn. Now we have male and females from stormtroopers all the way up to Admirals, and color/face variations on all levels. About the only things that were not represented much were more aliens in the Imperial military and non-binary genders (which if there is no storyline associated with it, would be more difficult to spot, given most stories are from the Alliance/Republic point of view, and the Imperials seen are there to be working military or the bad guys of the story).

As for gay aliens....with some species....how would you tell?
 
Y'all are way overthinking things. The Empire is cool albeit evil, let's try and make sure everyone can feel like they're having fun as the baddies because that moves product and keeps players happy.

I just wanna go pew pew in my A-Wing
 
@Ithekro , their specism is the only racist trait that the Empire kept between Legend and the new canon, what makes Thrawn exceptional is that he managed to climb the ranks all the way up to Grand Admiral despite being an alien. (and he could only enter the officer school thanks to a personal recommendation from the Emperor himself)
 
"they made the fascists more socially acceptable to liberal sensibility in a time of rising fascism for money, nb, y u mad tho", said the gaming community

This hobby is dumb.

Also I would very much like Grey's story to end with madness and death, or repentance and death, because that's the only fitting conclusion for a tool of the Palpitinian regime.

Battlefront 4 was a cop-out.

Cool cinematic though.

Was pretty cash watching Imps die by the boatload.

That dynamic of NR dominance in open battle and attendant implications should have been the direction that the new films started from, but JJ is a hack and Kennedy and her pet lore keepers have no artistic integrity or vision, sooo
 
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Claudette Savagely said:
That dynamic of NR dominance in open battle and attendant implications should have been the direction that the new films started from, but JJ is a hack and Kennedy and her pet lore keepers have no artistic integrity or vision, sooo
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As far as I can tell from the lack of cohesion between Abrams' movies and the tie-in works, J.J. Abrams didn't consult with the Story Group at all while making his films, so kindly refrain from blaming them for his failings as a filmmaker.


tankdrop24 said:
I think its also a bit of the 'both sides have to be equally playable' thing, where the rebels and empire need to be equally valid choices for one to identify with during play despite one side being literal fascist space nazis. So that means sprinkling in minorities for the Imperials even though its totally thematically messed up.
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Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it, but I also think that it's kind of fucked up that they have this recurring attitude in so many of their products that both sides should get a turn at being the main characters. There's a reason that the various WWII video game franchises don't have any campaigns where you play as the Nazis. Multiplayer is fine, but what exactly is the problem with only playing the good guys in the story mode, at least. If you want players to get some time in TIEs during that campaign, have them fly captured ones on undercover missions like Wraith Squadron.

And unless they're going to pull out another cinematic in the next two weeks, only the Imperials are getting a short film from their point of view.

Telling a story from the viewpoint of a mass-murdering fascist in 2020 feels a lot more gross than it did in 1993 or 2005.


Mutton said:
I just wanna go pew pew in my A-Wing
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Yeah, and I wanna go pew pew lasers in my X-Wing, but when I pull the trigger, I wanna be killing bad guys.
 
I'll give Timmy Zahn this; in the new Thrawn books Eli Vanto is definitely treated really poorly by the Imps because he's a brownish dude from what they consider a backwater part of the galaxy. It makes sense for the bigotry to be Core people looking down on basically anyone else with skin color not factoring in? At the same time making your baddies diverse LGBT+ friendly fascists just rubs me wrong in this day in age.

Of course, though, the aesthetics of fantasy fascism sell really well. Look at how much merch there is around the stormtroopers, Dath Vader, and other Imps.
 
The Narrator said:
As far as I can tell from the lack of cohesion between Abrams' movies and the tie-in works, J.J. Abrams didn't consult with the Story Group at all while making his films, so kindly refrain from blaming them for his failings as a filmmaker.



Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it, but I also think that it's kind of fucked up that they have this recurring attitude in so many of their products that both sides should get a turn at being the main characters. There's a reason that the various WWII video game franchises don't have any campaigns where you play as the Nazis. Multiplayer is fine, but what exactly is the problem with only playing the good guys in the story mode, at least. If you want players to get some time in TIEs during that campaign, have them fly captured ones on undercover missions like Wraith Squadron.

And unless they're going to pull out another cinematic in the next two weeks, only the Imperials are getting a short film from their point of view.

Telling a story from the viewpoint of a mass-murdering fascist in 2020 feels a lot more gross than it did in 1993 or 2005.



Yeah, and I wanna go pew pew lasers in my X-Wing, but when I pull the trigger, I wanna be killing bad guys.
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There already were games where you played exclusively the Empire, like "Star Wars: TIE Fighter". Personally I have no problem in playing imperials in Squadron, as long as it doesn't try to whitewash the imps and makes it clear that they are supporting a horrible system that most of the galaxy don't want, and if the bit of the imperial tutorial mission involving massacring refugees from Alderaan is true, then I won't have doubts that EA won't screw this.
 
Today is the day!

Actually, yesterday was the day if you set your X-Box's location to New Zealand so that it thought it was already tomorrow. :V

The only flight stick for the X-Box, the Thrustmaster T-Flight, has been out of stock everywhere. Had to pay extra to get one on eBay. Not only for Squadrons, my joystick for my PC is more than twenty years old now and not working so well. I got it back out and started playing X-Wing: Alliance again the past few weeks to get back in the groove, and the extra buttons and full-size throttle on the unfortunately-named Thrustmaster are definitely an improvement.

Anyway, I only got partially through the prologue before some friends hit me up to join them in online play, so I really didn't know all the controls yet, but I managed to muddle through. We did several rounds of Fleet Battle against A.I. and a few Dogfights against humans. We won exactly once. The AI opponents in Fleet Battle seems to be divided into regular AI and player-level AI that count as being the same as killing an enemy player, and the player-level AI were actually pretty tough. I was expecting that Squadrons would be easier than the classic X-Wing games, but it might have actually been harder, although that might also be because it handles fairly differently from X-Wing and I wasn't used to it yet.

Anyway, so far it's a cool game, it has a generally X-Wing feel although there's way more focus on missiles and countermeasures. Power management is different from X-Wing but follows similar principles. I haven't figured out how to angle my deflector shield yet, or how to boost or drift.

I'm planning to play through the campaign after I've slept, at which point I'll be able to better judge it and also hopefully have a better grasp of it.
 
Be advised that the default pitch and yaw axes will have nasty deadzones due to the main target being console inputs:



When binding to HOTAS you may want to use some sort of utility like Joystick Gremlin to map your stick axes to a virtual device and to different axes than X and Y.
 
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RangerKarl said:
Be advised that the default pitch and yaw axes will have nasty deadzones due to the main target being console inputs:



When binding to HOTAS you may want to use some sort of utility like Joystick Gremlin to map your stick axes to a virtual device and to different axes than X and Y.
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Hmm... using HOTAS on console, I did have some difficulty at times making small adjustments to line up shots. I should play with the settings to see if I can make it more responsive.
 
My main issue currently is that the z axis on my t16000m is a bit noisy – x and y are Hall Effect sensors but z is apparently a potentiometer. I'm currently trying rudder pedals for roll, and joystick x for yaw, but we'll see if that lasts.
 
Gravitas Hunt said:
My main issue currently is that the z axis on my t16000m is a bit noisy – x and y are Hall Effect sensors but z is apparently a potentiometer. I'm currently trying rudder pedals for roll, and joystick x for yaw, but we'll see if that lasts.
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That was my FS2 setup ages ago, should work out alright. Muscle memory can be a bitch, especially when you're toggling between stuff like DCS and this game 😂
 
Completed my first dogfight match as an A-wing. It's a bit tricky at first but once you get the A-wing going, it keeps going.

Then again some of my Ace Combat experience may have transferred. Well at the moment for me the game feels better with a controller than with mouse and keyboard.
 
Do y'all recommend any good joysticks? Might just use a controller in the interim.
Also opening with murdering alderannian refugees is a.... bold choice, and one I can appreciate.
 
Undead Martyr said:
Do y'all recommend any good joysticks? Might just use a controller in the interim.
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Whatever you get, make sure it uses magnetic/hall effect sensors, which are contactless and have a much longer lifespan. Potentiometers have a tendency to get noisy after a little while. I'm not sure many exist that have them on the z-axis, though.
I'm overall happy with my T16000m, except for the z axis.
 
I don't have a stick yet - any opinions on if it's worth playing with a mouse or is the experience so miserable that I should just wait?
 
Rat King said:
I don't have a stick yet - any opinions on if it's worth playing with a mouse or is the experience so miserable that I should just wait?
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I just did the first mission. I didn't think it was terrible- the mouse was reasonably intuitive for piloting. Admittedly I'm pants at it due to having terrible spatial awareness but still.
 
I flew the prologue, the training for the fleet battles, and the first Republic story mission and I'm having a blast. It feels like I'm a kid again playing X-Wing. I let out a little fangirlish squeal during the pre-flight starting sequence of the very first prologue.
 
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