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Why, on further thought, Star Wars: Squadrons can’t be the next TIE FighterLet the past die; kill it if you have to
Let the past die; kill it if you have to
Reader: I’m sorry. I was drunk on lasers. Utterly trolleyed on spaceships, and slurring that a trailer was my best mate. This has happened before, I will admit. In 2002, after watching a midnight screening of Attack Of The Clones with my mate Josh, the two of us sat on the night bus home to Mottingham, and looked at each other guiltily for a while, before one of us dared speak the unspeakable. “It was better than Empire, wasn’t it?” said Josh. “Yep, best Star Wars yet,” I added, sage as a septuagenarian champagne critic. “Can’t believe Yoda had a fight.”
This isn’t quite your traditional, hackneyed “good old days of PC gaming” post, but it may skirt close to it. Mainly, I want to talk about missions. Because if I really cast my mind back to what was excellent about TIE Fighter, those are what stood out. There were bloody millions of the things. Like, dozens upon dozens of missions. And while some were pretty much repeats, most were both complex and original.
This guy looks very faintly, but eerily, like my wife’s dad.
So complex, in fact, that they necessitated a full briefing complete with minutes of recorded dialogue from your commanding officer, and a holographic PowerPoint presentation with multiple slides, and little markers to represent which spaceships would be where. This was in-depth stuff, and if you didn’t listen carefully, you’d be fucked when the missiles started flying. You’d miss a lot of the story, too. TIE Fighter had a lot of narrative, especially for a combat flight sim, and without a cutscene in sight, its twists and turns played out through radio chatter in missions, and through their lengthy briefings.
It was great. It made you feel way more immersed in the role of being a pilot, as you could imagine sitting there during the briefing with a space pepperami and a sarcastic expression, quipping with your wingmates as some grey-suited git pointed sternly at icons denoting mon cal cruisers and nebulon-B frigates. It upped the sense of achievement when you stuck to a plan and carried it out, too. And in a game where spaceships were featureless blocks denuded of textures, you needed all the immersion you could get.
As you progressed through TIE Fighter, you also started getting mysterious secret missions of this robe dude on the right. Looking back now, I absolutely love how totally inconspicuous he is, standing in the middle of a neon light show about eight feet from the flight deck commander.
But I do not think this would happen now. I still don’t buy into the cynical roaring that Squadrons' single player mode will be rubbish “because EA”:Titanfall 2is a one-game rebuttal of that argument, and I could go more specific and mention the campaign added to Battlefront 2, whose creative team are now working on Squadrons. But if it’s good, it’ll be a different kind of good from what TIE Fighter’s campaign was. And this is where I sail perilously close to the rocks of saying “gamers these days”, in pointing out that tastes - or at least publishers' understanding of them - have changed a lot in 25 years.
However much I may enjoy dozens and dozens of complicated missions, each with a rambling audio-only briefing over an icon-pocked battle plan, I suspect the majority of Squadrons' potential customer base might expect something a bit more immediate. And that’s fair. Now that games look so astonishing, it’s quite natural that you’d want to get right in there and start blasting your way through unbelievable spacescapes.
No actually I would like to read some bomb statistics, please.
And furthermore, because of said astonishing looks, you can’t just crank out seventy-odd missions - complete with cutscenes, set pieces, environmental art and all the rest - without either being accused of massive asset reuse, or racking up unfathomable development costs. There’s nothing lazy or greedy about a shorter campaign - it would be commercial insanity to expect EA to apply the TIE Fighter formula to a modern game, when something with one tenth the level of convolution would meet the standard of something like Titanfall 2.
