Star Wars Squadrons

[Agent Gibbs]

Got this and tried it out Friday with a few mates and we had mixed reactions to this

We are all veteran Xwing/Tie/Xwing alliance fans and used to this sort of game and we loved the single player, the immerison is great, PSVR is great (aside from turning off snap motion for hangar controls, that was ropey) and generally we loved the multiplayer.

BUT there were some issues - Balance seems way off! certainly in the AI fleet battles, and to a lesser extent the VS battles with actual players. 

The AI was brutal on easy at times(in fact we saw no difference with Easy or Normal slider), with enemy 'player' AI flying full frottle to you, blasting you then as they pass you, dead stop rotate 180 and act like a turret and blast you to death, seemingly with 100% accuracy . There was one mission where four enemy AI ties basically sat like turrets over our flagship and spawn killed us as we left the hangar, using a combination of weapons fire and ion torpedos, with a gun ship as the 5th 'player' AI mopping up. 

And weapon Balance felt wrong, in the scenario above, i frequently put full power to my Xwing's weapons, fired until the weapons overheated and an enemy TIE would survive with between 5 and 30% health. Conversely they seemed to have weapons that didn't overheat and/or killed before overheating. Switching to the AutoAim blasters that did less damage but implied considerably better accuracy, did nothing, they hit for sure but seemed to tickle the TIE's.

Countermeasures seemed broken at times too, many times I/We would deploy counter measures (early and late) and it would claim to have stopped the torpedo only for said ION torpedo to hit and then the same TIE blow us up under normal fire.

Generally these problems seemed exclusive to enemy AI, who seemed to have shorter cooldowns (spamming Ion torpedo's) and no overheat on primary weapons fire and i'm sure TIE aren't meant to have any shields but we encountered some which did.

All in all it meant a loss for every AI fleet battle, even with a group of 4 coordinating attacks/ships etc

Once we got to level 5 and could play the ranked player battles, the above balance issues were considerably reduced, the only issue being the multi-missile seeming a little overpowered but counterable.

We did have one major issue with player Fleet battles - drop outs - not sure if this was intentional or because of possible loss/rage quit, but almost every player vs player fleet battle we entered, but without fail one player left, which throws up a message about not earning points and it being safe to leave, invariably resulting in others leaving. Had a few times when it ended up being incredibly one sided and nobody seems to join in progress matches to fill the void.
This could be for one of two reasons - 1. people aren't familiar with the push/pull nature of the fleet battle and the moment the bar at the top showed the enemy pushing past 50% we seemed to loose people, which could imply they don't know how it works and think its a loss so leave.
or 2. for the first hour my friend had terrible connection to JUST fleet battles, he would be kicked before the match loaded, which he only fixed with a reboot of his PS4

The lack of Polish to gameplay/AI shows its a budget game, and really did make it feel like DLC for battlefront ripped to be standalone, which is a shame because visually its stunning, the piloting is great and its promise is huge, things easily fixed with a patch

[Ronnie]

I've not tried the vs AI fleet battles mode yet but I know what you mean about even bog standard TIEs being bullet sponges in the multiplayer modes, it was manned by a real person so obviously isn't about to break at the first volley of fire, but it did feel excessive how much a pummelling they needed to take at times. 

In the dog-fighting mode you get a ton of XP for sticking with the match till the end, presumably to punish drop-outs. Don't know if that will have an effect in the long-term.

Your AI fleet battles sound pretty broken though, I'm sure there are balance patches incoming. 

 

12 minutes ago, Agent Gibbs said:

i'm sure TIE aren't meant to have any shields but we encountered some which did.

That's the TIE Reaper that's given them temporary shields

[Ronnie]

OMG

You need to get on this properly sometime soon @Julius 

[Julius]

4 minutes ago, Ronnie said:

OMG

You need to get on this properly sometime soon @Julius 

Looks like a solid pair of updates! So much for not updating this game, knew they'd come around in some form 

But as for getting to this soon...

glances at list of games releasing in the coming weeks

...I honestly don't know if I'll get to it before Christmas. Miles Morales and Astro's this weekend, Demon's Souls will probably take me up until the week before Cyberpunk (depending on when I finish that, could sneak it in there? But there's also Age of Calamity and 13 Sentinels I will want to get to), Cyberpunk will probably be two weeks minimum...and then I'm off for a week to cap off the year and hopefully catch up a bit 

Same thing happened with Ghost of Tsushima Legends, I adored that base game and want to check it out still, but it's nowhere near the top of priorities at the moment. At least I'll be able to play Squadrons with better performance on next gen when I do get to it! 

[Ronnie]

Haha take your time, plenty of games at the moment!

 

[Julius]

It's landed!