Thanks for the reply, but I think the problem is more basic - it doesn't have to do with your HOTAS. Also, the "gimballed weapon" and "aim assist" are minor factors. Pretend there was no aim assist. Even though there is some "bullet/laser magnetism," or whatever you want to call it, this is still a game where your weapons point the same direction of your nose. They are not independent. Your weapons direction, your ship's heading, AND your ship's bearing are all one and the same in this game (except when you do Boost and Drift, and your bearing temporarily separates from your heading).
What I am advocating is that they reduce the rotational inertia so that when you put your controller back at neutral (or back in the dead zone), the ship should *quickly* straighten up and point where you want it to point. It should not continue drifting uncontrollably for a second or more! I would estimate that out of a hard turn my Xwing drifts for an entire second (in time) and roughly five degrees (in angle - just guessing there). That is enough to make the old X-wing Series aiming skills go all haywire. It is just too hard to aim out of a quick turn in this game. It is frustrating to not be able to control my ship more exactly. And it happens on every controller type from what I can tell. (I have only used a pretty basic flight stick and a mouse myself.)
So you basically want to make the already arcadey physics to be even more arcade? It's already on rails enough as it is. It would be super boring if you didn't have to wrestle the spacecraft at least a little bit. That's part of the fun.
@RivenAlreadyReg wrote:So you basically want to make the already arcadey physics to be even more arcade? It's already on rails enough as it is. It would be super boring if you didn't have to wrestle the spacecraft at least a little bit. That's part of the fun.
It would be the opposite. The game has its high rotational inertia because gamepads cannot do precision aiming. They can easily be centered (due to deadzone) or pushed to extremes (due to short travel), but holding a precise input is impossible. The high rotational inertia favors rapid, extreme inputs, which is most gamepad inputs. It therefore allows the imprecise gamepad to compete with the precise flight sticks.
The side effect is all precision aiming goes out of the window, so aim assist is needed.
The side effect is that, since there's aim assist, the smaller profiles of TIEs now give them no advantage whatever, and TIEs must now be made tanky because shots that would have missed them, will now hit.
All of this compromising for the gamepad has taken away a lot of the skills such as precision tracking shots (sluggish ship prevents it), and snap shot timing (aim assist corrects it).
"your aim *had* to be more precise to hit, but the ship's maneuver *allowed* you to be that precise,"
Indeed. So this means that the gunnery aspect of the skill ceiling has been lowered compared to classic games, because there are skills that have been removed. No one can acquire it, and no one can exercise it either.
I still like the hardcore mode idea, because console players *can* go and acquire HOTASes and be free to exercise these leet gunner skills, as long as the game allowed these skills to exist. It's like GT Sports e-sports, where no one uses gamepads - steering wheels only!
@Elphaba wrote:
@BluesyMooGet a HOTAS, set all deadzones to zero, yaw, pitch and roll sensitivity to 100% and it’s fine. The ships don’t have ENOUGH inertia; more would make proper dogfighting like in the movies. Less is just an arcade feel.)
Get proper controls and you’ll feel very differently.
That does work, but as a workaround by limiting the flight stick precision to imitate a gamepad. It's way *more* arcade that everyone's inputs are mostly driven to the extremes, and everyone relies on magic bullets to hit targets consistently. The more inertia the less you can track targets, and the more you need magic bullets. Check out how players in actual arcades play - they jam the controls to extremes all the time, and the games are designed to tolerate / encourage such behavior. Games designed for ham fisted controls are literally arcade.
Yeah, I agree. It's a bit "sloppy" trying to get a bead on a target. But I think that's a part of the game play too. No expert on physics, but the ships do behave like they are using an aerodynamics model, opposed to no atmosphere. Whatever, allowing that sort of precision will just give mouse-keyboard users an unfair advantage....again
Interesting question RivenAlreadyReg. At least I can tell you understand what I was talking about, so props for that.
Since you use the term "arcadey" does that indicate you think it should be more "realistic"? Well, again, this is science fiction. Realism is a relative term.
What I want, and I will admit it, is to have the game feel a little more like XWA / XvT. But I submit that would make it more *fun,* which is what games should be.
It is not fun to have your target fly through your field of view and not be able to *stop and shoot* that target because your ship has too much angular momentum. It's enormously frustrating - when you are experienced at playing very similar games and being *able* to do that.
One particular problem in this game is when you are trying to "make space" from an opponent and then turn around to face them. In XvT / XWA, you could fly away from the dogfight (if they weren't *too* tight on your tail at full speed), turn around and face your enemy and be at least for a few moments back in a head-to-head with just as good a chance to shoot them as they have to shoot you. In Squadrons, that is exceedingly harder. Because when you do a hard / fast turn you cannot come out of it where you want to without guessing perfectly. So then I tend to oversteer and have to slowly correct, in which time I'm getting shot and haven't been able to shoot yet, so it makes it not even worth flying out and getting that space.
One way around it would be to do a lot of practice with distant targets or landmarks on your radar and get a feel for how long you need to be in a hard turn to turn 180 degrees. Hopefully I can do that eventually. But I am still not used to the single radar screen that makes it difficult to tell when objects are *behind* you. (The Xwing series had both front and rear radar screens giving more information about where things were.)
So anyway, you could call it arcadey, or call it nostalgic, but I just want to be able to aim and shoot things coming out of tight turns. I know I'm not alone in that desire. People playing games where you point and shoot things generally like to be able to point and shoot at will.
Here's another angle to it: as long as the main weapon is tied to your ship's heading, the ship's heading should be very tightly controllable. If you want to design a more "realistic" game with ships you have to "wrestle," you could at least make the weapons independent of the heading so they could be aimed more quickly and nimbly while the ship catches up. (I've seen a few players call for that, mostly people using mouse control. Of course it would be unfair to give that to mouse people without giving it to others.) But since this game did NOT take that step of making the main weapon independent of the ship's heading (other than the aim assist they put in), they should not have made the ship's heading so hard to control.
