Thursday, September 7, 2017

Star Wars Starfighter: 3/20 hours

I skipped my 2 hour post because at that time, I was already on mission 9, and I saw on a guide that there were only 14 missions in the game. So I naturally assumed that by hour 3, or shortly thereafter, I would have at least completed the main story. And yet, here I am, an hour and a half later, and I'm still only on mission 11. On easy mode.

It all comes down to escort missions. I don't get it. Why would I want my success or failure at a particular mission to hinge on whether or not an NPC is smart enough to stay out of the line of fire? Like in mission 11. I have to escort an ally through a canyon. Which is fine, in theory, because that means that enemies cannot come from the sides and are unlikely to come from behind, so if you were carrying volatile ammunition and had to rely on the protection of your fighter escort, all you would have to do is move slowly enough that your escort can clear out the enemies in front of you. Seems simple, really. So why on earth would you just charge ahead and fly into a clearing full of tanks when, if you waited 2 goddamned minutes, the fighter could wipe them all out from the safety of the canyon's protected cover. My only guess here is that the game itself wants me to fly around like an idiot, exposed to fire from all directions, instead of taking the boring and sensible precaution of not engaging more enemies at one time than I can handle.

I'm wracking my brain trying to remember if I've ever experienced this from the other side. Is there a game where you have to play the defenseless cargo ship and work your way through a gauntlet of enemies by relying on the protection of a more powerful attack ship? Or, at least, its genre-appropriate equivalent, like maybe you're a young child and you have to stay near your bodyguard. I can't think of any examples at the moment (except for tongue-in-cheek ones like Bioshock Infinite), and I'm guessing the reason they're so rare is that they're the sort of thing any human being could do with a minimum of prompting.

Despite my frustration, I do understand the appeal of an escort mission from a design perspective. Theoretically (they are rarely executed well enough to justify the downsides). They disrupt the player. Force you out of your old habits, optimized as they are for keeping yourself safe. They force you to have a broader situational awareness. It's no longer enough to know where the enemies are in relation to you, you also have to expand your mental map to include a second focal point. It's an order of magnitude more complex strategically. And thus could be immensely satisfying . . . if you had a partner capable of coordinating with you.

It doesn't help that Star Wars Starfighter is not an especially polished game. Don't get me wrong, it's fine by 2002 standards, and you actual ship controls pretty well. It's just that way games present information to help you navigate in 3D has advanced quite a bit since then. There is a targeting reticle that helps you track enemies, but it auto-places itself in a somewhat . . . whimsical manner. It's gotten better since I changed my controller configuration to map the manual targeting to a button the game actually recognizes, but even then, I have to be directly looking at my next target to do so, and that's not always easy (especially in a canyon).

I'm still expecting this game to be disappointingly short, but it would not surprise me if it takes me another hour to get past mission 11.

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