Posted by: Pali
« on: July 30, 2015, 08:16:57 AM »
I'd like a strategy game or flight sim in the vein of the X-Wing series. I'm tired of Star Wars MMOs and RPGs, and thus far the strategy games have ranged from bad to decent, but have yet to provide us anything truly great, while we've not had a good Star Wars flight sim since Alliance (Rogue Squadron games were excellent, but were arcade games and console-based).
For a strategy game, I want a game that's got ground combat, space combat, diplomacy and espionage, but all of them fleshed out in a massive single-interface real-time strategy game. Give me Sins-style empire and fleet management, but allow me to zoom into planets seamlessly from space for the battles like in Planetary Annihilation (as bad as that game is...), while I've got diplomats and agents working for me Star Wars Rebellion-style. Give me a galaxy to play with, with at bare minimum dozens of planets, but preferably hundreds or more. Give me multiple factions - the ICW period is honestly PERFECT for this, but since the EU no longer counts, Disney's got room to make its own complex universe (yeah, we'll see, but I can hope). The level of graphics doesn't have to be high, and to keep the game playable for all but very high-end comps it probably couldn't be, but the gameplay is what truly needs to be stellar. Honestly though, I'd probably be happy even with just an EaW 2 that fixed the original game's issues, particularly ground combat. I REALLY want the complete integration of empire-space-land under the same game clock, though.
For a flight sim, I want something that's largely a throw-back to the 90s heyday of space flight sims, but not entirely. Maybe not go all the way to realistic physics, because long-run lancer duels are boring as hell if you're not a knight on horseback, but give ships a bit more weight to them, something more like the feel they have currently in Elite Dangerous - let me kill my X-Wing's thrust for a second, flip around to blast the TIE behind me, then accelerate again through its exploding parts back the way I came. Have ships react more realistically to damage and impacts, maybe not to Star Citizen's extreme but no more than a couple notches below. Give a proper sense of scale, that sense that Freespace 2 so wonderfully nailed of making you feel like a fly amongst giants, yet a fly with a nasty sting if you can hit the right spots. Give me a story - preferably two stories so there are Rebel and Imperial campaigns, but one great campaign is worth ten okay ones - with branching paths depending on what degree of success or failure my missions have, so that I can feel the impact of my actions. This also allows for the experience of defeats without requiring you to replay the mission, enhancing immersion when you have half a missile load in the next mission because you failed to protect the convoy last time. Give me wingmen like those in Wing Commander, with personalities and backgrounds and out-of-mission interactions (and in-mission competence), rather than nameless guys who die halfway through the mission and leave you all alone (Freespace 2's single great error was that this happened too often). Lastly, on this one, the graphics do matter - it should be very, very pretty. I want to see inside the bridge of the ISD before I pump a pair of torpedoes into it, and I want that bridge to explode realistically when I do.