This month’s (the October issue… go figure) cover story at everyone’s favorite gaming magazine, PC Gamer, focuses on the announcement of space combat in BioWare’s up-coming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic .  While I certainly think the entire concept of this game is interesting, I for one have a hard time equating the Star Wars universe with a time period set a millenium or two before any of the movies (prequels included),  so I haven’t followed the project that closely.  But this caught my attention for two reasons.  First, Star Wars: Galaxies (which I loved back before there were Jedi) lacked a space component.  I personally was okay with that decision, but i can see how many would be upset that a game set in the classic Star Wars time period didn’t allow one to fly TIE fighters and X-Wings.  Second, Lucas Arts’ TIE Fighter space sim was quite simply the best Star Wars game of all time (if you think otherwise, you’re wrong).  It was everything you could want from a Star Wars space combat game, even if it had to ignore certain trivialities such as how physics actually would affect space craft in a dogfight and the fact that you can’t actually hear other ships or laser fire in space (I believe at one time this was explained by having “audio sensors” that created sounds for identified ships to aid in situational awareness, but I might be wrong.  Either way, that’s a bit of a stretch).

Flying this close to a Corellian Corvette in an unshielded TIE Interceptor without missiles is usually suicide by rebel.

So, as one might assume, I was delighted to hear that space combat and customizable ships, billed on the cover of the magazine, were going to be included.  I cannot stress my disappointment in reading the actual article.  First off, the combat is reportedly going to be a single-player experience at launch.  Cooperative and PvP modes will be added later.  A bummer, to be sure, but not the end of the world.  No, the end of the world came about in the next paragraph entitled “Tunnel shooter.”  When the article’s author, Josh Augustine, compares the play style to the Rogue Squadron games (themselves made in the tradition of the Rebel Assault series’ flying sections) I knew it would be trouble.  Basically, the player’s ship is on a rail.  The direction of travel and speed is chosen for you, and you fly more or less in a restricted area (the aforementioned “tunnel”).

Rebel Assault 2, a spiritual forefather of the Rogue Squadron series.

The developer tells us not to worry, the gameplay will be challenging and players will die, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.  Why not bring back an X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter experience?  Why not let us pimp out our ships and then actually fly them against other players?  With modern gaming technology, think of the fun we could have. Instead of being led through some sort of cinematic experience that’s scripted by a developer, we could live them ourselves, dangerous flitting between capital ships trading broadsides, hoping we don’t get vaporized by a random turbolaser blast while chasing enemy bombers away from our carriers or shooting up ion cannon batteries to give our cruisers the advantage in a slug fest.  This is the kind of stuff that was possible to a limited extent in X-Wing: Alliance and even TIE Fighter (though the sub-system targeting was a bit less effective in that one).

This pilot has a choice. He can go after the bombers that are probably heading for Home One, or send his wingmen and try to destroy those shield towers.

In the end, I think Augustine lets BioWare and Lucas Arts go a bit lightly.  However, he does seem to feel that a full space sim would be more appropriate and have greater longevity for an MMO, and I have to agree with that assessment.  I suppose it’s too late to hope for a change of direction at this point, so we’ll just have to suffer through with a rail shooter version of what Star Wars space combat is really about.  Instead, every experience will be more like a Death Star run (1 or 2, your pick) instead of Return of the Jedi’s massive fleet engagement over Endor.  A missed opportunity and a terrible shame.

UPDATE:

There is a gameplay video of the space combat.  It’s about as boring as I thought it would be.  Link below.

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/space-combat