Nemarus Posted November 6, 2015 Posted November 6, 2015 Lots of new images and brief videos from Battlefront today, and it includes both extended and all new footage of the Fighter Squadron mode. All of these are in-game, in-engine footage. Clip: Falcon gameplay clip (extended from trailer) It's basically a much cooler version of Damage Overcharge. Clip: X-wings vs. TIE swarms (extended from trailer) This shows just how busy the skies will be, with 10 players and 10 AI pilots on each side, as well as objective ships like AI-controlled shuttles. Clip: A-wing pursuing TIE This one really shows the extreme speed. It looks faster than even a GSF Scout boosting. I can't think of any space dogfighting game that has been this fast. Not GSF, not Rogue Squadron, and certainly not X-wing or TIE Fighter. Clip: Slave I dogfighting (all new footage) Apart from the amazing detail on Slave I, this video just shows the enormous scale (in every dimension) of this map. And the X-wings emerging from the clouds is breathtaking! Clip: TIE and X-wings over Tatooine at dusk (all new footage) Clip: X-wing in canyon (all new footage) Clip: TIE Interceptor hunting rebels over mountains Looks like you'll be flying very close to Medium Transports and Star Destroyers. For those who are not yet aware, Fighter Squadron mode will be a dedicated mode in Battlefront where you will instantly spawn in a Fighter. There will be five maps this year: Tatooine, Hoth, Sullust, Endor, and Jakku. All will be the same mode with (I believe) the following rules: * Team Deathmatch * Killing an AI Starfighter gets 1 point * Killing a player Starfighter gets 2 points * Killing an objective (shuttle) gets 20 points First team to X points wins. There are powerups strewn around the map (toward the ground). Some give the ability to reset cooldowns or heal. Others let you play as the Falcon (Rebels) or Slave I (Imperials)--again, similar to Damage Overcharge. You're powerful but also have a huge target painted on your back. Otherwise, you are flying the X-wing, A-wing, TIE Fighter, or TIE Interceptor. I'm not sure if you get to pick which you spawn in. Of course, Starfighters are also present in Walker Assault and Supremacy modes, but unlike in Fighter Squadron where you spawn in a fighter, in other modes you'll have to find powerup tokens in the map to load into one. Still, establishing air superiority and conducting ground strafing runs is certainly fun and unique, and something we don't ever get to do in GSF. Other details I gleened from playing the Beta: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=840027 The mechanics are certainly simpler than in GSF. Flying Fighters in Battlefront will be much more about speed, spatial awareness, and knowing when to go on the offense or defense. Oh and I guess Battlefront comes with other modes and stuff. Overall collection of Battlefront footage: As I've said before, I'll be playing on Xbox One. Please add "Nemarus" as a friend there and send me a message if you want to fly together! The game launches on November 17th, but Xbox One owners who have EA Access will get to play it on the 10th.
FlavivsAetivs Posted November 7, 2015 Posted November 7, 2015 Great post, thanks for the info! I'll be playing on PC. I hate origin but wanted this game (and ME3) so I got it. ~ Eudoxia
ALaggyGrunt Posted November 7, 2015 Posted November 7, 2015 (edited) Shiny. Not going to buy until it hits GOG. I kind of like to be able to play them after a few years without wondering if it will still work in 5-10 years. Lucasarts.com used to have updates for everything going back to the 1990s. No more. The target audience is getting up there in years, and a lot of us know how much of a headache it is to get old games to run on new computers-especially if it's a single-player game trying to call a home that doesn't exist any more to figure out if they weren't pirated 5 years ago. This one is multiplayer so not such a big problem-but if it has a campaign mode worth playing now, it will probably still be worth playing for at least some of us when Origin forgets how to activate it. SWTOR's single-player components will have exactly the same problem. Edited November 7, 2015 by ALaggyGrunt
Ramalina Posted November 7, 2015 Posted November 7, 2015 Clip: A-wing pursuing TIE This one really shows the extreme speed. It looks faster than even a GSF Scout boosting. I can't think of any space dogfighting game that has been this fast. Not GSF, not Rogue Squadron, and certainly not X-wing or TIE Fighter. So this is a clip we saw earlier, or a very similar one, but with the camera zoomed out a bit more. It makes interpretation a lot easier. Back then I suspected that the "speed" was mostly playing with camera angles and flying close to a detailed surface, now I know that's the case. Hate to break it to you, but they are moving reeeeaaallly slow. Like, P-51 Mustang zooming by 50-100 mph faster in level flight slow. I mostly process flight speeds in SI units and it looks like terrain following flight at 475 - 600 km/h. Maybe even as low as 425 km/h. It just looks fast because at times they're only about 5 m above ground level, so any given visual reference point on the terrain moves across the screen at a decent clip. I can tell you for sure, that flying very good simulations of real combat aircraft in DCS World, 700-900 km/h at treetop/below power line level is a heck of a lot faster than that A wing is travelling. GSF ships can ostensibly hit speeds over 9 times as fast, though ship scales are a bit wonky in GSF so perceived speed in terms of available pilot reaction time may not realistically reflect what a properly scaled model of roughly 3000m/s would be like. Edit: On second thought, after watching it a few more times, I'm revising my speed estimate down to maybe 300-350 km/h. It's really flaps down, gear down, final approach sort of speed for a fast jet. Probably also slower than the flight speed of anything other than maybe a Y-wing from the X-wing series of games, but in terms of making shots on targets the pace of gameplay is clearly drastically faster. Don't know if it looks like faster gameplay than GSF though, that TIE survived pursuit under fire for an awfully long time by GSF standards. That may be a good thing though. Longer TTKs and short map distances where it doesn't take long to get from one encounter to the next make for a nice flow in gameplay. In X-wing it took forever to get anywhere, and forever to kill anything. In GSF travel times are short, but with encounters that can resolve almost before they've started, the travel times can still feel a lot longer than the dogfights. Battlefront looks like short trips between dogfights of moderate duration and reasonable ability to resolve into victory. Very appealing gameplay wise. The cinematographic effects to make it look faster than it is are quite impressive. They're very careful with the fog/smoke/cloud effects and use them to confine the computer's required draw distance to just a few km. This allows them to render the ships and the little patch of terrain that they're skimming over at high detail and at a blazing fast framerate. If you have an eye for interpreting actual speed (really important in combat sims where stall speed is a thing that matters) the illusion of speed is pierced very easily. However, it is a gorgeously fluid video rendering of low level flight. I could see ignoring the battle to just zoom around and watch the scenery whiz past. You'll be going slow enough that you actually see scenery instead of blur.
Sliverspark Posted November 11, 2015 Posted November 11, 2015 Shiny. Not going to buy until it hits GOG. I kind of like to be able to play them after a few years without wondering if it will still work in 5-10 years. Lucasarts.com used to have updates for everything going back to the 1990s. No more. The target audience is getting up there in years, and a lot of us know how much of a headache it is to get old games to run on new computers-especially if it's a single-player game trying to call a home that doesn't exist any more to figure out if they weren't pirated 5 years ago. This one is multiplayer so not such a big problem-but if it has a campaign mode worth playing now, it will probably still be worth playing for at least some of us when Origin forgets how to activate it. SWTOR's single-player components will have exactly the same problem. It won't hit GOG - and won't hit Steam either. The whole point of EA creating Origin in the first place is so they can put their games on there exclusively, and capitalize on that. This is why you don't see the game even listed on either GOG or Steam right now, or ever.
ALaggyGrunt Posted November 11, 2015 Posted November 11, 2015 It won't hit GOG - and won't hit Steam either. The whole point of EA creating Origin in the first place is so they can put their games on there exclusively, and capitalize on that. This is why you don't see the game even listed on either GOG or Steam right now, or ever. Sigh. Oh, well. Maybe in a few years after they've decided it's $20 DLC'd out.
Danalon Posted November 11, 2015 Posted November 11, 2015 (edited) Sigh. Oh, well. Maybe in a few years after they've decided it's $20 DLC'd out. I'm sure Battlefront will get cheap in a few years when they shutdown the servers and release the next game in the series. Edited November 11, 2015 by Danalon
Recommended Posts