Star Wars: Squadrons is positioning itself to be the perfect game for people who have, for your, fantasized about sitting inside the cockpit of TIE Fighters or X-Wings or what have you, and the game is going to have customizability that will let you go in on that as hard or easy as you want.
Speaking with IGN Japan, the game’s creative director Ian S. Frazier explained that there will be customization options for a number of things, including advanced mechanics for in-flight power management, the HUD, and being able to see the cosmetic upgrades on others players’ ships.
Explaining the latter, Frazier said that there will be several fans who will want the ships and fighters to look exactly as they do in the movies, and so if you want, you can toggle off the visibility of all cosmetics.
“Some players aren’t going to want to see any of that,” he said. “It won’t matter how plausible it is, they just want to keep it to exactly what we’ve seen in the films, no more and no less, and we totally get that. And so we have an option in the game to hide everybody else’s cosmetics. So if you flip that on, then all of a sudden, if you want to put a racing stripe or whatever on your own TIE Fighter, you’ll see it, but everybody else’s is just going to look like a normal boilerplate TIE Fighter for you.”
With the HUD, players will, of course, get the option to see all info in the in-game UI. But if you’re looking to completely immerse yourself in the game, you can also turn the UI off and rely solely on the readouts on your ship’s cockpit.
“When you start the story, we ask if you want the standard experience – which we’d expect most players to take – or a hardcore mode, which gets rid of a bunch of UI that helps you localize yourself in space, and makes you rely entirely on the readouts in the cockpit,” Frazier explained. “So for the folks that are newer to the genre, I’d expect them to play standard, and for the folks that have tonnes of flight experience, they might want to try that out.”
Finally, he also talked about more advanced mechanics in the game. For instance, there’s the power management system, which will require you to decide how to use and prioritize your ship’s engine, shield, and weapons. However, on default systems, this system will be “relatively basic.”
“By default, we keep that relatively basic,” Frazier said. “If I hit a button, I will instantly max a given system. Our more advanced players could turn that into advanced power management, and they’re individually managing pips of power from one system to another. But that’s not the experience that we give to an average new user.”
Star Wars: Squadrons is out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on October 2. The game won’t have any microtransactions, and will cost $40. You can check out its PC requirements through here.