‘Star Wars: Squadrons’ Gets First Gameplay Trailer, October Release Date

Sorry, but no, a mouse is a horrible idea for changing a plane’s orientation. First of all, it doesn’t move back to a neutral position, which every functioning joystick does. Then, with a mouse you expect absolute displacement, because that’s what a cursor does when moved via the mouse or a trackpad. But that’s not how a plane works. With a joystick, you expect changes in pitch and roll rate (plus yaw with the pedals or joystick twist) – that’s what you get and how a plane operates. And lastly, with a mouse there is zero force involved with your input. Force is critical for precision, repeatability and safety. Deflection is actually secondary, a little bit needs to be there for the brain to accept it as successful input, but muscle memory actually works by applied force and not by travel.

If you want precision, buy a joystick with proper mechanics and hall effect sensors. There are models that allow changing springs and the length of the stick to suit your personal needs.

Mouse + keyboard support was introduced and refined to the point of usability (I take your word for that) for two simple reasons:

1.) Acceptance by a new demographic of gamers unwilling to dedicate money and desktop real estate to joysticks.

2.) Gamers gotten used to command FPS games with the mouse. A supremely unnatural method that allows superhuman movement. Basically something you can’t do anything against because nobody would accept the input lag that would come from survivable acceleration limits. Ever played Alien:Isolation in VR with mouse and keyboard? The only VR experience that ever made me throw up.

But let’s see the input methods as depicted in (more) recent space sims:
Eve – HOTAS
Elite Dangerous – HOTAS
Star Citizen – HOTAS
Freelancer – none
Everspace – HOTAS
X Rebirth VR Edition – none
No Man’s Sky – HOTAS
X3 – none

Doesn’t seem like the “realities” in most of those games support your claim, but feel free to add other examples to the list.

I would need to try X Rebirth VR Edition myself, but from what I’m seeing, people are not exactly moving a mouse around. What they do is tilt their controllers. Seems very much like mimicking joystick movements, oddly enough.

But most importantly, in the Star Wars universe, every space craft is controlled with HOTAS, as has been shown in every film, comic and game I’m aware of. So honestly I hope HOTAS will be the preferred input method and will not mean a disadvantage compared to mouse input in Squadrons.

IMO, knowing how to be precise with a joystick should be a required skill for any space combat sim. I’d even prefer not to have lead indicators. Let the flying, aiming, energy management, etc be the main challenge!

Because, let’s face it, having to point the gun towards your target is an anachronism in future space tech scenarios anyway.

The reasoning is that those games don’t even believe in mouse input but rather HOTAS in in their own portrayal of future input methods.

The space combat genre had it’s peak in marketshare in the mid-late 90s (Tie Fighter, Wing Commander III+IV, Descent: FreeSpace). I’d say the same goes for flight simulators. From then, FPS shooters took over and everyone except nerds started to throw their joysticks away. From then on you just couldn’t bring a space/air combat game to market without mouse support and expect the common gamer to spend money on it. So it was wise for developers to make mouse support practical.

The new MS Flight Simulator and Star Citizen will bring somewhat of a renaissance and I still maintain air/space sims are a godsend to VR and vice versa.

Curious to try out XRebirt VR myself, after the bitter disappointment of Everspace.

Pre-Star Citizen, Chris Roberts came to fame by designing/directing/programming/producing the Wing Commander franchise, including a miserable movie, as well as Strike Commander and other games. He contributed the original concept to Freelancer, but when the game eventually came to market, even that was changed.

Anyway, of course the mouse is a great great aiming device. To the point where it makes everything too easy. So as I’ve said, I will refuse to play the game online if such an input method is even allowed against HOTAS users. Actually I’ll even refuse if the flight model doesn’t severely limit yaw rates like Elite:Dangerous did on purpose, in order to allow a challenging dogfighting experience.

Well, on a real jet, you don’t aim a quickly movable turret (even if some pure arcade games like Ace Combat work like that) and the plane will eventually align on its own where the turret is pointing. Real jets physically don’t, can’t and should never work like that. Most of all because the top priority (in a dog fight at least) is constantly having control over the orientation of your plane. And for that nobody has yet found anything better than a HOTAS.

You fire the gun in the same direction the plane is pointing, always, you fire your radar missile towards the target you’ve selected on the radar (while the plane points somewhat in its direction) or you activate the IR missile by helping the heat seaker recognise its target, either by semi-precisely pointing the plane and thus the reticule in the HUD or by pointing the reticule in your HMD towards it.

Again, in a space fighter, if such a thing does an will ever exist in this universe, the concept of pointing a gun towards your enemy is total BS anyway, so why the need for precise-ish human aim? If you’re advanced enough a race to bring highly manoeuvrable vessels with beam weapons to outer space, then you can solve dead precise auto-aiming easily. There’d possibly not even be a selection process. A space fighter wouldn’t be confined to following aerial flight behaviour, it would just follow a Newtonian flight model. It’s so cringy to see space fighters on full boost, just to keep their top speed! It’d actually cost huge amounts of energy to make a space fighter fly like a plane in the air because there is no medium to carry aerodynamic lift! So if a space combat “simulator” is nothing but an air combat “simulator” located in space and with slightly different weaponry, why orient the inputs on what we actually fly in air?

I’m a single player myself, but I still prefer shooting enemies to be a challenge that involves a lot of maneuvring rather than a point and click afair. BTW, that flying through capital ship structures looks like a real painfull thing to do with a mouse. And I suggest trying something like formation flying and
in-flight refuelling with a mouse, as opposed to using HOTAS (where it isn’t exactly easy either).

Okay, I’ve seen Freelancer footage now. It’s worse than I expected. First of all: Follow-cam, no cockpit view. You point your mouse to the target, the movable turrets aim, the fighter follows loosely. I mean, that has quite possibly been a fun, engaging arcade game in its day, but please don’t call it a sim (when the term “simulator” is problematic for any space shooter anyway).