Star Wars: X-Wing - A Retrospective Analysis

X-Wing is a 1993 docking and long distance commuting simulator set in the Star Wars universe made by a small team of contractors working for George Lucas's video game company LucasArts it was actually the first Star Wars game made with lucasart's involvement as a license had only just recently reverted from broderbund instead LucasArts was primarily known at the time for its adventure games along with a well-regarded series of World War II flight simulators made by that very same group of contractors I just mentioned led by game designer slash programmer Lawrence Holland this team would soon grow into the studio known as totally games but at the time of x-wing's original release they were simply independent contractors once LucasArts finally had the license in hand it only made sense to put Holland and his team's experience to work on a space simulator game after all the space scenes in Star Wars were heavily inspired by both real and imagined footage of World War II plus only a few years earlier a little game called Wing Commander had come along to show them exactly how to do it ah wing Commander now is probably a good time to mention that this is actually the second video in a series following the history of spaceships the first one being about you guessed it Wing Commander you don't need to have seen that video to understand this one but just know that watching it either before or after I'm not picky will enhance your enjoyment of this video not to mention that it's a very nice Deep dive on that game that I worked really hard on but if you insist on being a rebel and not doing that just know that Wing Commander was a space Sim made in the year 1990 that pretty much wrote The Blueprint that X-Wing in every game like it would follow all the way up until they just kind of stopped making them for a while and make no mistake Wing Commander's influence is written all over this game which is fair enough I suppose you don't have to think too hard about where most of the inspiration behind Wing Commander came from and hold on can we go back to those World War II Sims for a second are those Sprite based planes I guess you could say Wing Commander was the first to do it in space but come on LucasArts was just taking it back and take it back they did creating a game that sold what was at the time considered gangbusters and started a long running series that is still fondly remembered today but what is it like to actually play well let's load it up and find out the first thing we get is a classic Star Wars opening crawl those of us in 2023 and Beyond are probably pretty sick of these by now but back then this was probably the first one of these that most people had seen outside of the original Three movies so let's just grin and bear it once you've watched or skipped that you're treated to a voice acted cut scene sir our Thai interceptors have located a rebel Fleet orbiting the planet turkana excellent prepare the attack we are under attack by Imperial Star Destroyers begin evasive maneuvers launch the X-Wing Fighters 1992's Wing Commander 2 had already done something like this Catherine what is happening on gorakar the rebels have taken the planet my Lord but X-Wing does a lot more of it and makes it look better to boot LucasArts games just seem to make better use of the 256 colors these games had available to them in my opinion the cutscene basically visualizes what the opening crawl said the Galactic Empire is at war with the Rebel Alliance but the rebels have a fancy new ship called the X-Wing to even the odds all right [Music] too [Music] welcome to the flagship Independence you must register no no no I'm sorry this is all just a huge misunderstanding please don't shoot me jeez these guys have no chill once we do properly register or get into what they call The Concourse we can see that just like Wing Commander this game uses an immersive tour of the carrier you'll be launching out of as its main menu system in this case the mon calamari Cruiser Independence unlike Wing Commander there's no bar to be found or indeed any characters who have anything to say to you that isn't a terse Mission briefing if you don't already have a reason to care about what's going on here from some previous experience with the universe this game has no interest in giving you one but who are we kidding it's Star Wars of course you have an existing connection to the universe and if you're looking for validation of that connection you've come to the right place they really went all out with the presentation especially in these menus every available surface has been Star Wars up to the gills there are a million different elaborate transition animations and there's even a tech room for when you want to look at a wireframe view of a TIE fighter while various unexplained technical specifications scroll by we're not here to browse though so let let's head to the Proving Ground to learn how to fly here you can enter the maze which sounds equal parts interesting and intimidating but is actually just a very simple obstacle course where you fly through these gates for points until you've made a complete circle this gives us a chance to try out the basic flight controls in a safe environment and at first blush these controls feel excellent the turn speed is a little lower than it was in Wing Commander but if anything that makes it a better fit for the analog sticks on a Gamepad which is what I use to play these games other than that it feels just as responsive with no limits on how far you could turn in any direction or any other kind of filtering to interfere with your input I had no trouble flying through the gates and getting to the end of the course under part time there is a small issue with the joystick controls where your ship will sometimes drift ever so slightly off course when it should be at rest which doesn't seem to be related to the physical controller because it still happens even when I crank The Dead Zone way up it's not a problem when you're actively controlling your ship but when you're trying to fly in a straight line it can get a little Annoying if you're wondering why you would be spending so much time cruising in this game that I would even care to mention it don't you worry we'll get to it in terms of the keys required to run your ship this is a considerable step up and complexity over Wing Commander where that game mapped quite easily to a Gamepad layout figuring out how to cover all the functionality for this one took some effort still plenty doable though we haven't entered Crazy Town just yet also I made fun of this game in my first video for having an entire button just for locking your s foils to attack position but to be fair now that I've played it I have to admit you don't actually have to memorize this button your s foils start open and there's no reason to close them so it's just for fun on the other hand there's also buttons for looking at your left and right windows and you can use them to see that the S whales don't actually close at all boy I really hope somebody got fired for that plunder they're progressively harder variations on the rules to unlock separately for each of the different playable ships but I'm already bored describing it so I think I'll head over to the historical combat simulator to learn how to shoot stuff here we have a selection of six missions for each flyable craft plus an additional six bonus missions the game itself describes these historical missions as the best way to learn the ins and outs of violating a Starfighter so let's go ahead and take the first X-Wing mission for a spin and we get a voice acted briefing area in the Cenex system by this guy pocket area is only two meters wide small thermal exhaust Port yeah him not to be confused with bricks made in Brooks May Dean crix May Dean technically the voice acting for these briefings wasn't in the original floppy disk version of the game but it is an all subsequent versions including the ones you'd actually want to play anyway this mission is a recreation of an experience that a young recruit who goes by the call sign Dev had in which he was practicing in The Proving Ground when he accidentally activated his hyperdrive and somehow didn't notice ending up in an unguarded imperial training area he assumed the Imperial equipment he found was part of his training and proceeded to go about blowing it up until his instructors managed to get a hold of him and tell him to get out of there now thanks to the magic of the simulator every new pilot in the fleet can become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of this guy's incredibly embarrassing up I bet he feels great about this [Music] speaking of embarrassing I uh can't seem to stop crashing my ship foreign [Music] guys uh I think something's wrong with the G diffuser you see there's a wrinkle to the controls that doesn't really make itself clear in The Proving Ground it takes forever to slow down it also takes the same amount of time to accelerate but it's the slowing down part that matters it wouldn't really be accurate to describe this as momentum because you don't keep going in the direction you were going you actually just move forward that is the direction you're pointed in now you could say all right just don't look at things if you don't want to crash into them but it's not that simple obviously you need to look at things in order to shoot them and there are plenty of reasons why you would want to stop in front of something or follow closely behind it but the amount of time it takes to do so does not feel intuitive the crashes themselves are unreasonably deadly wherein Wing Commander low speed collisions were no big deal in X-Wing the only thing that seems to matter is the size of what you collided with specifically whether or not it's bigger than your ship you can survive a head-on collision with a TIE fighter as long as you have enough Shields but if you so much as brush up against the stationary cargo container you will die instantly this also applies to smaller more mobile things that are nonetheless still bigger than you things you might need to chase but which have a bad habit of suddenly slowing down out of nowhere and even if you manage to avoid crashing into them directly that's still not always enough see when a ship is destroyed pieces of debris will fly off it including the chassis in a random Direction it's a nice satisfying death animation I've seen plenty of games do something like this but just about all of them take pains to make sure it isn't gameplay relevant in X-Wing though that chassis is considered to have just as much mass as the entire ship did before it was destroyed so if it happens to get flung in your direction well hope you were not a good run it is my uh professional opinion that this sucks coming from Wing Commander where fail crashes were relatively uncommon and always felt like they were my fault when they did happen having not only the frustration of having them end your mission out of nowhere but also the annoyance of having to keep constant vigilance to avoid them is a bitter pill to swallow now you could just say that's how it is skill issue and so on and it is true that I better at avoiding crashes as I played but is this really what you would want to be your primary concern off and above all others in a game called X-Wing is this fun is it Star Wars I don't know it didn't really seem to be much of a problem for wedge in the movie another annoyance comes from the X-Wing itself you see it has a rather significant design flaw that has been staring Us in the face since the very beginning it's those laser cannons located all the way out on the tips of the Wings it turns out that spacing them out like that makes it really hard to hit small targets even when they're right in front of you small targets like I don't know Tie fighters hopefully that won't be too much of a problem when going up against the Galactic Empire in the movies starfighters are depicted as having a limited ability to aim independently of their facing assisted by their targeting computers which solves this problem no such luck in the game though the only way to shoot is straightforward and yes this does contribute significantly to the crashing problem well anyway if you manage to avoid crashing into everything long enough to destroy it all it's time to move on to the next mission watch and learn as red leader takes out Tie fighters on point defense stay close you're responsible for his safety while he makes his attack dodana makes it sound like you could sit back and watch your wing leader do all the work but we've played video games before so we know what they're actually going to do absolutely nothing while we handle everything ourselves guess it's time to learn the basics of CQC combat and X-Wing is fundamentally very similar to Wing Commander but with some tweaks and additions here and there your main offensive tool is as you might expect your red laser cannons just like Wing Commander they're limited by a recharging pool of weapon energy although you get substantially more shots before you run out which is nice one added wrinkle is that the lasers have two levels of charge you've got a yellow bar on top of a red bar as long as you have yellow bar your shots are fully powered depleted and you start using up the Red Bar red bar shots are weaker and don't travel as far so you can still attack in a pinch but ideally you'll want to stay in yellow bar as much as possible you also get a limited number of missiles or proton torpedoes depend heading on your ship defense wise you've got the same basic forward and rear Shield system although the rate at which it recharges is slow really slow but uh I'll tell you later once you've lost your Shields though there's no locational armor just a generic HP value for your ship's Hull represented by a color changing from green to Red enemy ships follow a somewhat simplified version of these rules they do seem to have a finite number of missiles but their Shields don't take locational damage and if they do have to deal with weapon energy or component damage or anything of that nature it's impossible to tell so those are the basic rules but that's all Theory how is it in practice well my first impression with the combat was that it seemed overly brutal enemy ships don't appear to be very aggressive but when they do decide to shoot you the results are devastating it seems like your starting seals can take one maybe two hits before being depleted and don't seem to be in any hurry to regenerate and from there it only takes a couple more hits to either kill you or you to the point that you'll soon be dead anyway on the other hand if you do manage to avoid being shot your enemies are even more vulnerable it only takes two yellow bar shots to destroy a TIE fighter which checks out so the mission is doable if a bit frustrating Imperial forces are sitting on setting up lights near chorus count the only have a few minutes before an imperial frigate responds this mission is what you might call a filter I can't ignore it any longer it's time to talk about power management it's something that I had been avoiding to this point because it seemed complicated and I wanted to focus on learning the basics first but as this Mission proves it's not something that could be ignored for long if you try to take on these Minds without at least engaging with power management on the most basic level you will fail every time see these three bars the blue one is for your engines and determines the max speed of your ship the red one is for how fast your laser energy recharges and the green one is for your Shield regeneration speed your ship only has enough power to fill each bar to half at the same time there are dedicated buttons for adjusting the power level for your lasers and shields press the shields button once and it'll go up to 75 percent press it again and it goes to a hundred percent one more time and it loops around to zero and so on whatever's not going to your lasers and shields goes to your engines which don't get their own butt additionally there are buttons to take some of your existing laser energy and convert it directly to Shields and vice versa alright you got all that good because there will be a test I don't think you would be exaggerating to say that this power management system is one of if not the most influential single features found in the genre outside of its foundational elements it was like the regenerating health of its day once this game came out every space game after it had to have it for a good while it even made its way back into the wing Commander series I remember this stuff frequently being used as an argument for why these games were the superior Star Wars experience for the Discerning gentlemen not like those baby games on your peasant consoles that don't even have a dedicated button for diverting Shields to lasers hell it was a key part of the marketing pitch for EA's Star Wars squadrons you start off playing it's pretty straightforward fly around shoot your lasers but as you get deeper into it you start learning how to divert energy from your lasers to your to your engines and whoa guess I gotta drag the mic back out to acknowledge Starfield even I didn't see that one coming and our power allocation system boosting power to your engines will make your ship faster I have mixed feelings about all of that to put it nicely but I'm here to talk about this game and I can't really blame it for the trend chasing behavior of others so what is the experience of managing your power in X-Wing actually like God that sounds so exciting doesn't it if you've only had it described to you without any practical examples you might assume like I did that it's a matter of preference you know if you like to play defensively you spec into Shields or if you're a real go-getter you go all in on lasers and hope for the best that kind of thing but no that's not how it works any real X-Wing Pro will tell you it's all about efficiently managing your laser power you'll want to keep that Max or at two-thirds most of the time unless you're already fully charged and you're traveling and that Shield bar on the right you can just ignore it it pretty much doesn't matter for the most part that's not to say that your Shields themselves don't matter they're really important actually but which is why you always want to keep your lasers topped off and okay allow me to attempt to explain the first step to navigating this mess is understanding that at the default level of 50 your laser energy and shields are not regenerating because that is the power level required to maintain those resources at their current level go below halfway at your SEALS or lasers will start draining away without being used and conversely if you want to actually get more charge than you already have which you will need if you want to shoot things or survive being shot you need to go over 50 percent you can't just crank them both up and call it a day though because that'll leave your engine star for power making you too slow to keep up with the Tie fighters or make it to your mission objectives in time so to play effectively you need to constantly be micromanaging your power system to make sure you have enough laser energy Shields or speed as a situation demands wonderful there is one little trick that makes keeping up with all that not as bad as it initially seems though the thing is even at max power the rate at which your Shields regenerate is slow so slow in fact that you might as well not even bother see the real way to charge your Shields is by converting your laser energy if you just dump all your lasers into Shields you can get them fully charged in something like a tenth of the time it would take to regenerate them naturally and that laser energy will be back in a jiffy meanwhile you could just permanently leave your Shield power at half to maintain the charge this one weird trick leaves you free to only worry about managing your laser power 100 lasers half Shields is fast enough for most fights and you can leave it at 50 50 50 when you're topped off and traveling to the next one in emergency situations where you need to get somewhere ASAP you might consider setting your Shields to zero while traveling because they drain pretty slowly too but that's not necessary in most cases okay ready to move on well too bad because I'm not finished in addition to keeping your Shields supplied with power you're also responsible for choosing where to direct them like they did in the movie see switches on double front stabilize your rear deflectors watch for enemy Fighters you do this with a single button that Cycles this switch through front rear and equalized positions you don't need to think about it too hard though the optimal position is in the center because it turns out that outside of extremely Niche situations leaving half of your ship unprotected is a really bad idea no matter how sure you are of where the enemy is and besides if you're playing the power game right you'll have enough shields for both sides anyway but don't go thinking that means you won't be pressing that button all the time if you want to do well in X-Wing you're going to be doing a lot of this maneuver right here you flick it down up back to the center you press it three times tick tick tick you do this because as you take hits your Shields become lopsided on their own any energy that gets added to your Shields goes to both sides equally so if your rear Shields have been taking a beating but your front Shields are fine that discrepancy isn't going to fix itself but you can equalize or re balance your Shields manually by flicking that switch it became this little ritual that I would do anytime I had a moment to spare in battle rebalance the shields a dump a little laser energy into them if you can spare it alright so now that we understand power management we're finally ready to take on the third mission of what is supposed to be the equivalent of a tutorial the mines are actually stationary laser turrets that fire in regular intervals at Rebel ships that come within shooting range of them there are a lot of them and they will absolutely demolish you if you don't engage with the power management system it only takes one shot to destroy them though and if you're moving reasonably fast the ones that aren't aligned with you will miss so as long as you know the secret to keeping your Shields fed they're no big deal so I haven't been trying very hard to hide my disdain for this mechanic but I could be fair when I want to let's look at exactly what is gained from its inclusion and then we can talk about the cost ostensibly power management is supposed to add a layer of strategic depth to the gameplay you think the enemies are going to be coming from behind so I'll shift balance to rear and increase seal power then put it all in lasers when I get to my Target and you're rewarded for your presence of Mind however as I touched on before it doesn't really work out that way there are optimal strategies that don't require much lot and quickly become sort of automatic reflexive responses to a given situation this isn't going well is it I was supposed to find something good to say about it clearly there must be something to it for it to have resonated so deeply with so many people including every game designer who played it apparently hmm I think I've got it it's immersive out of all the tools that games have to immerse one of the most underappreciated and yet most effective ones is a system that encourages players to think about the game world as if they were a Denizen of it and hey characters in the movies do concern themselves with this stuff I think this does go a little deeper than just we saw it in the movie so we put it in the game though ships in Star Wars aren't just a simple means of conveyance they're hot rods complicated temperamental machines that nonetheless reflect their owner's personality and reward those who take the time to learn the ins and outs of how they work and treat them right with Superior performance oh yeah watch this watch what I have to admit it makes a lot of sense to include a feature like this in a Star Wars game it tracks with the approach they've taken with all the out of cockpit Parts if you were a Star Wars fan in the early 90s looking to lose yourself in that world this must have been pretty potent stuff nowadays if you're looking to get immersed in the world of Star Wars well let's just say you've got options my friend personally I'm never going to Value this kind of thing unless it could pull its weight gameplay-wise it does come with a pretty hefty cost after all a massive barrier to entry for new players they do tell you that it's a thing you should know in the fine print of the first historical missions briefing there you'll speed and configure your power system for highest impact because that's how early they expect you to have learned this stuff I say have learned because they of course aren't going to teach you anything about how it works or even what buttons to press in the game itself Oh no you're going to have to crack open the old manual for that the t65x wing is not some children's toy you could just pick up and have fun with immediately it's a complex and dangerous piece of Machinery that requires diligent training and study to use effectively it's the kind of thing that might convince them prospective player that these kinds of games aren't for them after all I hope it was worth it it's tempting to say that this is just how games were back then but Wing Commander wasn't like this and you're not going to convince me that the X-Wing team didn't play that game x-wings from Red Squadron will test Imperial defenses near sir Compass 4. you may expect to encounter Tie fighters performing barrier defense engage and destroy the ties and then return to base this Mission demonstrates what Combat versus ties is going to be like in quote unquote real conditions sort of which is convenient because now that we've actually gotten power management out of the way we're finally ready to talk about how combat actually works but first let's talk Tie fighters which are as you might expect the most common enemy type at least in the first half of the game standing for twin ion engine the Tie Fighter is well I'm sure you already know what they are and what they represent the Empire's callous disregard for human life their willingness to employ a strategy of quantity over quality to overwhelm their enemies with as many hapless Pilots as possible in the cheapest possible ships this Mission does a good job of establishing how that works out in X-Wing in the movies and in my first encounter with them they appear to be quite deadly in spite of their fragility now that I understand how Shields work it turns out that even a huge swarm of them is no match for an alliance Fighter the thing is you start each Mission at half shields for some reason so if you know how you can double that and then if you take advantage of rebalancing to make use of both sides you could double the effectiveness of that and just in case that's not enough you also have another half of your total Shield stored away in your laser energy where once each shot from a tie was potentially deadly they are now almost trivial one strategy that I employ often is to face tank a TIE fighter shots on approach secure in the knowledge that my Shields will keep you protected while their lack of them won't It Only Takes Two fully powered shots to take one down so if these guys are dumb enough to play chicken with me that's their problem plus it saves a ton of time to take them out while they're flying straight at you and not buzzing around you like an annoying fly that's what the relationship between you and the ties feels like in this game they're a cloud of insects flying around you and you are a fly swatter they really aren't much of a threat to you at all even in large numbers but what they are good at is leading you on a Merry Little Chase taking advantage of their small size and high maneuverability to prolong the inevitable it may only be a matter of time but time is the Real Enemy I mentioned that this mission is only sort of Representative of what a real one is like and that's because none of the real ones are as simple as just fighting some Ties You've pretty much always got bigger fish to fry it's not a matter of whether you could beat the ties but how fast you can beat them lest the mission get away from you and so much like Wing Commander the focus is on placing your shots which can be quite challenging your lasers travel at a set speed so you need to predict where your target will be and aim to intercept that point x-wing's lasers travel faster than Wing commanders do and the use of 3D models instead of 2D Sprites makes it easier to perceive depth but that only goes so far on a 2d screen and the less maneuverable ships in this game end up traveling much farther away from each other on average so the interception distance that is how far away on the screen the enemy is from where you need to aim to hit them you'll be quite far it's far enough that it feels kind of awkward to do without assistance from the game nowadays pretty much any space sin that comes out is guaranteed to have this neat little indicator on your HUD that gives you an estimation of where to shoot in order to intercept your target as far as I know this was first seed a year earlier between Commander 2 but if you can think of an earlier example let me know in the comments this did not make it over to X-Wing unfortunately well okay shouldn't say that you have no help in the movies Pilots rely on this tracking display in their cockpit to line up their shots get the Target in the middle and it's a goner this display is in the game but it doesn't work like you would expect it does tell you what direction to turn in order to face the target but it orients you towards looking directly at them not at where you need to aim to hit them that's nice and all but if I need to find an off-screen Target I can use the radar to figure that out and if it is on screen I can just look at the screen while it does nothing to help you get there if you do manage to aim at the correct point to hit your target based on its current trajectory it does light up just like in the movies but your crosshairs on the main screen also change color when this happens so there's not a single piece of information given by this display that isn't redundant I'm not sure it would be a good thing to be constantly staring at this little doohickey instead of the main screen anyway so maybe it's for the best it feels like something's missing but having the game at least confirm when you're on the right track does help and you can get good at it I felt myself improving as I progressed through the game and it is satisfying to nail the those ties I've been laser focused on the tutorial experience for quite a while now and I played the game for that there's just a mountain of knowledge you need to learn before you can even get started and X-Wing makes no attempt to space it out over the course of a campaign the way a game might do nowadays now that we understand the basics though we can afford to skip around a bit but before we go anywhere we should talk about the X-Wing itself despite being the namesake of the game it's not the only playable ship and you actually find yourself in the other ones quite often although you probably fly an X-Wing in more missions than any one of the others you've got the slow but versatile y-wing the quick but fragile a-wing and the X-Wing splitting the difference as the Jack of all trades in theory anyway in practice the initial impression the X-Wing gives offs is terrible it appears to be by far the worst ship in its own game it's those dumbass spaced out laser cannons they really do make it so much harder to hit the ties you can learn to account for them and score kills but it's always going to be that much harder to do it in X-Wing that it is in the other ships this is greatly exacerbated by the early game being very tie heavy with hindsight as the game started to introduce different kinds of challenges the X-Wing came into its own as a ship just as capable in its role as the other two are in theirs its engines aren't quite as good as the a-wings but it's still fast enough to get the job done it has four laser cannons which counter-intuitively doesn't give it any direct offensive advantage over a ship with two but does mean you have twice as much laser energy defeated to your Shields which is a huge defensive Boon it also comes loaded with six proton torpedoes which are the missiles of this game you can acquire a lock by keeping your Crosshair over your target for about 5 seconds or if that would take too long and you think you have a good shot you can just launch them straight out with no lock you also don't lose the lock after firing one which comes in handy against tougher targets while you can use Torpedoes against other Fighters their primary purpose is to safely damage Capital ships there their lock-on range when targeting larger ships is greatly extended allowing you to fire from outside the range of their laser turrets I like the way missiles are handled in this game a lot more than how they were in Wing Commander having a bunch of different missile types that all lock on in different ways wasn't something I really questioned at the time but seeing it all simplified down to a single type that could fill all of those roles depending on how you use it has me wondering was anything of value lost with all this simplification not really not to mention that you actually get enough of them to make a real difference this time overall I'd say the X-Wing holds up as a solid all-rounder whenever a mission puts you in one you can be assured that while it might not be the perfect tool for the job it'll almost always be at least decent at whatever you need to do with it the a-wing is a more specialized craft optimized for Speed over everything else which makes it ideal for an Interceptor role imagine you were tasked with protecting a helpless ship from a wing of approaching tie bombers which is a situation that happens often in this game the faster you can get to them the better a slow ship might not reach them before they get in range to launch their Torpedoes while a Speedster like the a-wing could take them out and be on its way to the next wave before they even get close another thing that will help in situations like this is being able to reliably hit the ties which is much easier to do when your laser groupings are significantly closer together than the x-wings yes I really am going to keep harping on this because it legitimately does make a big difference despite having only two guns versus the x-wings 4 the a-wing doesn't suffer any DPS laws because it fires twice as fast so the only real drawback is that it'll run out of energy faster it also helps to be able to keep up with them when they would outrun a slower ship the a-wing also has a better scanner than the other two ships scanning is a whole other can of worms that I don't even want to get into right now suffice to say that most of the missions that require you to use a scanner don't give you an a-wing but will make you wish they did so those are the pros but what about the cons well the main one is that it's defensively lacking that's not to say that it doesn't have strong Shields as far as I could tell the seals on the a-wing are just as good as the ones on the X-Wing oh no see the problem is that it has trouble maintaining those Shields due to only having two guns each laser has its own independent store of energy so having twice as many guns means you get twice as much energy to feed into your Shields they also regenerate independently so the more guns you have the faster you get that energy back this is never going to stop being the most counter-intuitive thing why even bother with seal generators just stick another gun in there it'll work better anyway this lack of laser energy makes the a-wing a bad choice for intense prolonged battles because as your seals take damage your laser energy won't be able to keep up with the demand without taking long breaks to recharge this is fine when you're intercepting small groups of ties you could just recharge on the way to the next group but not so much when you have to keep fighting continuously instead of the x-wings Torpedoes the a-wing gets a Nerf in the form of 12 concussion missiles the most notable differences are that they do less than half as much damage and lack the ability to Target Capital ships from Long Range if they're supposed to have some kind of advantage to make up for that I haven't been able to discern what it is I get the idea that they're supposed to be for Fighters but if that were the case you'd think they'd lock on faster but nope it takes the exact same amount of time I guess the fact that you get more of them makes them more efficient against anything they can one shot which does include most high variants maybe they move faster or have better tracking it's hard to tell I'm not too bro looking up over it though so the a-wing is no good at fighting Capital ships so what just don't use it for that aren't they pretty much never asked you to so it's no big deal an a-wing taking on a capital ship could you imagine oh my God [Music] we're just about the entire first half of the game the a-wing seems downright overpowered this is because it's really well suited for the kinds of challenges you face in those early missions later on new challenges get introduced that can take it down a peg even then it still has its place I'm just not wishing they gave me an a-wing in like three out of five extra y-wing missions anymore it's a good ship is what I'm saying and that leaves us with the y-wing well known as the rusty old clunker hand-me-downs of the Rebel Fleet although apparently the idea of them being slow started with this game weird well it is slow so slow that it has trouble keeping up with Tie fighters it even Turns Slow which adds a whole new dimension of not keeping up at least it has the tightest laser grouping of any of the ships so when the ties do decide to fly under your crosshairs you'll definitely hit them so why would anybody want to fly one of these things two words ion cannons thank you in addition to its two laser cannons the y-wing has a pair of ion cannons which can disable any unshielded ship with only a couple shots and I do mean any ship that does not currently have shields disabled ships are completely dead in the water unable to move shoot or do anything really and they won't ever recover without external help it's common for a mission to call for a specific ship to be disabled so it can be boarded and you'll need to either Fly Away Wing or escort one to do the job even when the mission doesn't specifically call for it the ability to render a capital ship completely helpless after taking out only half of its effective HP seems a little busted but hey this thing is so goddamn slow it needs all the help it can get other than that it gets two extra proton torpedoes over the X-Wing six further cementing its role as a capital ship killer I guess you could also use them on some who's going around too fast for you to catch them defensive the y-wing is sitting pretty because the juice from ion cannons works just as well as regular laser energy according to this YouTube comment the y-wing is actually the toughest ship able to survive being double tapped by missiles which would instantly kill an X or a wing according to the in-game tech room the y-wing should actually have less Shields than the other ships assuming that's what this is even supposed to mean and it's hard to verify that because Mitch is where that could even happen to you let alone in a y-wing are very rare but the tech room seems kind of iffy so I think I'll go with the Lambda team on this one if you think about it the y-wing mainly excels at missions that were designed specifically for it but there's nothing wrong with that doing the job you were made to do or doing the jobs that were made for you to do what's the difference really it's all fine as long as they don't do something dumb like put you in a y Wing to do the job of an a-wing just to make things harder for you which uh they do do a few times but sometimes life gives you lemons right the thing that strikes me the most about how the player ships are handled in this game is how well they complement each other in Wing Commander they sort of half-heartedly played at giving the ship's advantages and disadvantages but when it really came down to it each successive one was an upgrade over the last one the way they handle it in X-Wing is so much more interesting and less frustrating I never feel like the ship I'm flying is straight up inadequate at worst it's a bad fit for the job you get a good sense that each ship has a reason for existing and while they don't really play differently enough to make it worth varying up your tactics based on what ship you're in they do feel different to fly which is nice for variety's sake there are some early game balance issues but overall I think they did a good job here oh wait a minute there's another one well this year's expansion content and even the first historical Mission with it seems ridiculously hard so let's set it aside for now no I think we spent enough time in the simulator it's past time we went out on October of Duty but first a message from our sponsor me that's right I've got a patreon now remember when I said this was the second video in a series well with your help we could take it a lot further than that who knows we might even make it to your favorite game but you can't start the show with a show stopper we gotta work up to that so why not check out some cult classics along the way maybe take care of some unfinished business and oh how about some controversial games that could be interesting there's a whole world of possibilities out there is what I'm saying if you'd like to help realize those possibilities I've got options for you I'm keeping things pretty simple to start with because I got my hands full just making the videos you understand but I can still offer the basics you've come to expect give a little get your name in the credits give some more and you can get me to read it out loud plus subscribers at Captain level or higher can vote on the game I'll cover next if you want to subtly or not so subtly guide me down the path towards covering your favorite game sooner you can do that if you're enjoying these videos and would like to support the creation of more of them please check it out tours of Duty which could be less confusingly described as episodes or campaigns but old habits die hard I guess are what make up the main bulk of the game each Tour of Duty of which there are three in the base game is a series of 12 or more missions Loosely connected by a story thread involving some large strategic goal that the alliance needs to accomplish for example one of the expansion tours is primarily concerned with securing a food supply for the rebel Fleet yes I kid you not you spend multiple hours fighting over cargo containers full of grain in this Star Wars game grid one must identify and disable any transport carrying food transport radar will then deliver a Commando team to capture the food Overlord gorin has offered to sell food supplies to the alliance a-wing rib is to confirm reports of grain located at an imperial Depot all Imperial green containers must be destroyed why Wing groups red and gold will Ambush the green Convoy here the Imperial Cricket Elite is expecting its Food Supplies to arrive shortly and it's mostly not as boring as that sounds mostly but I'm getting ahead of myself let's go ahead and sign ourselves up for the first tour [Music] one takes place some amount of time before A New Hope when the rebels hot off a major victory at some place called the turkana system are quaking in their boots because the emperor is probably up to something okay kind of a generic start and there's no cut scene either we just get dumped straight into the first mission briefing you get your orders from Admiral Akbar into our missions yes that Admiral Ackbar isn't this guy the highest ranking officer in the fleet are there really so few Rebels that it makes sense for him to be talking directly to the pilots despite sound strange because you don't know him like I do but I think he might have an ulterior motive here [Music] defect the Corvette crew has stopped their ship and lowered their Shields the Y Wings will guard the Corvette until the boarding party arrives x-wings from that Squadron will destroy the Imperial Freighters do your best to destroy all of the Traders this first mission is not a bad place to learn the basic flight controls which makes sense but isn't there a whole mode for that I guess they wanted to have something to catch the kind of players who Skip tutorials and jump straight into a game but those people are in for a rude awakening when they run into some of the less intuitive mechanics not long after this but before we go any further let me just put my glasses on there we go that's much better so the thing about this game is that there is no best version the two versions that you would play today each have their own pros and cons which I'll go into detail about in a section dedicated to them near the end of the video I was going back and forth over which version to play but once the game started in Earnest I had to make a choice and I ended up going with what this team release calls the special edition mostly for the improved Clarity that comes from running at a higher resolution that's what I was playing when I recorded my footage so that's what you'll be seeing in this video however wherever possible I use the Dos CD version for any out of cockpit stuff because I think it looks much better unfortunately for reasons so esoteric I'm not even going to attempt to explain them until later in the video that does not include most of akbar's briefings so we'll have to live with him looking like this from now on it's okay though he's just a little melty it could have been worse at least it's not like what happened to dodana he Rebel intelligence is expecting Empire activity in the devil system rendezvous with the nav boy and stay alert for Imperial warships ID all spacecraft withdrawal without engaging the enemy the second mission is mainly a vehicle to deliver story you get to see the scale of what you're up against and if you pay attention to the names of some of the larger ships you'll notice that these are the ones that you're going to be dealing with throughout the rest of the tour in terms of mechanics it's a gimme Target a ship and get close to idea they'll take pot shots at you and a couple ties will hang around to harass you but as long as you know how to power your Shields it's no big deal what's that you don't know how to do that because you thought you could just learn how to play this game on the Fly well it's certainly not going to lift a finger to help you now so have fun our Fleet is evacuating all of our forces from the base at Virginia do x-wings from Red Squadron will fly cover for the evacu several shuttles are carrying the most important Personnel gold squadrons why Wings will provide close escort for the shuttles help the Y Wings protect the shuttles until they can hyperspace it turns out that what we witnessed in the last mission was the staging of something called operation strike fear which appears to consist of taking a huge Fleet and using it to crush any Rebels they happen to find great plan guys must have taken a genius to come up with that one their first move is to attack a not so secret rebel base on bridgia so our job is to defend the evacuating shuttles the opening of this mission is another example of the in-game mission scripting being used to convey story with the Star Destroyer jumping in right on top of a Corvette in one of the shuttle groups before you could do anything about it ramming straight through them in the process maybe I'm not giving the Imperials enough credit there's another group of shuttles closer to you that can still make it though and for that they send a wing of three tie bombers you know these guys they're like Thai fighters but chonkier and with heavier Ordnance specifically 12 Torpedoes and 20 missiles which they will begin launching as soon as they get in range of their target the missiles are no joke if a bomber manages to launch two of them at a bad time and you can't stop them from hitting you in time that's it you're done luckily this is something you almost never have to worry about because 99 of the time you see a tie bomber they're not thinking about you they're on a mission to destroy some other Target usually some other targets that will cause your mission to fail if they're successful which makes destroying them priority number one whenever they appear they will stop to defend themselves if attacked but by that point you're far too close for a missile lock to be practical while it still doesn't have shields a bomber's hull can take significantly more punishment before it gives out so you can't just casually SWAT it out of the sky like a fighter on the other hand it's far less fast or maneuverable and a much bigger Target on screen so consistently Landing the needed shots isn't too much trouble this is good because you're going to be doing it a lot shortly after you destroy the bombers the Star Destroyer will launch another wave of them there are also Tie fighters around but they're not what matters if those bombers make it to their target you lose of course you could take them on if you have time and in fact if you don't destroy enough of them they'll probably kill you when you try to make a beeline for the bombers this is pretty much the primary gameplay Loop of X-Wing it's a balance you've got to prioritize completing your objectives while also taking time to carve out enough space to survive one interesting factoid about the Thai family in general is that unlike the rebel ships they don't have hyperdrives this means that they can't travel long distances without the help of a capital ship to act as a carrier it's not just trivia the developers took this into account when designing the missions you will never see a TIE fighter or bomber just spawn out of nowhere they have to be launched from a capital ship and if you somehow manage to destroy that capital ship before all the ties have launched well that's just too bad so sad for them isn't it now technically there's nothing stopping a capital ship from hyperspacing in and launching ties out of nowhere but if that happens at least you know where the rest of the ties will be coming from for the remainder of that mission we're doing such a good job saving those refugees we get a medal from mon Mata congratulations on behalf of the Rebel Alliance wait go back what is that wink what is she trying to communicate here I uh let's talk about the medals just like in Wing Commander you get promotions based on your performance and if you perform particularly well you get a bunch of shiny things to put on your uniform which is a nice way of showing off how far you've come you get a badge for each individual training Mission which makes them seem weirdly important then a pip for each tour mission and these larger medals at fixed points in the story finally you could get little additions to the unique medals by doing particularly well in the missions that take place around the time you get the big one they don't explain how the scoring system works which is a pet peeve of mine and makes it a bit of a non-starter for me but it kind of seems like the way to get most of those additions is to stick around after a mission is over and farm the stragglers for points foreign [Music] ERS will fly cover until the last shuttle arrives stay alert for Imperial Marauders and protect our wounded this one seems very similar to the last one an imperial frigate jumps in and launches some bombers and Fighters so we move to intercept but surprise before we can even reach the bombers the frigate makes a midi jump to the other side of the group for protecting and launches another wing of bombers it's a pincer attack where no Rubes though after we deal with the first wave we'll just head over to the other side and uh uh yeah [Music] sure is taking a while to get there once we've taken out the bombers in their escorts the frigate continues to send out waves of Fighters two at a time for a good while until they run out and leave we can't leave yet though the whole point of this mission is that the wounded refugees from bridgia need to be transferred from their shuttles and Corvette to a medical frigate we're just supposed to make sure that happens so in order for our mission to be complete that needs to happen in real time I counted about four minutes between when I destroyed the last tie and when I received a notification that I could leave unfortunately this mission is not an outlier you're pretty much always protecting somebody usually in an obnoxiously slow transporter shuttle who needs to dock with something else maybe to transfer cargo or to repair a damaged ship or to take over an enemy ship first they need to slowly amble their way over to the Target ship a process that can often take multiple minutes once they've successfully docked they need to perform whatever action they came to do which is typically a matter of multiple minutes once that's done they usually need to hyperspace out before you could be relieved which is something you'd think would be a cinch but actually takes multiple minutes but hey maybe I'm missing something did you notice how my wingmen left shortly after the Imperial frigate did the way you end a mission is by going into hyperspace if you've completed the mission then you go to the next one otherwise you can retry it and hey the mission effectively is over once the Imperial frigate leaves my wingmen seem to think so maybe they know something I don't so let's do a little experiment in the simulator Star Destroyer drops off a whack a tie bombers to attack this Corvette carrying a Twilight delegation then leaves the pilots to die of asphyxiation once their Air Supply runs out remind me not to fly for the Empire no matter how good the pay is anyway all you have to do is take out the bombers and there's nothing else to stop the Twilights from reaching their destination and sure enough my wingmen know when their job is done so let's join them nope Mission failed those Twilights somehow managed to get themselves killed by nothing the second we took our eyes off of them I have to go now my Planet needs me [Music] there's no way around it the amount of time you spend traveling to meet distant enemies and waiting for Allied ships to dock with each other at this game is obscene you have to understand there is so much docking in this game so so much docking the human mind wasn't meant to handle all this docking you spend enough time watching this stuff and it starts to take on new meaning [Music] [Applause] [Music] sometimes I wish I could partake in the docking but alas my role is just to watch so yeah it's a problem a big problem the learning curve is nothing in comparison it's a pain point for sure but once you get over it it's done you know how the game works and you can have fun but this this is something you just have to deal with no matter what if you want to try this game yourself be prepared to spend a significant portion of your play time just sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting and if one of those docking sessions happens to be in the middle of a mission and you fail before the end hello darkness my old friend you want to know the worst part it didn't have to be this way I can say that with confidence because Wing Commander already solved this problem three years earlier see in that game whenever you needed to go somewhere far away all you needed to do was press the handy dandy autopilot button and it would play this five second cut scene and then you were there but it can't be that simple what if something comes up if something interrupts you you drop out of autopilot you deal with it and then press the button again to be on your way but what about Allied chips they thought of that autopilot puts you in formation with them and takes you to their destination together okay so to be completely Fair it really is not that simple X-Wing scripting and Mission design is exponentially more complex than Wing commanders it would be unreasonable to expect x-wing's solution to this problem to be as polished and easy to use as Wing commanders for example Wing Commander's autopilot hinges on the fact that the designers always know where you need to go next so there's no need to have controls for setting your destination you just have a single button that whisks you away to wherever you need to be in X-Wing the answer to the question where do I go now perpetually changes based on the situation and doesn't really have an objective answer figuring that out is part of the challenge and there's a lot more going on with the Allied ships you need to protect the next wing all of which would complicate their involvement with an autopilot system any kind of solution they could have come up with for X-Wing at the time would have necessarily been a little less elegant a little harder to use a little more finicky and that's fine it's the price of progress but to do literally nothing to solve the problem to seemingly not even recognize that there is a problem is simply inexcusable well all right maybe we could find a way to lay some of the blame on Wing commander in my video for that game I remarked that it was like a game out of time and I stand by that even more after playing this one the quality of life features were implemented so elegantly and seamlessly dressing them up as features of your ship like the navigation and autopilot systems smoothing over the transition with a cutscene I could almost believe that it was so far ahead of its time that people at the time didn't even know what they were looking at doesn't look like anything to me meanwhile X-Wing very much is a game of its time to be fair that time was three years after Wing Commander so it does benefit from a few advancements over that game like an options menu That's nice to have apparently it wasn't always a given that a game would have one of those and okay credit where it's due the save system is pretty slick where Wing Commander had you saving manually between missions X-Wing just saves to your profile automatically every time a mission is concluded without asking or even notifying you any Mission you completed goes to the simulator where you can replay it anytime you want which is very nice this idea of a save system that always puts you right where you left off without you as a player ever having to even think about it is very much in Vogue today the cheats that are always available straight from the options menu remind me of current trends as well your reward for sitting through all that docking is a cutscene there aren't many of these I guess they occur at roughly the same frequency as The Wanted Wing Commander but these ones are way more elaborate with action sound effects and voice acting so they are pretty nice when they do appear [Music] it has been secured [Music] Teresa pie Freighters are heading for their Rendezvous point with the Imperial Star Destroyer Invincible they are being escorted by a full Squadron of Tie fighters and the Corvette Ranger you will draw off the escorts by launching a few Torpedoes at the freighters the y-wing strike force will drop into the Convoy one minute later keep the Tie fighters occupied stay alert for any reinforcements coming from the Invincible you must give the Y Wings enough time despite what the cutscene would have you believe it looks like the Empire's plan to just roll in and shoot every Rebel they happen to find didn't turn out the way they expected go figure time to take advantage of that by ambushing them while they resupply Akbar makes a big deal out of the fact that you're supposed to be supporting the Y wings but the only thing that actually matters is that the Freighters get destroyed no matter who does it which makes this Mission very short and easy if you figure that out the subtle but important distinction between what Akbar tells you and what the game is actually looking for you to do is something worth noting for later a freighter has lost its hyperdrive while in the rubric system your mission is to be the advanced Scout for this capture operation a shuttle has been dispatched to repair and capture the freighter be on the lookout for pirates well as the empire in this sector the Rebellion is in desperate need of Astromech droids to support their Starships so it's time to steal some but it looks like we're not the only ones with that idea the gimmick of this mission is that you're fighting pirates with unconventional ships like y wings and transport fighting a y-wing is not all that dissimilar to fighting a tie bomber so that's no problem the transports on the other hand first of all the game doesn't consider them to be a fighter even though they're sometimes used like one so the Target nearest enemy fighter button that doesn't work on them which is extremely annoying their primary weapon is ostensibly an ion cannon but what really makes them dangerous is the fact that they're bigger than we are and are prone to slamming on the brakes without warning of course my first real death was going to be from a crash how could it have ever been anything else and yes the game does draw a distinction between dying in the simulator and in a tour of Duty because I was out there for real the game does consider me to be actually dead you must register it won't let me continue playing I got a little unlucky there normally when your ship is destroyed you automatically eject but the ejection system must have been damaged in the crash if you do successfully eject you'll either be rescued by the rebels or captured by The Imperials which is functionally identical to death but you do get a cut scene of Darth Vader torturing you [Music] now we will discuss the position of the secretary base which one you get seems to be set on a permission basis based on whether you're in Rebel or imperial controlled space although there may be some RNG involved too I'm not sure but hold on maybe we should go back to the part where I can't continue playing the game because I'm dead that seems a little harsh doesn't it but don't worry there are ways you could actually save people from death the dark side of the falls is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural okay but really you just click on modify pilot and you can revive yourself the cost is all your points and your rank gets busted down to flight officer assuming you got that high to begin with I kind of like this system it's a punishment for losing that does encourage you to try to play well I do have my pride after all but without affecting you in any material way it's clever three x-wings have been hijacked by their subverted our tool units red Squadron will send three y-wings to intercept and disable them shuttles will drop in to repair the x-wings and replace the r2s the calamari Cruiser Maximus will then arrive to recover the x-wings these x-wings are manned you must save the pilots from being kidnapped and the R2 units were booby trapped you know that's actually not bad they got us to fight a bunch of pirates over these and then they pull this on us they must be learning this mission is the formal introduction of the y-wing and its ion cannon you've got to use it to disable the x-wings without destroy God damn it you disable the x-wings without destroying them and then defend the shuttles that come in to rescue them from Thai Interceptor attacks interceptors are a lot tougher than Tie fighters Thai interceptors they're like Thai fighters only more so more guns more speed more maneuverability tougher Hull I'm not sure if having four lasers actually improves their offensive capability over the fighters too because it doesn't really make a difference for the X-Wing it's hard to tell the other three things definitely make a difference though that extra little bit of HP puts them just over the break point of dying to a single well-placed dual link shot and they're even squirrelier than the regular guys in theory the faster speed should make them a particularly bad match up for the y-wing due to their ability to straight up outrun it at will but that tight laser grouping is just god tier it really does make a huge difference identify and disable Imperial transports bearing prisoners protect our rescue transports from any Imperial counter-attacks destroy all other transports before they reach the Imperial frigates the celestins are stubbornly refusing to pick a side in the Star Wars come on guys it's the Galactic Empire what do you think they're gonna do when they get around to dealing with you luckily the Imperials just can't help themselves and have already kidnapped a highly skilled team of Solace and texts maybe if we rescue them we can convince their leaders to come to their senses there are a bunch of transports but only two of them have the celestines on board which by the way they don't tell you so you just kind of have to Intuit it from the fact that there are two icons on the briefing map but anyway the first thing we need to do is identify them doing that involves scanning each of the transports until you find the right ones welcome to what is undoubtedly the single worst mechanic in this game by an enormous margin we've already used scanning before in a low pressure situation with an a-wing if you don't remember the way it works is that you target a ship and get with it a certain distance of it then after some time has passed the ship gets id'd so you can see its name and what it's carrying so what's the big deal then well you see the amount of time it takes to scan something is random or by a process so inscrutable that it might as well be I couldn't find any information about this mechanic online the manual has nothing elseful to say about it one of the historical Mission briefings has this get within .02 kilometers now that is ridiculously close like impractically close and also not true considering that I've gotten successful IDs from much farther away this led me to believe for a long time that this was either a typo or the in-flight units are not kilometers and they actually meant 0.2 units which did seem to line up with the distance of which things would get id'd in my experience only sometimes I would spend ages within that range without getting the ID perhaps you're beginning to understand why in a high pressure time sensitive situation this mechanic might lead to some frustration wait wait I have an idea there's no need to leave things to chance what if I just disable all the transports and sort them out later wrong you idiot you absolute buffoon the friendly transports full of Commandos to come in to rescue the sullistans will always try to dock with the first ship you disabled whether that makes any sense or not no you need to locate and disable only the correct ships or the mission failed so assuming you get lucky enough to ID both Celestine transports in time now you just need to destroy all the other ones before they could dock with the frigates no big deal right there's only what like 12 of them and it only takes about half a minute of sustained fire to destroy them you do have Torpedoes but Lowes will only take you so far not to mention that even catching up to them takes a while unless we forget that we're flying the slowest ship in the game and once they get in range of the frigates forget about it they will obliterate you if you get too close [Music] if you're watching at home and you actually managed to do this my hat's off to you that's seriously impressive as for me well I noticed something a little odd on the mission results screen after failing one time why isn't there any reference to how many transports I've destroyed I am supposed to destroy the transports right right so it turns out that this destroy all other transports before they reach the Imperial frigates was a lie the only thing that matters is that the celestins are rescued the game doesn't care one iota what happened to the other transports do not attempt to destroy them you will fail the mission if you even try anytime spent chasing after them is time not spent defending the Allied transports from ties which is time you do not have uh at least it's finally over well not quite even after having finished the game written the script edited most of the video there was still something bothering me I had to know how does this stupid scanning mechanic actually work so I looked over my footage of the times I scanned things ran some experiments and collected enough cooled hard data to get to the bottom of it however I'm going to leave the previous section chronicling my initial experience intact including the mistaken assumptions I made so it can hopefully convey how frust trading it is as a regular player to just have to deal with a mechanic like this without proper explanation when the game consistently tells you that you need to get within .02 units but you know for a fact you've id'd things from over 0.1 units before but other times you've been closer without it working what do you make of that all you can do is just try things and then guess which factors are important based on what you happen to notice in the moment which can very easily lead you to the wrong conclusions there's a million different things that could potentially make a difference you have to be within a certain distance that's been established how long do you have to be there for do you have to be looking at the Target does it matter which side of the target you're on does the ship you're in actually make a difference and if so how much of one but now that it's served its purpose I will lift the veil of ignorance if you want to scan something you need to Target it and get within a certain distance it won't work if you're not targeting the thing but there are no other requirements the target will be ID the instant you cross the distance threshold as for how close you have to get well that depends on what kind of thing you're targeting each class of ship or object has a different distance requirement these values seem to roughly correspond to the size of the thing being targeted with bigger things able to be id'd from farther away finally the ship you're flying does make a difference the X and Y Wing are almost identical with the y-wing consistently able to ID things from roughly 0.01 units farther away which is a difference small enough that it can probably be accounted for by the y-wings cockpit being further forward on its model or some other kind of confounding variable like that the a-wing on the other hand is much better at scanning with double the range for smaller ships and almost double for the larger ones there are diminishing returns as the values get larger for whatever reason putting this knowledge into practice for an optimal scan what you should do is instead of trying to keep the Target in your sights you fly past them you want to get as close as possible as quickly as possible and it doesn't matter for how long only how close you get so if you fly past them you could do this at high speed while minimizing the risk of a crash I actually picked up on this flyby method after many hours of play but I didn't understand why it seemed to work so much better than the more intuitive method of trying to stay within a reasonable distance for as long as possible until I did the science protect the alliance and solo stand ambassadors during their meeting wait that's it this guy I swear rescuing the tech team paid off and the sullistans are ready to negotiate joining the alliance which they have for some reason decided to do in person on a spaceship within range of a hostile enemy Force this mission is a good example of me being a big old dum-dum just an absolute who wastes huge amounts of time for no reason did you catch it I'm sure you did since you must be so much smarter than an idiot like me but just in case here it is again this little message right here I either missed it or failed to comprehend what it meant what it meant obviously is that the mission was a failure and I should hyperspace out immediately instead of waiting five more minutes for the rest of the mission to play out if like me you're under a certain age you might expect certain things out of a mission based game specifically you'd expect it to notify you when you failed a mission yeah like that but maybe we're just entitled young whippersnappers we shouldn't need to be told when we failed a mission we should check for ourselves alright let's check oh wait we can't while there is an objective screen all it has is the text part of the mission briefing the crazy part is that the thing we're looking for an itemized list of our objectives and their status does exist we just don't get to see it until after the mission is concluded and there actually is a mission failed notification it just doesn't appear until the entire Mission script has run through which could potentially be up to 20 minutes after you inadvertently failed it no that's all hindsight your only friend in the moment is this message ticker at the bottom of the screen if you want to know if your mission is still completable the only sign will come from here you better hope it doesn't get lost in a sea of other messages or covered up by status messages generated by your own ship or you don't just miss it because you're too busy trying to avoid being shot and assuming you see it I hope you studied the briefing well enough to be able to tell that this particular ship was essential to the mission what was the briefing for this Mission Again protect the alliance and solo stand ambassadors during their meeting yeah great thanks you want to know what the best part is I was scrubbing through my footage trying to figure out what actually happened to that transport and I couldn't find it the message doesn't show up until over a minute after I destroyed the last tie so it must have happened off screen sometime in the last few minutes and then got caught up in a huge backlog of messages about ties being detected or destroyed that or it just spontaneously exploded in complete safety for no reason did I mention that this is one of those missions where you get to sit through three and a half minutes of docking fun before the Imperials even show up lovely National stand leader is on board one of these Imperial shuttles why Wing red too will identify and disable the shuttle X-Wing gold will engage and destroy the escorting Tie fighters protect the shuttle while the Rescue Unit picks up the Sulu stand leader escort shuttle rescue one with the solo stand to a type of space location the Empire hopes to Blackmail the celestines into submitting to the emperor by threatening to kill their leader really oh no they've got the president guess we have no choice but to turn our entire planet over to them absurdity of the premise aside this is another mission where you have to ID a needle out of a haystack but it's nowhere near as bad the time limit is much less strict there's only one thing to ID and we don't have to contend with any lies from Akbar well except for this part X-Wing gold will engage and destroy the escorting Tie fighters but that's not important the wild card is that instead of transports this time it's Imperial shuttles and while it may not look like much the Lambda Class Shuttle is one of the most dangerous enemies in the entire game it's because whenever you encounter them they're pretty much always in a large group that is just sort of sitting stationary or coming at you very slowly waiting for you to approach and when you do they'll all be waiting for you spinning in place to track you like a turret ready to spit out of Rapid Fire stream of deadly accurate lasers that are red for some reason if you could charge them down and get behind them they'll start flying around like any other ship and it's no big deal but before that every second you spend in their Kill Zone puts you in extreme danger and of course you're not going to know that the first time you encounter them just like transports the Target nearest fighter button doesn't work on them so they're annoyingly hard to locate in larger battles too the cygnus corporation is conducting Trials of their latest spacecraft many Cigna scientists and Imperial observers are on hand identify and locate the transport with the cygnus staff on board clear a path for our transport to capture the sickness Observers protect the boarding craft from Imperial counter-attacks the celestens are now on our side and they have a plan to get rid of the Star Destroyer Invincible which has been hounding us for much of the tour the first step of the plan is to capture some Engineers from cygdus Corporation the people who made the Lambda shuttle so they can rig a captured one to appear Legit To The Imperials our objective here is to ID the transported hey is that the new ship they mentioned [Music] it managed to escape the hyperspace so never mind that for now there's only one transport flying around and you have an a-wing this time so that's no problem after a minute or so these cargo containers will start pouring ties out at an alarming rate but they seem to be more interested in you than in the transports so as long as you're not asleep at the wheel it should be a breeze short and sweet a damaged freighter carrying a massive nuclear warhead is stranded eliminate the mind and disable the freighter so it can be captured step two is to seal a nuclear warhead is this Star Wars I guess I could believe that these guys haven't used nuclear power but it doesn't feel right does it well anyway the first part of this mission is just like the one in the simulator keep your Shields topped off and thin them out one by one until they're all gone once you've cleared out the mines and disabled the freighter a friendly shuttle will come in to capture it before it can leave though two enemy shuttles will drop in these are here to distract you because shortly after that two transports arrive did you know that there's an alternate version of the transport that has a turbo laser and proton torpedoes because I didn't until this Mission if you're busy fighting those shuttles like a Rube instead of making a b line for those transports as soon as they appear you're gonna end up having to clear out that Minefield again plus the mandatory five-minute docking sequence of course uh if you do manage to take out those transports in time you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor [Music] all right [Music] thank you the Star Destroyer Invincible is gone and with it the brunt of operation strike beer and that's a wrap for our first Tour of Duty overall I would call this a pretty weak First Act it puts a lot of emphasis on the worst aspects of the game in particular the docking oh my God all that docking I think part of the problem is that because this is the early game they didn't want to overwhelm you with too many enemies so there's just not that much for you to do relative to all that important business your allies are getting up to on the other hand if they wanted to make it easy they sure fail with that transport scanning mission in the middle there ugh I don't even want to think about that anymore let's move on to tour two instead of taking the failure of operation strike fear sitting down the Empire is back at it with a new project that promises to have such awesome destructive power that it could crush the alliance I wonder what that could be you and your wingman will enter near the planet kashyyk and proceed along the preset intercept course we're afraid of hiding escaped Rebel prisoners as being bordered by a stormtrooper transport protect the shuttle Draco from all enemy craft until it captures the freighter and it jumps out be prepared for a counter-attack from the nearby Star Destroyer Intrepid hmm a prison that relates somehow to the Empire's new project you don't say the start of this mission is a bit problematic see there's this transport full of Stormtroopers docked with the freighter and if given two minutes they'll disembark and kill the escaped prisoners first of all I'm having a little trouble imagining how it could take two whole minutes to get off a transport The Briefing says the Pilot's hid aboard the freighter but if we assume they've actually taken it over then maybe the Stormtroopers have to cut their way in so sure fine I guess more importantly though I was very confused about how to actually do this at first because the hit detection doesn't really seem accurate enough to differentiate between the transport and the Freighters and yes but you still need to shoot the transport before the two minutes are up and before you ask which version you play makes no difference here I found I had better luck getting my lasers to register on the correct ship if I shot them from farther away once that's done it's a standard defend the shuttle mission evade the Empire's latest fighter the assault gunboat built by cygnus eliminate the Tie Fighter escorts and quickly identify the freighter support the y-wings in disabling the freighter with the wookies on board protect the rescue transports from any attacking Imperial starfighters beware of reinforcements coming from the Star Destroyer Intrepid it's time to rescue some Wookies who are on their way to a slave labor camp so they can hopefully tell us something about what they were going to be working on why would they know anything about it before they've arrived well anyway now we get to fight the new ship that was teased near the end of the last tour and no we're not going to evade them ignoring them won't make them go away the star Wing assault gunboat which as far as I could tell was invented for this game is basically the opposite of a TIE fighter it's big slow and not just heavily armored but also shielded it kind of looks like a streamlined version of the Lambda Class Shuttle which makes a lot of sense when you consider that they're both made by the same company their slow speed and lack of maneuverability make them particularly bad at dog fighting but they can be dangerous on approach this is because they carry 16 concussion missiles and unlike tie bombers they are very willing to use them on you when a missile is locked onto you if any Allied Fighters are around they'll verbally warn you about it which I thought was a nice touch if there's no one around you get a text only notification from your Astromech which kind of sucks to be honest you pretty much always have someone else with you so it's not a huge problem but still you couldn't just like beep at me you're an R2 unit that's supposed to be your whole thing [Music] once you're aware of it you can press a button to Target the missile and if you're fast enough to get your sights on it while it's coming straight at you destroy it you could try to Juke it but that's a mistake these things will follow you to the ends of space and once they're orbiting around you I found them nearly impossible to hit because of how fast they move the Delta between where they are and where you need to aim to hit them means you literally have to shoot while they're off screen if things have gotten to this point trying to avoid the inevitable is such an enormous waste of time that it's usually better to just take the hit and move on with your life life and probably the most important feature of the gunboat is something we saw in tour 1. it has a hyperdrive this has implications for the mission design of the remainder of the game but we'll get to that when we get to it the experience of actually fighting a gunboat pretty much always goes something like this once you've dealt with the missiles on approach you just sort of lazily follow behind them steadily pumping them full of lasers until they die doing your best not to rear end them this makes them a good example to use when talking about the game's damage effects or lack thereof in any game about shooting things it's important to have the things you're shooting react in a satisfying way would you destroy a ship I'd say they do blow up pretty good there's a nice explosion Sprite and instead of generic scrap the actual pieces of the ship go flying off Every Which Way but there's more to hit feedback than making a good death animation it's just as if not more and important to have each hit before the enemy dies be a source of satisfaction this is something I praise Wing Commander for and with good reason that game had two different sound effects depending on whether you hit a ship with shields or not and ships would start to leave trails of fire and Sparks behind as their Hull took damage in X-Wing you get this and only this a hit spark and this sound effect it's not bad probably better than either of the ones used by a wing Commander to be honest but I'd still take them over it because the alternative is to get literally no audio or visual feedback to indicate whether a hit was absorbed by Shields or not the only way to tell if a ship has lost Shields is this status message in the Target window you could maybe chalk some of this up to limitations born from the decision to go with 3D models for the ships instead of Sprites which is an important step that needed to happen but it's still pretty disappointing especially in a game where you spend not insignificant amount of time doing this what is perhaps a bigger source of disappointment comes from within my own ship just look at this effect isn't bad but isn't it a bit slow something I've noticed after playing a bunch of games like this is that each one tries to come up with its own way to prevent your basic laser attack from being too powerful Wing Commander's solution was to severely limit the amount of times you could shoot before running out of energy which was annoying to be fair so it makes sense to try to come up with an alternative in x-wing's case they go after your rate of fire it works from a practical gameplay perspective but it just feels bad man you could duel or quad link your lasers to fire them at the same time but that decreases your fire rate even more to compensate it's definitely not accurate to the movies but more importantly it leads to this feeling of impotence I don't think it's controversial to say that in your space fantasy fulfillment game it should feel good to unload your uh laser gun and this ain't it pretty much every other Star Wars game I've played does a much better job here even something as simple as doubling the fire rate while having the damage to maintain the same DPS would go a long way here how are your wing leader to the Comsat Rendezvous point an imperial Convoy is expected to jump in from hyperspace first attack the Corvettes shuttles and transports then destroy the supply Freighters and hyperspace home documents found aboard the freighter point to the location of a convoy carrying materials to be used for the secret project we still don't know what it is I mean what could it possibly be but we could at least delay its construction by destroying this Convoy this Mission a little under halfway through the base game is the first time we're tasked with destroying a capital ship which I think is telling of the attitude this game takes toward them I went on a tear about Capital ships in my wing Commander video over their abysmal representation in that game and ended up declaring that it was a mistake to let you use a fighter to destroy a capship in any game well after playing this game while I do still think it's kind of silly I've softened my stance a little bit depicting large ships is one area where the move from Sprites to 3D models really pays off while they're still significantly smaller than they are in the movies the sense of scale is so much better than it was in Wing commander and the addition of perspective allows you to interact with them in a way that doesn't feel broken people in my comments have pointed out that these Space Battles use Naval Warfare as a metaphor and in that context it's not implausible at all for a single fighter plane to sink a huge capital ship which is fair enough but for me it's not about realism a key pillar of the fantasy that these games are built on is the awe-inspiring scale and power of these massive nigh Invincible warships just look at the very first shot of Star Wars all of Star Wars what do they choose to emphasize when introducing us to a galaxy far far away is it the main character is it a Jedi with a lightsaber no it's the mind-boggling size of a star destroyer so a game that trivializes Capital ships is undercutting the fantasy behind it all that's why more than any technical improvements what impressed me about x-wing's handling of capital ships was its commitment to making these things actually dangerous and imposing it's not like we haven't encountered any before now we've been dealing with frigates and destroyers throughout the game launching wave after wave of ties at us and absolutely ripping us to shreds if we made the mistake of getting too close it's just that the idea of actually taking one on has been Unthinkable until now of course this is our first time so they started us off small with two corellian Corvettes you know the ship that was dwarfed by the Star Destroyer and that iconic opening shot the reason why it and other Capital ships are so dangerous is that they're covered in free aiming laser turrets the lasers are emitted from fixed points on the ship though you can't actually see or damage the turrets but hey it's 1993. I'll cut him some slack Corvettes have significantly less guns than the bigger ships but still more than enough to ruin your day however Corvettes in particular have a unique weakness a blind spot directly behind them if you can manage to Sidle up right next to their engine block and stay there they can't hit you and you could dump your lasers into them until they blow it's very silly but there's at least a bit of a skill check involved they can shoot you before you get close enough so you'll want to go as fast as possible but stopping in The Sweet Spot before you crash can be quite tricky before you get the hang of it one thing to watch out for is that Capital ships can still shoot you for the duration of their five second long death animation so uh watch out for that of course the ideal way to take out a capital ship is from outside of laser range with Torpedoes it only takes six to down a Corvette so between you and your wingmen you should be able to take them both down without putting yourself in danger it's just nice to keep the blind spot thing in mind for late a stolen frager full of the Empire's latest model of cumsense is the Target and is being pursued by Stormtrooper transports escorted by armed shuttles your y-wing will engage and destroy the pursuit forces and disable the freighter if necessary when the freighter is disabled the shuttle willsie will arrive to board and capture it still don't know anything about the mysterious project so let's steal some communication satellites and see if they can pick up anything about it there's nothing really remarkable about this Mission other than the game just straight up admitting that shuttles are one of the hardest enemy types you take out the shuttles and Stormtrooper transports then disable the freighter and defend it from ties after the Star Destroyer Intrepid arrives next afraid of carrying satellites is waiting for the cruiser Maximus the Maximus has been delayed so you ought to watch over the freighter 10 minutes of shooting down ties followed by five minutes of docking at least the docking happens at the end so you don't have to sit through it again if you fail well we wait let's talk about the damage system if your Shields are downed and you take another hit it's possible for various components and systems on your ship to be damaged such as your Shield generator or engines it's clearly inspired by the damage system from Wing Commander but it is significantly streamlined in comparison which ends up being both for the better and the worst you can see all the systems that could be damaged on this pause screen and determine the order in which your Astromech will repair them which is nice it's not possible for any of these components to be irreparably damaged which I think is a very good change because it means you always at least have a chance of recovering aside from these named components parts of your cockpit can get smashed up and this can't be repaired it's not just cosmetic either stuff like your power meters and shield display can break and then you won't be able to read them anymore technically you don't need to be able to see these displays to use their Associated systems but it still sucks to have this happen and if your targeting display breaks in a mission where you need to identify a specific Target then you really are screwed and that's not the only way in which it's more punishing in Wing Commander a system could take damage without going completely offline so it would perform worse but still work there's no such thing as partial damage in X-Wing if a system is hit the only variable is how long it'll be offline for and if that happens to be your engines or Shield generator you could pretty much kiss your ass goodbye there also just aren't very many systems Wing Commander got pretty granular here with tons of different doohickeys that could be damaged with all sorts of effects that rain is in importance which effectively functions as a buffer making it less likely for any given hit to completely ruin your day in X-Wing the chance of being left dead in the water is much higher sometimes what a system needs is more complexity in order to be truly elegant escort the freighter oh hi and a transport to their rendezvous with the alliance Corvette Jeffrey the Jeffrey will distribute the comsats and the secret Outpost will monitor them be on alert for Imperial patrols this area of space is very close to a burial Starship traffic lane uh Akbar buddy you okay they're really making a big deal out of these satellites huh that's three missions now wave after wave of gunboats will come in two at a time and eventually a few transports will try to sneak into well I'm not really sure what they're trying to do they don't seem to be carrying anything [Music] thank you [Music] transmission sounds like an imperial couple that's right I'm decoding it now [Music] looks like plans for an Imperial Battle station [Music] ah yes the Death Star plans how did they get the Death Star plans is there a single question in Star Wars with more contradicting answers than this it was always the first thing everybody thought of when they sat down to write a Star Wars story and nobody ever thought to check if someone else had already done it hopefully now that Rogue one exists we can move on to answering other questions like what's the deal with those bothans huh many bathrooms died [Music] watch over him until help arrives so you're telling me that the one time we've ever seen an X-Wing spontaneously break down in the middle of space it just happened to be the one carrying the Death Star plans never tell me the odds waves of gunships will jump in three at a time to play with you and every once in a while a shuttle will try to sneak in and board the X-Wing I think we're starting to establish are you kidding me well at least you can't get any worse than that oh I want the record to show that the lasers that destroyed the plans and lost us the war came from this guy not me speaking of AI well I wouldn't call it bad exactly I mean it's functional it does manage to avoid looking outright stupid most of the time which is impressive in its own right especially back then but it's not good enemy Fighters will employ various Maneuvers to make themselves harder to hit but there's more to a dog fight than just not being hit you also need to hit your opponent ideally you want to get behind them but failing that you could at least turn to face them so you can get a shot off but these ties don't really seem interested in doing that it often feels like the enemies in this game aren't even trying to win they're just delaying their loss one of the a-wings historical missions is a series of duels with Pilots of escalating levels of skill all the way up to Aces so apparently the game does model pilot skill in some way or another but as for the difference between the lowest and highest skill Pilots it's genuinely hard to tell I guess the ace Pilots shoot more often and more accurately it's a pretty Far Cry from Wing Commander's Aces pulling out recognizably unique behaviors that you don't see the regular Pilots doing it's pretty telling that I had no trouble completing this Mission even before I started the first Tour of Duty okay I did die once but you'll never guess how it happened occasionally I would notice ties with yellow markings on them and my best guess of what that means is that they denote higher ranking more skilled Pilots but hell if I know enemy Fighters are at their most dangerous at the very start of a fight when you're both flying straight towards each other that's when they're all facing you once you've flown past each other and are in a melee they become non-factors I think I pegged five or more enemy Fighters at once in Wing Commander as a death sentence but an X-Wing that's the minimum amount you have to get to before a battle is chaotic enough that an enemy might occasionally get a shot off at you most of the time the simple Act of turning towards an enemy to try to shoot them is more than enough to throw off any would-be pursuers I also said that Wing Commander is not a game where you blow away enemies by the Dozen and well X-Wing is you end up shooting down a lot of ties over the course of Any Given Mission so it would be prohibitively difficult if each one was as Adept at flying as the average kill wrathy but that doesn't make fighting them interesting on a fundamental level the dog fighting action is not as deep challenging or exciting as it is in Wing Commander that's not to say the game has no challenge it just comes from elsewhere high level gameplay and X-Wing is all about the missions each one is a unique Clockwork puzzle to solve and figuring out where to be to respond to each threat as it appears can be quite tricky I had quite a few Mission failures because I couldn't get to the mission objective in time and just as many deaths happened as a result of me not taking the enemy Fighters seriously enough and trying to ignore or brush them off in favor of speeding to the objectives but that's the core of the difficulty in X-Wing figuring out how to balance the urgent need to attend your objectives with your own need for self-preservation when it works flexing your ability to sift through the noise of the battlefield and coming up with a plan to tie it all together can be satisfying it doesn't always work though after all every mission is unique and not all were created equal sometimes the skill being tested isn't some fundamental Axiom of strategy but your ability to have already played tour 5 Mission 2 and made note of the fact that in about four minutes remaining a group of transports will spawn behind your escort targets and you need to be in the right place to stop them from launching Torpedoes immediately you can't really solve that one from first principles time the Freighters with the hyperdrive cargo then destroy them get through the Tie fighters and any other defense encountered while we were dealing with our engine trouble the Imperials had it much worse somebody crashed a frigate into the Intrepid so now it needs to have its hyperdrive replaced how did they manage that guys you're in space you have like infinite room to maneuver then again I guess I'm not what to talk am I destroy the Freighters while fending off Thai interceptors the Intrepid will be left stranded [Music] major y-wing Squadron in an attack on the intrepids escort an X-Wing will help by providing close escort for your squadron seems pretty self-explanatory this one's a lot like that earlier missing with the Corvettes only now there are three of them and instead of ties there are gun I'm sorry what in a way I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with this problem make your way so the Star Destroyer intrepids TIE fighter defenses then destroy both of the intrepid's shield generator Towers a-wings will escort you in while the y-wings make a frontal assault it's finally time to finish off the Intrepid I think they've done a good job of establishing how big of a deal it is to actually take on a Star Destroyer it's only thanks to a very lucky break and two missions worth of preparation that we can even attempt this and it's a real team effort we've come a long way from where we were just three years ago even after destroying the shield generators you don't have enough Torpedoes to finish it off when you don't have a blind spot to take advantage of trying to fight a capship with lasers is a loser's game it's a matter of attrition if you're close enough to hit them with your lasers they can hit you with theirs and you have to fly straight at them to attack it's a DPS race with someone who has a lot more guns and armor than you can break away and recharge your Shields but massive ships like Star Destroyers or frigates have enough Hull strength that it takes forever even when you're just continuously unloading into a disabled one as well it should if you're having to do this every few seconds well I hope you brought snacks no you're going to want to rely on your fellow Rebels here in my case the ones I came in with weren't doing too hot by the time I was able to take out the shield generators but there's more in reserve waiting to show up once the first team is destroyed as long as you do your job they should be able to seal the deal eventually locate Princess Leia's Corvette so a shuttle can deliver the Death Star plans then see that how Corvette makes it safely out of this sector the part where you have to find the Red Corvette Is Not Great there's space pretty far apart so that's a lot of travel time with nothing else to occupy you unless you get lucky and find it first try once you do a star destroyer will show up but for some reason only gunboats will be sent to try to stop the transfer you know the drill this one's a little weird in that the cutscene plays after the penultimate Mission with the final one presumably leading directly into a new hope here are the secret plans I will bring them safely to Alderaan [Music] I have you now protect Princess Leia's Corvette until it reaches hyperspace intercept and attack approaching Thai squadrons with your a-wing the Star Destroyer Immortal is out to capture Princess Leia's Corvette is it just me or did they put these in the wrong order they'll be sending interceptors and bombers in addition to gunboats but otherwise you're just defending the tantive four again and that's the second tour done I'd say it's an incremental improvement over the first one the introduction of the gunboat adds a welcome bit of enemy variety there's a lot less waiting around mostly because there are more enemies to keep you busy but still way too much and despite being more challenging overall I found it less frustrating probably because they didn't abuse the scanning mechanic too much this time it kind of feels like they made these tours in order learning a little bit about how to make a better one each time no idea if that's actually the case but I'd believe it moving right into tour 3 there are no surprises here the Death Star is out of the bag and now we get to see what the rebels were up to while Luke and friends were having fun on Tatooine protect the military Rendezvous from attacked by imperial fighters intercept Imperial Tie fighters and Thai bomber squadrons starting with the transfer of stolen Death Star Materials from a freighter to a Corvette exciting stuff we get to defend them from a surprisingly low number of Fighters and bombers and they even gave us an a-wing to do it I guess they wanted to start things slow at the beginning of each tour you're flight leader red one will attack the Corvette and repair doc you are to destroy all the smaller ships and any defenses in the area okay never mind what I just said this is quite an escalation from the last time we had to clear out a Minefield now we have enemy fighters in a Corvette shooting at us while we do it followed by a frigate jumping in to send out more ties after a while though in hindsight I probably should have dumped all my Torpedoes into the Corvette from the start since the other guy is pretty bad at his job that would have made things a lot easier an imperial military transport is disabled and Stranded protect the shuttle Hunter while it boards and captures the transport this Mission oh boy this mission I spent a long time on this one it's a pretty good microcosm of everything wrong with The Mission design in this game well except for all the waiting fact this Mission marks a turning point after which they found a partial solution to the waiting it's just that the Cure may be worse than the disease but alright let's examine the mission in detail there's an already disabled transport full of Imperial officers who may know something about the Death Star our job is to protect a shuttle as it deploys a team of Commandos onto the transport to capture it then protect the transport itself as it very slowly makes its way into the hangar Bay of a rebel frigate trying to stop us are six gun boats take them down and another three gunboats arrive and another three gun boats arrive and another three gunboats arrive and it just keeps going like this and I can't keep up with this I'm taking them down as fast as I can but there's so many of them I can't possibly stop them from destroying the transport or whatever they're doing to it there's so many messages going by all the time I can't even tell but even when I make it all the way to what should be the end of the mission it ends in Failure so that's fun okay so what's going on here is this some kind of infinitely respawning gunboat well yes but also no let's pull back the curtain for a moment you may have noticed that every non-capital ship in the game has a little designation as part of their name Rebel ships get colors while Imperials get Greek letters these designations uh designate that this particular ship is part of a group if we go back to the beginning of the mission we can see that there are two groups of three gunships moo and row there's nothing special about moo group take them out and they're gone but as soon as you destroyed the last member of Roe another group of three rows arrives this is because row group is scripted to have multiple waves of reinforcement this is actually very common throughout the game Let's Pretend Star Wars is real for a minute assuming there was some reason why a star destroyer couldn't just scramble all the ties it's willing to commit at once instead of In Waves of two or three at a time the way you would expect it to go is they launched three ties then after a minute or so they launched three more then regardless of how many ties are already out there after another minute they launched three more until they run out that's the simplest and most logical way to do something like this that's not how it works in X-Wing a star destroyer will show up and launch a few different name groups of ties as long as those ties are intact the Destroyer will never launch another one but when you destroy all of a given group it'll launch a set of reinforcements with the same name pretty much immediately and it'll continue to do this as you destroy those reinforcements until it runs out of reserves I'm going to call this the wave system there are a few reasons why someone designing missions for a game like this might prefer this way of doing things to the time-based method I outlined earlier but the one I want to focus on is difficulty balancing with time-based reinforcements a struggling player might fail to destroy enough ships before the next wave spawns and become overwhelmed by having to deal with more and more of them at once while conversely a pro player might clear them out too quickly and end up with an empty Battlefield and an even easier your time taking out the next wave with no distractions by scripting the reinforcements to only come when a given group is destroyed they could ensure that no matter how quickly or slowly a player destroys the enemies the enemy density will always be roughly the same and so in theory everyone will have the same experience its function is pretty similar to that of rubber banding in a racing game if you think about it and it runs into all the same pitfalls that rubber banding does is it really a good thing to try to muddle the connection between my performance at the game and with my performance in the mission if I bust my ass to shoot down all the ties in record time you're damn right I want an easier time with the next waves I deserve it in the same way that if I drive like hell I want to enjoy being in first place I earned that lead why are you taking it from me and then there are the unintended knock on it fixed oh boy the knock on effects the effect of the wave system is not infinite eventually the Star Destroyer will run out of ties to send out and leave if you were to graft the way a battle plays out one managed by time base reinforcements which generally play out something like this the amount of action would vary over time with spikes of intensity at lulls in the action happening at unpredictable times based on how quickly or slowly the player deals with enemies with the wave system it looks more like this roughly the same intensity at all times but the battle ends at an unpredictable time based on how quick the player was so what happens when a battle ends really early well in X-Wing it's mainly a lot of docking see the majority of the missions in this game consist of us protecting some number of Allied ships as they perform a series of tasks they're the important ones we're just there to facilitate them so if we finish our job before they finish theirs well that stuff still needs to get done in real time yes that's right the wave system is a big contributor to all that waiting I was complaining about earlier it's not the only one there's lots of travel time and some missions make you sit through elaborate docking dances before a single Imperial even shows up but a significant amount of the waiting in my playthrough was punishment for doing too well but not to worry the x-wig team is on the case the wave system is the cause of the waiting but what if hear me out we use the wave system to fix the waiting after all would you only have a hammer all your problems start to look like nails so we come back to gunboat group Row in tour 3 mission 3. this is ostensibly the solution to my boredom what if a fighter group had like 50 waves of reinforcements then the fun never stops right it's not literally an infinitely respawning enemy but for the purposes of the mission it effectively is even if your aim is perfect it takes a certain amount of time to destroy a gunboat no matter what so it doesn't matter how well you play there will always be gunboats flying around for the duration of the mission assuming you win the battle keeps going long after the mission is complete so there's never a dull moment this is the wave system taken to its logical endpoint if you'll indulge me going back to racing games for a moment a little bit of rubber banding is annoying but can be overlooked it weakens the connection between your Skillet racing and your placement in the race but it doesn't destroy it your skill at driving is still what ultimately determines your place but what happens if you crank the rubber banding up to the max can you reach a point where your driving skill is no longer the most significant factor what skill is even being tested at that point I remember hearing somebody talk about one of the burnout games or maybe it was Need for Speed the AI only rubber bands when you boost so if you want to win when you're behind the pack you should boost as much as possible but when you get to first place never boost as long as at least one enemy from a group is intact the next wave will never come so if you disable one of them and then order your wingman not to attack it you can stem the tide that's the advice I got from game Fact for this Mission it almost worked the problem is that after a while my wingman seemed to forget about their orders and would destroy it anyway and then the Avalanche of gunboats would resume somebody on YouTube suggested sending all my wingman home which almost certainly would have worked had I not found another comment with an even better suggestion the Imperials only care about the transport and only after it gets captured so if you order the Commando shuttle to wait at the start you can deal with the enemies at your left pleasure and tell them to finish the job once it's safe we're not thinking like an X-Wing pilot anymore we're thinking like a mission designer or a QA tester we've transcended the boundaries of play and somehow ended up at work your flying skill isn't the most important thing here meta knowledge that's what's being tested your ability to discern how the mission scripting system works and think of ways to abuse it or learn from somebody who did anyway winning this way isn't just unintuitive it's boring well anyway at least now I can get a better look at the transports that jump in every few minutes to try to abort wait the what did you notice them because I didn't the first few times the only notification you get is in the form of a message which I happen to miss because I was a little busy with the non-stop gun boat action and also it was sandwiched in the middle of all the message spam that was happening as a result of said action and so we peel back the next layer of the problem yeah that's right it's got layers like an oven what if I were to tell you that this Mission isn't as bad as I've been making it seem but that actually makes it worse [Music] allow me to explain let's put our mission designer caps back on those name groups each one has a mission that mission could be a generic search or destroy or it could be to destroy a specific Target or dock with it or so on the mission never changes and applies to all members of the group so if Thai bomber Alpha is trying to launch Torpedoes at a specific Target and you stop them the next wave of TV Alphas will also try to go after that same Target this means that most of the enemies in any given Mission aren't just making a b line to your escort Target they're here to fight you or your wingmen or maybe even the escort Target if no one else is nearby but they're not making a point of it however somewhere Among Us are groups who make it their life's mission to end your mission by going after whatever you're escorting these are the ones you actually have to watch out for all the rest are noise there to distract you from the real threat I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that correctly identifying these Party Poopers is the single most impactful step you could take towards successfully completing a mission sometimes it's obvious from Context if you're defending a capital ship in a wing of tie bombers launches you could probably figure out what they have in mind other times it's not clear at all you might have one out of the five active groups of ties in a mission secretly plotting to ruin your day and figuring out whose sus isn't as easy as you might think they're not so single-minded as who immediately give themselves away chips on a mission will pause to defend themselves if threatened behaving very similarly to any other enemy at first glance the point is as a first time player there is no way to know for sure which enemies are mission critical and which aren't therefore it's only reasonable to treat them all is Mission critical this is how I played most of the game I would prioritize obvious threats like bombers or Stormtrooper transports whenever I notice them then try to take everything else out as fast as possible in the meantime and hope that was enough to be fair for much of the game it was these respawning gunboats put a bullet in that strategy it doesn't matter how fast you are it'll never be enough your only option then is to specifically focus on the mission critical enemies whenever they appear but how do you know which enemies are mission critical what's the path to figuring that out supposed to be I'll tell you how people actually do it let the escort Target die and make a note of who killed them or better yet break open the mission designer and find out for sure eventually though you sort of develop a sense for it when I recorded this footage I had no idea what the threat was so I tried to clear the board as fast as possible looking over the footage now though it's obvious to me these gunboats don't care about the escort Target the only thing that actually matters are these enemy transports that come in probably to try to capture it my reasoning is that it would be nearly impossible to complete the if the gunboats did go after the escort Target thinking like a mission designer again are we having fun yet they could have dropped a hint in the briefing something like these officers are vital to the project so the Empire will almost certainly try to recover them alive but no you get no information about what you're up against this kind of vagueness is all over the game and it sucks I've been complaining a lot about the mission design in this game because there's a lot to complain about but I want to take a moment to switch gears and give it a bit of praise the reason why it's even possible for most of these problems to exist is that the mission design in X-Wing is orders of magnitude more complex and expressive than what we found in something like Wing Commander one missions in that were so simplistic that I basically considered them separate from the story you would go out to blow up some spaceships and then the story would happen and then you go back out to blob some more ships and so on but with X-Wing I've felt the need to summarize what happens in every Mission so far in at least some detail because I'm not conveying what happened in the game otherwise it's like going from this [Music] to this with a massive increase in detail and possibilities but was once a maze of abstract rooms with little meaning beyond the enemies they contained starts to cohere into something much greater than even the sum of its already expanded Parts instead of being a simple delivery vehicle for combat missions and X-Wing have started to resemble the Epic Space Battles they were inspired by each Mission feels unique in a way that wouldn't be possible with a system as simple as Wing commanders with that increase in complexity came a lot of new pitfalls some of which they really stepped in but it was worth the risk and I'd even go so far as to say that the game is better for it warts and all they were right to be ambitious in this way there are just some things about it that they could have done better with hindsight is all with your X-Wing defend all come on ship the calamari Cruiser Defiance the Star Destroyer Immortal has just entered our sector and is deploying ties due to uh technical difficulties we'll have to make do with the recreation of this mission's briefing by jadana don't worry about it this mission is nothing but Thai bombers so many Thai bombers this is kind of an illustrative example of a mission where every enemy really is Mission critical but you know that coming in and they've made it sure it's reasonable to take them all on so it's not a problem that's not to say it's easy you really gotta bust your ass to get them all in time I ended up having to dump all my sealed power to engines in order to go fast enough not that there's much to worry about it really is nothing but tie bombers pocket the Death Star design team is on their way to a rendezvous with the Star Destroyer Immortal with them is a squad of Stormtroopers holding them as virtual prisoners on their Corvette they're a gunboat and Tie Fighter escorts these will be attacked and drawn off by the x-wings you will leave the capture effort your task will be to disable the Corvette carrying the design team a rescue shuttle will drop out of hyperspace as soon as the Corvette has been disabled protect the shuttle as it makes its Escape back into hyperspace Knights of Akbar to summarize the story so I don't have to the gunboats in this Mission do not respawn so you can make things much easier for yourself by clearing out all the fighters before disabling the Corvette I've been making a big deal out of how big and complex the missions are in this game so something you might be wondering is how do you keep track of it all it's an important question to ask if the game expects you to manage these large-scale ever-changing battles it better give you the tools to efficiently sort through them Wing Commander had the bare minimum this simple but efficient radar that told you where to turn to face your Target and two buttons to manage targeting if you looked at a ship you would automatically Target them and there was a button to cycle one way through all the targets on screen and finally a button to lock onto the current Target so it would stay targeted if you looked away or at another ship that that's it and yet it was never a problem because when there are never more than about six total targets flying around a small area at any given time that's all you need X-Wing can have dozens of targets clustered around a massive area any number of which could suddenly become relevant at any given time it needs more so how's this for more instead of one radar you get two one for things that are in front of you and another for things behind you so does this give us twice as much information to make up for the fact that it takes up twice as much space on the screen well not really but it does deliver one key piece of info that Wing Commander's single radar didn't which is just enough to justify it you can see at a glance if traveling to meet that enemy you targeted will take you to Wars or away from all your allies if your rear view has nothing but Green Dots it's safe to venture out if there's a few red dots mixed in there you'll probably want to deal with those first there's no concept of a soft lock system if you select a Target you're locked onto it until you manually switch to another one or it disappears it makes sense because while it was convenient in a simpler game like Wing Commander soft lock doesn't scale up very well when there are 20 plus targets available the last thing you want to happen is to lose track of your current one because you looked at something else as for how you sort through all those targets you have a few options the first is a button to Target whatever's in your sights as useful as it is self-explanatory although it won't help you if the reason you want to Target something is that you don't know where it is probably my most used targeting button in this and most space sims is Target nearest enemy fighter whenever you're not sure what to do next you could probably do a lot worse than focusing on the nearest enemy its use is pretty obvious when you're actively being attacked but even when you're not it's useful for gauging who is likely to threaten you or your Fleet neck it does have an unfortunate limitation though which is that as I've mentioned before they really do mean Target nearest enemy fighter which does not include transports or shuttles when I'm surrounded by hostile transports and desperately need to get a fix on one of them I don't particularly care about the fine distinctions between different classes of ship not the time and finally if those methods don't apply you could manually cycle forward or backward through every Target available when there are a lot of targets this is obviously not ideal but sometimes you have no other choice there are four preset slots you can use to store targets to be recalled later which on the one hand is useful but on the other hand I resent having to manage myself and of course you're not always going to know which targets are worth storing ahead of time okay so it is more and most of these are welcome editions but is it enough no there are far too many situations where I find myself in a panic desperately fumbling with the next and previous Target buttons to try to find a Target on short notice because there's no better way to do it the find nearest enemy button stands out as being particularly useful and transformative because it filters the list of all available targets to try to find the most relevant one for a given criteria which ship is most likely to be a danger to me right now it's no wonder this button is now ubiquitous in these kinds of games I just wish there were ways to filter the targets for other criteria storing a reference to one of your escorts is good for getting your bearings but it won't tell you what ship is most likely to be a danger to them right now there's a bit of an arms race between the scale and complexity of the missions and the tools used to manage them and the missions are winning right now attack Imperial supply and repair base destroy containers and mines attack any Imperial Freighters that approach the base General dodana has some kind of brilliant plan to locate the Death Star by capturing an imperial Starship they don't tell us what the next step is yet or what kind of Starship he wants for that matter but step one is to destroy a supply base so the next ship that arrives will be stranded and also very very confused what do you mean where is it so I'm trying to tell you kid it ain't there it's totally Blown Away watch out another Supply base another minefield there are a lot of containers in this one so I asked my wingman to help out which meant I got to hear this Roger so that's nice wingmen are a thing that exists in this game almost every Mission gives you at least one wingman often two alongside other Allied Fighters that aren't under your command they seem to have a lot of trouble hitting enemy Fighters probably for the same reason enemy Fighters have a lot of trouble hitting you the AI just kind of sucks though they spend a lot of time flying around each other without either side being able to score a kill keeping the enemy distracted is helpful in its own way I suppose they tell you when you got a missile coming for you which is nice I guess although you'd think your ship would be able to do that on its own the one situation which I found them genuinely helpful is when I would order them to focus fire on a large slow-moving Target like these containers or a capital ship that's pretty hard to screw up and the cumulative effect of all that extra Firepower adds up fast it probably would have made some of those missions involving capships earlier a lot easier if I had bothered to learn the radio commands beforehand there's really not much to say about wingman in this game but if I said nothing you would probably so if there is something to say and I just didn't say it there is an obscure feature involving wingmen that is exclusive to the Dos version of this game which is somewhat interesting but I'll leave that as a teaser for when it's time to talk about version differences attack the ships providing escort for the cricket prime your y-wings will try to destroy the Corvette escort the a-wings will concentrate on destroying the Tie Fighter Beware of the Minefield that is surrounding the cricket Prime all right step two take out all the Corvettes escorting the frigate that just arrived at the now non-existent base looking to be repaired there's a Minefield around the pream that you may want to clear out a bit but the worst mistake you can make here is getting too close to the frigate so watch out for that other than that there are three Corvettes to take down so I hope you know about the blind spot trick by now your a-wing is to destroy mines and provide cover for the Y wings that are disabling the frigate Prime protect our boarding craft as they storm the cricket Prime and capture it now that the Corvettes are gone it's time to clear the Minefield out again and use an a-wing to support a group of Y Wings tasked with disabling it if they had just asked me to do it when I was in the y-wing it would have already been done by now just saying [Music] congratulations the Death Star is complete the emperor may be pleased I think it is time we demonstrated the full power of this station station is insignificant prepared with the power of the force you may fire when ready [Music] two corellian Corvettes these are one and two are being repaired by the Empire destroy the gunboat escorts and keep an eye on other enemy Fighters support the y-wing Squad release in disabling the captured Corvettes protect our rescue shuttles while they recapture both Starships by looking through the captured frigates computer they were able to figure out that the Death Star was being built in a place called the horiz system But Not only was it gone by the time the rebels got there the Imperials had a trap waiting for them and managed to capture the two Corvettes they sent so much for operation brain genius it kind of tickles me that the idea of the Death Star being linked to prison labor has apparently been around for decades hold on is that supposed to be pronounced despair uh I was gonna say that's a bit silly even for Star Wars but it's really not is it okay time to clean up this mess after taking out a few waves of gunboats two friendly shuttles will jump in to recapture the Corvettes and you'll need to defend them from more gunboats there's a limited amount of them and they seem to spawn on a timer so this mission is actually an example of what I was asking for earlier the periods in between attacks are kind of boring but I'd still much rather have that than an infinite gunboat vomit what they're not even supposed to be going after the Corvettes my best guess at what happened is that he managed to bait the Torpedoes chasing him into hitting the Corvette I don't know if I should be annoyed or impressed protect the military supply cash from Imperial attack wait for a wing blue Squadron to relieve you the Death Star is active and nobody knows where it'll pop up next and also we need to guard this random ass Supply Depot sure whatever the containers are split up into three groups and as long as fifty percent of each group is still there when your relief arrives it's fine so don't panic like I did when the frigate shows up and immediately blows up a few boxes somebody tell past me to stop getting too close to these things just focus on taking down the bombers as they appear and it's no problem the alliance Flagship Independence is under attack and needs our help ward off the Imperial forces until the independence has escaped the flagship Independence is under attack Hey That's the menu ship Monmouth thinks this is the start of the next big Imperial offensive so everyone is scrambling to get to the rebel base at Yavin let's gather everyone up on one planet that seems like a good idea can't think of anything that could go wrong there anyways let's spend off a ton of tie bombers while respawning gunboats try to distract us all right mission accomplished time to oh uh oh that was close the direction you need to enter hyperspace from seems to be set permission usually it's clear but sometimes they'll get cheeky and put a star destroyer in the way so you need to be very careful about where you do it from okay 500. [Music] I like how that was the exact same cutscene as before but with a different planet Sprite Invader removed very uh clever we'll go with that escorted by a-wings you are to attack the death star's defenses destroy the Comsat so that reinforcements cannot be called in this will leave the Death Star open to a direct attack by starfighters all right this is it time to take on the Death Star you all know how it ends but did you know that it started with a bunch of Fighters duking it out in open space before the rebels even arrived at the station it was there just off screen trust me you'd have to destroy them ship to ship get the crews to their Fighters shut up Vader don't ruin this for me wait what the Thai Advance is an advanced tie yep that's what I'm going with they really pulled out all the stops for this one though it's got Shields hyperdrive missiles The Works what really sets these things apart though is they're insanely high speed and ability to make turns that should probably leave their pilots dead or at least unconscious for the g-forces their strategic role is to annoy me personally and they are very good at it the way they casually zip in and out of range and dance around your crosshairs is just so obnoxious if you want to destroy a Thai advance I recommend shooting a missile at it from far away and hope it gets there before the advance stops traveling in a straight line because once they've engaged you their ability to waste tons of time as you desperately chase them around trying to score a hit is unmatched they're one Saving Grace in my books is that from what I could tell you never have to kill one to complete a mission their actual role is quite literally to distract you from whatever you're really supposed to be doing speaking of which it turns out the only thing the game is actually looking for is whether or not you destroy the Comsat so if you haul ass to the satellite while dodging the Tas taking pot shots at you you could blow it up and head home victorious in under two minutes that's right game I did destroy the SATs and with that 12th Mission under our belt that brings the last tour to a somewhat underwear surprise it's not over yet in a Twist that will shock anyone who didn't notice that there's an entire menu option dedicated to controlling the detail of the Death Star we get to fight over the surface of the Death Star it's you know this part of the movie engage any Tie fighters encountered on your way to the nav bully destroy all turbo laser gun Towers surrounding the nav GUI destroy all Hangar ports from which the Tie fighters are launched our mission here is to destroy four hangers that will infinitely spawn Tie fighters until you get to them then take out every gun Tower within two kilometers of the beacon the hangers are camouflaged as cargo containers which definitely makes a lot of sense and isn't just an excuse for why they reuse an existing model anyway the key to success in this mission is understanding that engaging any of the ties is a waste of time until you've taken down the hangers otherwise they'll just get replaced as quickly as you destroy them engage any Tie fighters encountered on your way to the nav bull and I really hate that man once you've done that it's just a matter of methodically destroying all the remaining ties in turrets which is going to take a while because two kilometers squared is a big area and there are a lot of turrets it gets kind of tedious after a while but I'm sure the scale was really impressive at the time in your X-Wing you follow the knob buoys to the Death Star trench turn left and descend into the Death Star trench follow the trench to the exhaust Port use your proton torpedoes beware of Imperial Tie fighters they will send their best out to you and finally the big one up to this point we've been playing as generic self-named X-Wing pilot number 32 but I guess we're Luke Skywalker now because it would be pretty disappointing if they didn't let us do this which uh yeah you didn't think they were going to take us to the Death Star and not let us take a crack at the Trench Run did you of course not the way it works is when you get into the trench R2D2 supercharges your engines and causes you to move much faster than normal standing in your way are gun towers and random bits of superstructure with some kind of dodgy Collision detection you can destroy every piece individually which is pretty impressive actually although you're going to be taking a lot of damage from the turret so you'll want to save some laser power to replenish your Shields I think this is one of the few situations where you really can set deflectors to forward without it being a bad idea technically you can leave the trench at any time but if you do your speed will go back down to normal because R2 really wants you to enjoy the ride it's a lot like that old Atari Star Wars game to the point where it feels like a deliberate reference much like that game you don't have to worry about Darth Vader or any kind of tie interference really as long as you stay in the trench which seems a bit odd I guess they couldn't think of a way to make it work without being frustrating or unfair this whole thing kinda seems like a half-baked last minute Edition but it holds together just well enough that I'm glad it's here even with your boosted speed it takes a while to get to the end so it's a real test of endurance trying to shoot the towers before they can get a shot off dodging the bridges keeping your Shields fed and then when you get to the end you choke and miss your shot okay look in the briefing and in most games the exhaust Port is on a vertical wall but what it actually happens in the movie it looks like it's flat on the ground or something it's hard to tell this is always confused me anyway assuming you don't blow it the Death Star does and the game is over [Music] thank you [Music] so about the story it's barely there right but to be honest I kind of like it for what it is let's not beat around the bush it's because it's Star Wars seems downright unfair Wing Commander goes to Great Lengths to try to get me invested in the outcome of its missions with in-depth conversations and branching story paths and I don't care but X-Wing doesn't bother with any of that and I do because it happens to be tied to some movies I like but well it works they know what they're doing though they take great pains to weave your actions around the events of the movies in a plausible way so you can go yeah I'm the guy who made sure those Death Star plans made it to Leia it also helps a lot that the mission design has enough going on that it actually feels like I'm participating in the story instead of just watching it happen in cut scenes and even if I am a faceless nobody accomplishing a bunch of dry military objectives if they could manage to contextualize why it matters to the characters I know and love they've won it's not just about locking into having a good license it's about making good use of that license and what can I say they do people have mentioned in the comments that they got really into the universe of wing Commander thanks to the tie-in novels so I think origen did try to provide that kind of additional context to people who are willing to seek it out but that wasn't most people whereas you can just assume that everybody has seen Star Wars it actually is totally unfair but what do you gotta do right together Star Wars foreign we're not done yet though we've got two expansion packs to cover they only have one tour each so we might as well yeah it turns out that each one of these expansion tours contains 24 missions so when you put those together and combine that with the added historical missions that comes out to more content of the base game had I'm afraid we'll have to save these for a possible future video instead why don't we take a look at the different versions of this game starting with the original dos floppy disk release one thing that surprised me about this version is that it talks at least in the cutscenes anyway High interceptors have located a rebel Fleet orbiting the planet I thought the whole selling point of the CD versions was that they had voice acting but I suppose it's just more voice acting one Quirk of the Dos versions is that you have to calibrate your joystick every single time you start them up very annoying the ven user as we've seen throughout the rest of the video except the briefings aren't voiced once you get into a mission you'll notice that it runs at a very crunchy 320 by 240 resolution now everybody loves their chunky pixels these days but I actually found this made the game significantly harder to play than it otherwise would be because you spend a lot of time looking at things that are very small on the screen in this game either because they're very far away or because they're you know Tie fighters or both so when said far away TIE fighter looks like this it can be a problem since I'm on the subject I might as well mention the way this version shows you which ship you have targeted on the main screen which is a little different from how it is in most of my footage instead of those Wing Commander style lock-on boxes this version makes the currently targeted ship periodically flash red this method of doing things is uh bad not only is it ugly as hell but it's terrible for visibility it's easy to lose track of your target during chaotic dogfights and in situations where the target is too far away to be rendered at potato resolution well you just can't see it maybe that's what this computer display that tells you when your target is on screen is supposed to be for I genuinely did find it useful for that purpose a few times while playing the Dos version at least they thought to set a frame rate cap of 30 unlike the Dos version to Wing Commander so you don't have to worry about the game running too fast although there are still some elements of gameplay that can change depending on your CPU speed when they're not flashing red the 3D models for the ships are very primitive using tinted polygons to imply the presence of textures I've seen some people say they prefer these to the models using the newest version I think we'll have to agree to disagree there these aren't some charming hyper stylized interpretations of the ships here they're just worse versions of the same thing the sound effects are of a noticeably lower Fidelity and kind of off model compared to the ones in all subsequent versions with some of them even being generated by your sound card like a midi instrument I don't think they're horrible or anything but you know Time Marches On and then we have the music X-Wing has the distinction of being the first non-adventure game to make use of LucasArts famously underappreciated imuse system except I've heard so much bloviating over how secretly amazing it is that I think it might have wrapped around to being overrated by now in my experience with this game is not helping so Dynamic music like when the soundtrack changes based on what's happening on screen to be clear that's not what Imus does you don't need a fancy name system for that Wing Commander did that but listen there did you notice how the song Just abruptly changed with no fade out or transition to be honest it's not something I ever noticed or cared about while playing but sure it could be a bit more polished what Imus does is create a suitable transition between the different tracks so that it sounds like one continuous piece of music with no abrupt changes or stops so here's how it plays out in an X-Wing Mission when nothing is happening it sounds like this [Music] an Imperial capital ship arrives Imus waits till the end of the current phrase then plays this motif since we were in an idle State before it can also act as a musical bridge to this more tense theme that plays when the Imperials are around but you're not fighting them yet all completely seamless finally when you get within five kilometers of an imperial ship it transitions to the combat theme which is based on the music they played during the Tie Fighter attack on the Millennium Falcon and the new hope within these three primary themes the system will randomly stitch together minor variations and extensions to try to add variety much like the capital ships you also get this snippet of The Imperial March whenever an enemy fighter is launched along with a similar Alliance themed one for any Rebel reinforcements that show up foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] music at the end of a mission [Music] seems pretty cool right so what's the problem well the problem is that's it I just showed you all of the music that you're going to hear during typical gameplay all of it it's actually worse than that that first stage Idol theme that plays before the imps arrive well this is a game about fighting the Empire so conditions for that one are obviously a lot rarer than the other two you'll hear it anytime the game wants you to sit through a bunch of Rebel docking before the enemy shows up but that is thankfully not that common it also doesn't come back when the Imperials leave civil really is just a whole lot of and even more when it comes down to it I don't care how smooth the transitions are that is not enough Muse music I want you to imagine alternating between minuscule variations on the same two thirty second Loops for 50 hours I would die I'd love to know what happened here was it hubris did they think that with the power of eye Muse they were creating something with infinite variation and people wouldn't get tired of it or did all the work of making those transitions take away from the time that would have been needed to create more unique tracks or did they just independently think this was somehow enough to be completely Fair that's not all the music in the game they do have some special music for the Death Star service which is nice but that's three out of 116 missions each room in the menu has its own music and yes they do Transition smoothly into each other [Music] thank you thank you foreign [Music] s there I also noticed that the maze has its own unique music for some reason it probably wouldn't hurt to have this show up in the regular missions occasionally just saying oh right there's that mysterious wingman feature that I teased earlier in the Dos versions of this game there's this flight group screen before each mission where you select your wingmen except they're not predetermined characters they're whichever other player pilot data you happen to have on your system why would you have more than one pilot well most people wouldn't hence the obscurity of this feature but I'm sure some people had multiple family members who played the game on the same computer or maybe they got really bored and decided to start over because that's the kind of thing you would do when you were a kid and your parents only got you one game every six months or so anyway those other Pilots show up on this screen so you can have them fly as your wingmen and their rank determines their AI skill how noticeable this actually was in practice I can't really say but I kind of have my doubts perhaps realizing that most people didn't take advantage of or even noticed this feature the developers added the top Ace pilot in one of the expansions I'm pretty sure it was one of the expansions because the original manual doesn't mention it anyway top Ace is a pre-made pilot with everything unlocked and the highest rank achieved so you can have at least one good wingman at your side without having to create them yourself I found it useful for sampling various aspects effects of the game if nothing else since I only have my personal clear file for one version of the game naturally a year after the original game they released something called X-Wing collectors CD-ROM to coincide with the release of TIE fighter using that game's updated version of the X-Wing engine along with various bug fixes and improvements this is the version that most people online recommend but I'm here to tell you it's not that simple it's still basically the same game but with all sorts of miscellaneous changes the most noticeable one of course being the voice Mission briefings they also redid a bunch of the more Infamous missions to make them less frustrating you could toggle between the old and new missions in the options menu and this carries forward as the default to every subsequent version of the game if these are the ones that are supposed to be less frustrating I don't even want to know what the old ones were like it came with both the Imperial Pursuit and b-wing expansion packs pre-installed plus an additional six bonus missions which makes for a pretty hefty package altogether the lighting has been improved thanks to the Tie Fighter engine so now you can actually see differences and shadings across the ship's Hull which helps make them look less flat the sound effects have been redone to be more like the movies and they seem pretty good to my ears there's also more of them in various places so for example where before there was only one Rebel laser sound your lasers now sound different depending on whether they're at full power or not which is a nice bit of feedback on the other hand one of the added sounds is this annoying beeping noise whenever you adjust the throttle which I do a lot so points of the floppy version there the music is surprisingly an objective downgrade from the floppy version [Music] foreign foreign was composed for a specific sound card the Roland mt-32 just like Wing Commander there were options for other cards but they had reduced detail and Fidelity by the time TIE fighter came out the mt-32 had fallen out of style in favor of Microsoft's General midi standard and so there was no special support for it as a result even if you choose the mt-32 as your sound card and X-Wing CD's settings you'll get the cut down version of the soundtrack no matter what I've already explained why this shouldn't really be much of a concern but considering that the reason why people online will tell you to play this version is so you could experience the Majesty of imuse it seems worth pointing out I experienced multiple crashes on the mission debriefing screen in this version though I haven't tested the floppy version enough to say that it doesn't happen there too luckily the game saves that you completed the mission before you get to this screen so no real progress was lost but it's still annoying and the sound it makes is something else in 1996 Larry Holland's Group which by that point had achieved their final form of totally games released of macport of the game this one is a bit of a curiosity on account of how obscure and inaccessible it is try as I might I could not get this to work no matter what I did it would always tell me the CD wasn't in the drive I guess that's the copy protection working as intended it's hard to even find footage of this version if you search for X-Wing Mac you'll find a bunch of videos claiming to have it but when you click through they're actually just running the PC version on dosbox I did manage to find a couple videos of people who managed to get it running based on this footage and what little has been written about this version online I can tell you that it's based on the Dos collector CD version but it runs at 640 by 480. that's double the clarity of the Dos versions which would have given it a pretty big leg up unfortunately this resolution bump also prompted them to redo the menu Graphics this time in mostly untouched CG now if you look closely at the original menus you could tell that some elements are CG While others look like they might be Mortal Kombat style digitized film but the heavy lifting was done by gorgeously detailed pixel art that conveyed a ton of depth and character they must have thought that CG had Advanced enough over the past three years that it could stand on its own this time it does not the remade menu scenes are dreary severely lacking in detail and just look like what they are primitive early CG they also cut many of the little animations and flourishes that were in the Dos menus making the whole thing feel even more Barren and lifeless [Music] they've also smeared what remains of the original pixel art namely the character sprites with an ugly interpolation filter because raw pixels were considered unsightly at the time so fun fact about the mission briefings if you use the historical simulator to replay a tour mission the Donna gives the briefing instead of Akbar you know since the simulator is his domain or whatever and yes they did record all the lines for this beware of Imperial type Fighters they will send their best after you I don't know why they why they bothered but if you're wondering why all my footage of Akbar is with the new menus that's why and for the PS the resistance they've special editioned up the intro cut scene the results of which I think speak for themselves under an Imperial Star Destroyers they didn't bother to uh improve any of the other story cut scenes in this way considering that this carries over to the version I chose to play the bulk of the game with I am very grateful for that fact flight roster menu is gone from this version never to return on the bright side Imus is still there the sound font sucks and apparently it can't be changed but if Dynamic music is that important for you there you go and that's all the differences I've seen noted this appears to have been an otherwise faithful adaptation of the Dos collector CD version and finally we have X-Wing collectors series not to be confused when X-Wing collector's CD though I wouldn't blame you it's another engine upgrade this time to the X-Wing vs TIE fighter engine that came as part of a collection of X-Wing TIE fighter and some kind of demo version of xvt in 1998 or maybe it's what steam refers to as special edition or remastered if you go by the folder names oh well this definitely wasn't the last subtitle crime committed by Star Wars but it may have been the first this is the version that those internet people will warn you away from because it uses CD music instead of midi which means no eye Muse it sounds like well I can't show you what it sounds like because it's literally just music from the movies arranged into medleys so just use your imagination the thing is it may not have the dynamism of eye Muse but it's a hell of a lot more variety that you get with the midi soundtrack and you actually get different tracks occasionally as you progress through the game I seriously consider this a major upgrade not even because of the CD quality but because it's more than a minute's worth of Music the intro movie and menu Graphics are inherited from the Mac version unfortunately only now the menus have no music behind them it just keeps getting better doesn't it I'm not sure if this is the result of trying to run the game on Modern computers or if this is just how it always was but the lack of music makes it feel even more empty which is quite an accomplishment despite using a much newer version of the engine made for a completely different game the fizz physics and gameplay of remarkably identical as far as I can tell I was really expecting to find little differences here and there but I legitimately could not I mean one would hope that they would have made some improvements in the physics at AI in five years but I don't know I guess we'll have to see when we get to xvt it uses all the same Mission files from the previous releases including the option to toggle between the original and the CD ones so no changes there where we do see major differences is in the renderer in addition to the Mac version's resolution boost the ship models have been replaced by the much more detailed ones from xvt complete with textures and the lighting has been given another overhaul although it looks a little wonky unless you turn the gamma all the way down as I mentioned before this version changes the way that your current Target is highlighted instead of making the model flash red it draws a white box around them which makes it much easier to tell where things are especially when they're far away the controls are almost identical with the exception of one addition a button to automatically match speed with your current Target which I found to be very helpful for not crashing into things one change I didn't expect is that you could now hear the engine of your shift a friend of mine found this to be absolutely unbearable to listen to so if you're like him you could turn it off but I love it each of the playable ships has its own sound which helps further differentiate them and it changes pitch based on your speed which is a great little bit of feedback that lets you feel how fast you're moving in addition to seeing it everything flying with that it just feels empty like there's something missing you know a notable subtraction in this version is the removal of any way to turn your ship without a joystick that's right this version is unplayable without a joystick it doesn't make a difference for me because an analog stick counts and that's my preferred way to play but even I can see that this is extremely uncool nowadays even if you don't have a dedicated flight stick you very likely at least have access to a Gamepad that'll do the trick this was very much not the case in 98 a lot of people mention in the comments for my wing Commander video that they played these games using their keyboards because they didn't have a joystick it was not an uncommon way to play so I'm really struggling to see what the rationale for arbitrarily locking those people out was as is customary with remasters there are a few new bugs added in the Sprites for Stellar objects are drawn at half the size they are the Dos versions I'm guessing this is because the equivalent Sprites used by xvt or double the resolution so when you put the original Sprites in there they shrink it's not the end of the world though you can't really tell how big they're supposed to be so they don't necessarily look wrong the Death Star is missing from the Skybox of the one Mission that's supposed to have it getting shades of The kilrathi Saga here the demo recording feature is unstable oh did I mention the demo recording feature in all versions of the game you could record your gameplay to be played back later from various angles it's neat and I wanted to use it to get some cool third-person shots for the video but I had to stop when it kept crashing my game this never happened in my limited testing of it in the CD version so I'll give the Dos versions the benefit of the doubt and assume that this issue is exclusive to the collectors series I also got a consistent crash at the start of exactly one Mission which just so happens to be an optional Mission from one of the expansions which might be the worst mission in the game a convoy of troop transport is to Rendezvous with the frigate Mayhem b-wing rid will intercept each ship and identify the passengers it's a literal nightmare scenario so I think the game might have just been looking out for me and since it was released in 1998 this is of course an early Windows game now using direct 3D this comes with the usual problems you'd expect to have running such a game on Modern computers but also exposes it to the world of modding I'll put a link to a guide in the description but suffice to say not only can you get it working you can also run it at any 4x3 resolution you want which clears things up quite nicely I love PC gaming finally top Ace has been removed despite having survived all the way into the Mac version which is the one that acts the flight roster if you'll remember damn can't believe they do them like that after all the hard work you put in for them over the years oh well annoyingly there is no definitive version each one has its own pros and cons the floppy version has the best midi soundtrack but is the most primitive in all other ways this CD version has a downgraded version of that soundtrack but all sorts of other enhancements while the special edition loses eye Muse has ugly menus and adds bugs but has better graphics and notable quality of life features you're just gonna have to decide what's most important to you I have no love lost for the midi soundtrack but losing the good menus is a shame ultimately though the menus aren't the most important thing the time I spend in the cockpit is what matters so the improved Clarity there is why I ultimately chose that version if you're looking to play X-Wing in 2023 and Beyond it's available on Steam and Gog Disney or the armor of it that manages Star Wars games anyway is one of those Publishers that still remembers to regularly put its old games on sale so watch out for that if you're price conscious it doesn't matter which storefront you choose you'll get basically the same experience either way I went with the steam version because it happened to be on sale there and not on Gog at the time in both cases you get access to the floppy version the collector's CD and the special collectors series remastered Edition for the former 2 the included version of dosbox is playable but to hear the best music you're going to want to set up dosbox staging with a set of mt-32 ROM files and tell the game to use Roland music in the included installer program if you want to try the scsre you probably won't have much luck getting it to run out of the box suppose supposedly the steam releases a few versions behind the Gog one in terms of attempts to keep this running on newer PCS but neither of them is going to cut it in the age of Windows 10 plus luckily there are mods and guides to using them one of which I've Linked In the description should you play X-Wing in 2023 and Beyond if you have to ask me that question then the answer is no when I look back at the time I'd spent playing X-Wing I could say yes I did enjoy it more than I did not so you could probably say that it was worth it but by how much there's a cost to be paid for those hours of fun in the form of a considerable amount of homework that you have to do before you can even get started and even afterwards the frustrating flat out unferitized Mission design the long commutes and the docking oh God the docking something I didn't mention in my wing Commander video is that before making Wing Commander Chris Roberts and his team made RPGs and so it follows that Wing Commander is the kind of space Sim that RPG people would make it's very logical to get a team of flight simulator people to make a space Sim there's obviously a lot of crossover there but sometimes those Outsider viewpoints can be valuable In Those Old School flight Sims you would fly to your objectives in real time then complete them and then fly back to base in real time that's just what she did in those games so they didn't really think anything of all that downtime at least not to the point of making a big effort to do something about it I think I'm just not fully on board with the kind of space Sim that flight simulator people would make I do appreciate the technological leaps X-Wing made over Wing Commander I definitely lean way farther towards Wing Commander's design sensibilities enough so that I still prefer that game overall it's funny though when you look at them side by side it almost feels like these two games could have been Switched at Birth like Wing Commander was the easy to pick up and play story Rich relatively speaking experience that a licensed Star Wars game probably should have been while X-Wing was the complicated Boutique Simulator game that Wing Commander maybe could have been just a thought but I think whether or not you would enjoy X-Wing is going to hinge on whether or not you're already in the process of typing up an angry comment about how I didn't appreciate the power management and deflector switching enough if spending a large amount of time learning how to Pilot an X-Wing appeals to you then all that stuff I described as homework would instead be part of the fun maybe even the main draw and that changes the equation significantly so if you know you know but otherwise there's probably a long list of games in this genre that you should get to First foreign and that's it congratulations you made it all the way to the end of the video maybe you could celebrate by dropping a like and clicking that subscribe button just thinking out loud oh and check out the patreon chances are it's been multiple days since you saw that part so don't forget about it next video will be about Wing commander 2. see you then foreign

Channel: Space Cadet Rewind

Views: 130,906

Keywords: xwing, space sim, flight action

Id: N6mNiV7xXmw

Length: 178min 55sec (10735 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023