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Squadrons has phenomenal feel and VR support, but the singleplayer campaign is shallow and the multiplayer is busted. Without extended balance patches, bug fixes, or additional campaigns, Squadrons got stale real quick.
Freespace and Freelancer are right there at the top for me.
The freespace series just has everything: tight controls, cool ship design and weapons, superb story and misson design, and a great modding scene. a couple of years ago I exclusively played Freespace 2 mods for months. That and it runs great on Win 10.
Freelancer for me was a very cool universe and probably the best control scheme and combat overall of space fighter simulators. Damn annoying to get it to run nowadays though (not that i have tried recently though).
I think it's struggle to maintain popularity really comes down to two major factors.
The first factor comes down to basic game design format. When this game was first announced and then later released, the discussion often seemed to veer towards comparisons with the older LucasArts X-Wing and Tie-Fighter titles. Those older titles pretty much defined what a Star Wars space combat game should be and for good reason. You see, the older X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games worked really well because they were designed from the ground up to convey the basic feel as portrayed in the films. Obviously they were limited by technology of the time but when you play those older titles, you feel like you are playing something purpose built to immerse you in the role of a Star Wars pilot. Every aspect of design went towards that goal first and foremost.
Squadrons is a very different animal. It looks like Star Wars and even sounds like Star Wars but when you actually play it for what it is, you will find that the Star Wars aspects are but a thin coat of paint applied to the top of a fairly generic class based 5v5 competitive PvP focused title. Do you know what you never see in Star Wars films? 5v5 balanced competitive dogfights.
Now If this was just a multiplayer mode attached to a much larger, more flexible game, it wouldn't be a problem but it isn't. The single player and PvE content is all strangled by the limitations of the 5v5 competitive format and as such, it never truly FEELS like Star Wars. It doesn't really sell the fantasy of being a Star Wars starfighter pilot like the older titles did. As such. While it might have had some appeal to those specifically looking for yet another class based, ultra-balanced competitive experience, those who were coming from the legacy of the older X-Wing/Tie-Fighter titles rightfully asked themselves "Is this it? Is this what the developers thought Star Wars fans really wanted?"
The other issue is perhaps going to be controversial to say but it does need to be said. Squadrons is a VR novelty title. Had it not been made with VR specifically in mind, it probably would have had more room to breath. When you look at VR centric titles, they tend to be smaller in scope (for performance reasons) and built more around shorter bursts of playtime (for physical reasons). This is especially tragic because other space combat titles have managed to integrate VR without compromising the overall game experience (Elite being one example). Squadrons (like Star Trek Bridge Crew) is built for quick bursts of VR gameplay but when you take it out of the VR context, it comes off as arbitrarily limited and unfulfilling.
Jedi Survivor and Jedi Fallen Order are basically continuations, GAMEPLAYWISE, NOT storywise, of the Jedi Academy games, which were fantastic btw. So was the other game that came out with the same combat style. Cant remember the name now lol. Maybe it was the one with Kyle Katarn as the main? Aaannny who, the new Jedi games play just like them. Which is great btw. However, still not the RPGs and adventures we were promised (such as 1313 for example, and what Squadrons was SUPPOSED to be lol).
And then, of course, we had the god awful, super short, ridiculously over powered Force Unleashed games. I know they are a cult hit, but they were critically panned failures and I concur with the latter. And another "of course" is the online game. It's pretty good and gets better all the time. The amount of secrets and stuff to find is fantastic and an unknown feature of the game. Most people have no idea what they can find by exploring. Unlike WoW for example, exploring is rewarding in SWTOR. The space fights, while on rails, are better than this game. Ill tell ya that fer free.
Sorry for the wall o text, but this game is awful, the forced permanent first person is a moronic choice in a flight game, especially a space flight game, and if you're gonna specialize like that, you better do it better than the next guy. They didn't. Ill take Everspace 2 or Elite Dangerous' first person modes any day of the week over this pile of crap. This game got rushed and it's obvious IMO.
Lastly, the usual stereotypes placed upon women and minorities by the woke are very present in this game and many wont even try it so they'll never know whether to even try competitive mode. Im not one that calls every thing in modern star wars, "woke", either. Some of it is b.s., some of it is just normal casting or creations of characters. Im over it, so are most. But this was developed in the hey-day of Star Wars stereotyping women and minorities while claiming it's just representation.
Look, I dont want this discussion to devolve in to a debate about this, Im just saying there are people for sure on BOTH sides of the socio-political spectrum who wont even try this game, wrong or right in their views of the world. Ok I lied above, this is my actual 'lastly' part of the rant:
The game just isn't that great. Most people don't feel the need to go beyond beating it, and I think it actually has a low percentage of gamers that did beat it. I can't remember if that was this game or a different star wars game.
Ok TL;DR: Game ain't that great and many wont even try it for various reasons. The end. Play Everspace2.
...what stereotypes?
Yeah, trying to blame this game's problems on the gender of the characters or how that gender was handled quite widely misses the reality of this game's problems. Trying to blame everything on some kind of political rhetoric fueled "woke" boogeyman is just absurd.
The game didn't gain a lot of traction because it didn't have much to really offer. A big part of that came down to the focus on 5v5 PvP as the basic foundation of the entire game when that does absolutely nothing to sell the fantasy of being a Star Wars starfighter pilot. The same could be said of the most recent Battlefront title where the single player was completely crippled by the underlying multiplayer format it was built awkwardly on top of.
To put it simply. Squadrons lost its appeal quickly because on a basic design level, it wasn't a very good game. It didn't have any real staying power and it is clear that EA and Motive Studio didn't really understand (or perhaps just didn't care to understand) why the older X-Wing/Tie-fighter titles have such staying power. They didn't learn from the past and instead tried to grab a cut of the now extremely tired, extremely overdone ultra-balanced, class based 5v5 PvP format's apparent mainstream success. It was a gamble that didn't pay off for them and hopefully they have learned from the mistake.
Blaming this on some kind of "woke agenda" nonsense is just silly. It might work in certain political echo-chambers but it doesn't reflect reality at all.
That said, I played the game without VR and I must say that the gameplay just felt off to me. Playing with Keyboard/mouse I could never get used to the controls and have not gone back to the game to finish it. Maybe someday. More likely than not this was an experiment for the VR features, which the many people do not own (nor a complete joystick setup).
We really need a return to the Freespace series or Freelancer series. That or another game like Rebel Galaxy in which we can control Capital ships! Havent played X4 yet, waiting for a decent sale of the whole package.
Maybe with the game being moddable, it could have had a longer lifespan, but with all the VR stuff it would have been very difficult.