Why does it not support VR motion controllers

[醉仙望月]

James Clement, Lead Gameplay and Technical Design Director explained in the interview on UploadVR why Star Wars: Squadron doesn't have motion controller support:

I worked on a pitch at one point for the Touch, but we decided we wanted to keep this hardware oriented.
Everything we do in the cockpit since you have a lot of stuff to manage needs to be instantaneous and you can only really get that on a hardware controller. The Touch controllers, for example, just don’t have enough inputs to really put everything on a button on the controller so we’d have to do simulated touches and stuff like that. If you went into a dogfight having to do that you’d probably be at a severe disadvantage, I don’t think it would be a fair match.

But this is not true.
Since you can use a gamepad to play this game just fine, a pair of motion controllers has enough inputs to put every control of a gamepad on them.
You could grab the right motion controller as a virtual joystick to roll and yaw, and twist it to yaw, while moving the left motion controller as a virtual throttle.
The thumbstick on the left motion controller could be used as the D-pad on the gamepad, while the thumbstick on the right motion controller are the A/B/X/Y buttons.
The LT/RT and pressing the thumbstick are the same as those on the gamepad.
There is a button on each of the left/right motion controller for the LB/RB.
The menu button on the motion controller is still the menu button of the gamepad.
Done.
Even some motion controllers have two available buttons each, which makes them have more buttons for binding than a gamepad.

[Mazryonh]

I think that James Clement was referring to controlling the ingame starfighters using a virtual environment (i.e., you control your starfighter by pressing buttons in a virtual cockpit or turning a virtual joystick), not directly controlling the game with motion controllers like you would a game console controller. Besides, from what you say, motion controllers for VR systems aren't standardized, which would make it hard to program them for.

My recommendation is that you up the immersion by using a joystick and throttle to play this game instead.

[Det.Bullock]

Originally posted by Mazryonh:

My recommendation is that you up the immersion by using a joystick and throttle to play this game instead.

In my experience motion controllers complainers don't want immersion, they just want to use their new toy to the full extent. Which is understandable to a certain point (I only bought the throttle of my CH HOTAs set when I was 100% sure it could work with at least most of the flight games in my library in a way or another) but in a game where you pilot a land or air vehicle motion controls will always be an inferior options that is often more expensive than the superior one and far more niche (given that IIRC not even all VR sets come with those) so why bother?

[醉仙望月]

It is more accessible with motion controllers since you don't need any extra hardware, and it helps to maintain immersion since your virtual hands are constantly being tracked.

[necrophonic]

It would be nice to have your hands tracked, but I understand why they didn't implement that as it needs to be responsive and support cross play across controller types.

Mainly it's the difference between "VR Supported" (which this is) and "VR Native" (which is something like Half Life: Alyx).

I agree that they could maybe let you map buttons to the controllers like you do with HOTAS (even if it doesn't then track movement) but I'm not going to say "that should be easy" as I've no idea how the internals are written so it may be a lot more complicated than it seems and probably not financially worth it given the size of the VR player base that would use it.

[醉仙望月]

Originally posted by necrophonic:

It would be nice to have your hands tracked, but I understand why they didn't implement that as it needs to be responsive and support cross play across controller types.
Mainly it's the difference between "VR Supported" (which this is) and "VR Native" (which is something like Half Life: Alyx).

Supporting cross-play across different controller types is not a problem.
There is a multiplayer flight game that supports flying in VR or on desktop with either virtual flight controls using motion controllers or bind your hardware HOTAS.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1397650/Jetborne_Racing/

[Det.Bullock]

Originally posted by 醉仙望月:

It is more accessible with motion controllers since you don't need any extra hardware, and it helps to maintain immersion since your virtual hands are constantly being tracked.

Extra hardware that is available since the 90s and (depending on the model) is cheaper than the motion tracking doohickeys.
Also in a game that doesn't have clickable buttons and you are expected to keep your hands on the controllers how is a stick without a fixed pivot/gimball more immersive?
You are just very ignorant about how spacesims work and what they require to play at their full potential, the game is already plenty compromised as it is without needing additional compromises for a niche of another niche.

Just get a HOTAS X/4/One and stop bothering people, please.

[necrophonic]

Not saying doing it is impossible (of course it's not), just that I can understand why they chose not to given the small (relative to bigger AAA-style games) nature of the game.