So I finally got around to exploring a little more of the SWTOR Galactic Starfighter expansion while I was trying to find the information about Character Transfers that Shintar alluded to in my 2013 Crystal Ball Review.
And behold, I laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And I wonder how long before the lawsuits kick in.
Here is a video of the Imperial gunship gameplay from Galactic Starfighter.
Got it? Now here is a video of the frigate gameplay from Star Conflict, Gaijin’s (the guys from Warthunder) game of space combat that is currently in Open Beta.
Whoops. Kinda similar huh? And that’s not all. TOR’s Galactic Starfighter has 3 classes of ship, with subclasses that have specific set abilities in each. Same as Star Conflict. And some of those special ablities and weapons? Well, the name is changed, but the effects are the same.
We might could wave it off as similarity…but really? I mean, Warthunder and Warplanes are different enough. These two though, hit so close to the mark in terms of HUD, weapons abilities, special systems, and so on, that its hard to pass it off as coincidence. So here is a small litmus test. Galactic Starfighter only has one class of frigate…er…gunship at the moment. Star Conflict has another. So if a new gunship class appears with player controlled smart missiles…well, that kinda seals the deal right?
I have played Star Conflict, but I have not yet had access to Galactic Starfighter. I will be interested to see how the two play out in a side by side comparison.
Copyright challenges aside, this does present a unique opportunity. With character transfers now enabled, I can move my Jedi to my main server (for free basically, I will have enough Cartel Coins amassed from my security fob allowance) around the time Galactic Starfighter drops for Preferred Users (January 14th). I can do the storyline, skip the side missions, and make up any XP gap with the Starfighter minigame, because quite honestly, if it is indeed like Star Conflict, which I really enjoy, then playing it as a break to the storyline would be…well, really nice actually.
Who knows, maybe 2014 will see a full time return to SWTOR for me? The real question is, if I do…what from my current play rotation gets the short end of the stick?
Harbinger Zero 
The problem, of course, is that both games are awful, designed for ADD millenials to play on their iPhones while sitting in their psychiatrists’ waiting rooms.
GSF is only played by a few dozen people (primarily people who stuck it out during the very early days of its launch and have fully loaded ships so they can farm everyone else that tries to play. Because gear > skill, and GSF doesn’t offer tiered matchmaking. That alone is why Star Conflict has over 30,000 players. Well, that, and a wider variety of ships and parts. Neither game is anywhere close to as good as Totally Games’ 20 year-old space games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter, but apparently that technology is WAY too hard to reverse engineer or code in the 21st century.
I enjoyed Star Conflict actually. That said, last time I was online, the game never had more than 500 concurrent players at peak. So 30k+ players seems a tad bit exaggerated to me. So does GSF only having a few dozen.
In any case, we are definitely agreed on one thing: GSF is crap and was a waste of developer time and manpower.
Star Conflict has certainly taken a nosedive since I posted that comment, due in large part to hackers and bots dominating matches.
However, I stand behind my statement concerning GSF’s numbers. And let me clarify that I meant “serious” players, not SWTOR groundpounders who simply queue up and crash on purpose to end matches as fast as possible just to get weekly conquest point rewards, or newbies who play 3 or 4 matches and ragequit because of the dominance of geared ships, skilled or no.
Queue times are so long on most servers that by and large GSF gameplay is limited to one or two servers now, and even on those servers it’s limited to one or two nights a week, often with self-imposed rulesets in order to offer a semblance of “balance” to gameplay.
It doesn’t help that the primary proponents of GSF (e.g., “aces” who are “good” at it) are nearly uniformly toxic assholes who have done a fairly good job of alienating 1.5 million SWTOR players from even playing GSF. Those jerks acknowledge the game mode is rife with glaring deficiencies, yet defend it like Episode I fanboys.
At any rate, we have all the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games again, so both GSF and Star Conflict are by and large moot points today.
My greatest learning from GSF and SC both has been that I do not have the brain for freeform 3d space combat. I think too much like a dogfighter when the meta really seems to be wrapped around thinking of yourself as a spinning moving turret. To me that’s not only weird but also not very entertaining either. I stopped playing Asteroids a long time ago. (-:
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