I think it’s fair to say Star Wars: Squadrons hasn’t had the smoothest of take-offs, with the game launching with a variety of issues for flight stick and PC VR users. At least some of those issues have now been solved, thanks to a patch deployed last night which took aim at some of the most annoying technical problems.
As posted by AOD_RedAlpha to EA answers.
One of the game’s more frustrating bugs has related to Fleet Battles ranking, in which players could not rank after completing their initial placement matches. Thanks to the patch, players who are yet to start their placement matches will now be able to rank normally, while those who were caught mid-way through the process will have their remaining matches use the corrected system. Unfortunately for those who already played all their placement matches, there will be no rank resets “at this time” to even the playing field, and it looks like you’ll be graded on your matches going forwards.
At launch, many flight stick users complained Squadrons had an oversized deadzone (the area of your controller that doesn’t respond to stick movement) which players described as “mak[ing] flying with HOTAS feel like your ship is drunk”. Motive has now introduced a menu option to allow players to modify the deadzone individually, rather than having to use workarounds with their HOTAS software. No more death sticks for you. On top of this, the default input curves for flight sticks have also been adjusted, which should apparently make the controls feel more responsive.
On the VR front, the patch adjusts some of the visual effects in VR mode – such as the brightness and bloom when dropping bombs from your starfighter. Sadly there isn’t yet a fix for the locked framerates and choppy gameplay problems reported by PC VR users, but EA is aware of the problem and is currently investigating solutions.
The patch includes a bunch of other fixes and general stability improvements, so if you want to find out whether a specific bug has been fixed, you can find the full list here. Personally, I’d really like to see a change to the way ranked Fleet Battles are scored, as there’s currently an issue where matches go unscored should anyone drop out, which is happening all too frequently. And, of course, some balance changes to certain ships (*cough* TIE Bomber) and adjustments to better reward support work wouldn’t go amiss. If we’re not getting further DLC or modes for Squadrons, hopefully we’ll at least get some improvements on what’s already there.
