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It has taken me way longer to beat Star Wars Squadrons than it probably should have. Most
estimates put the total playtime of the campaign at around eight to ten hours which, with the
oncoming tide of massive open world games on the horizon, makes Squadrons seem downright quaint by
comparison. And yet, while my total in-game hour count is probably similar, Squadrons is a game
whose campaign I’ve been playing for weeks now. See, where most games can see me spend hours
sat in front of a screen if need be, blasting through the available content,
there’s a reason Squadrons has me breaking up my playtime into more bite-size chunks—I’m talking
one, maybe two missions at a time. It’s made for what some might call a clunkier,
less comfortable experience, but simultaneously it’s also made my time with the game so much more
meaningful than it would be otherwise. Of course, I’m talking about Squadrons’ VR component which,
despite its fairly uneven nature, is the only way I can play the game now; and not only that,
it’s gotten me thinking about the role VR might end up playing in people’s gaming
lives in the future, in ways I didn’t expect. What’s weird about this though, is that for how
significant all of this might seem, the actual game itself is… fine. Vanilla Squadrons makes for
a perfectly competent space dogfighter that, while perhaps not quite as demanding or in-depth as the
older Star Wars flight sims it draws inspiration from, has all the sights and sounds from the
franchise you’d expect. Squadrons is perfectly OK with its straightahead nature—play the story,
play a bit of the multiplayer, move on. It’s refreshing, especially from a publisher like EA,
to not feel so beholden to a game bearing the Star Wars license. On the surface, though,
it’s not the kind of game I’d expect to stick with for as long as I have.
That’s where VR comes in. As I touched on in a video late last year,
if you haven’t tried VR before it can be hard to convey just how monumental
and exciting a shift to gaming the platform represents but Squadrons readily illustrates
part of what makes it so special—scale. You know, I don’t think it’s coincidence
that the first game I was encouraged to try out upon purchasing my Oculus Quest last year was also
a Star Wars game. People have grown up with this stuff, they have expectations of how these utterly
iconic environments and characters are supposed to look, acting as the perfect platform to showcase
VR’s wholly transformative nature. It’s one thing to see Darth Vader and storm troopers
on the big screen, in a different world to you, but having a gun actually pointed in your face?
Looking up to see the Sith Lord towering over you in full 1:1 scale? Trust me when I say I’m not the
only one who found that formerly goofy image actually pretty unsettling. It stuck with me.
Similarly, sure, playing vanilla Squadrons—seeing how they’ve rendered these iconic ships with
modern graphics technology—acts as a neat coat of paint that lends a bit of character to the core
gameplay. But putting on that headset and actually being inside those ships, looking around and
realising, feeling just how big (or in some cases cramped) they are, is surprisingly humbling.
Moreover, it changes the way you approach gameplay—it’s easy to distance yourself from
the cracked cockpit windows and smoking panels indicating your ship’s decreasing armour, but when
that stuff is right in front of your eyes, the void of space so close you could almost touch it,
this perspective shift highlights the flimsiness of the glass cannons you pilot; lending the act
of healing an urgency it would otherwise lack. Merely turning around to chase your targets,
barrel rolling to avoid oncoming fire—the basics of any game in the genre—are suddenly viscerally
intense because you’re not just controlling them from a distance, in a way you’re physically
performing them yourself. It’s a scenario I’ve found across VR titles as a whole—that
I could be playing a glorified tech demo and simply by being placed inside that action,
the most basic mechanical inputs like turning and shooting are given so much more meaning.
But that’s not to say that Squadron’s VR component is 100% successful in this endeavour either.
Any Star Wars virtual reality world is just begging to be poked and prodded around,
in a way that Squadrons just doesn’t allow for thanks to its lack of touch controller support;
keeping you from engaging more deeply with systems that could have seen Squadrons become
truly transcendent—having to lean into oncoming fire to twist the knob to start repairs while
simultaneously reaching over to redirect power to your thrusters to perform a quick escape.
I’m not kidding when I say a game like No Man’s Sky reaches hitherto unknown heights of mechanical
engagement, it becomes almost a different game, when you can actually grab and maneouvre the
thruster yourself—and it’s the little details like this that would have pushed Squadrons over
the edge into an absolute must-play VR experience. But that’s not the only reason that Squadrons in
VR—hell, VR in general—remains a tough sell to so many. As previously stated,
I’ve been playing on my Quest—and separate, even, from my growing concern about playing on an Oculus
headset now that Facebook is placing the security of my purchases into baffling levels of jeapordy,
just getting into the VR version of Squadrons on the Quest takes a comparatively absurd
amount of effort relative to other games. Even with the Oculus Link that allows you to
hook the standalone headset up to a PC, there’s a ridiculous list of steps required sthat make
the whole process feel less like an officially sanctioned method of playing games and more like
you’re side-loading some weird mod you found on a shady-looking website. First you connect the
headset to the computer, then through the Quest, with your touch controllers, you turn on the Link
functionality, then you go to virtual desktop mode in what is ostensibly the Rift interface, then you
open Origin from there, and only then do you open Squadrons at which point you put down the touch
controllers and pick up a regular gamepad, all the while my PC battles to keep up with the layers
upon layers of programs and interfaces running in parallel (and the minutes of loading that
entails) until I can just get in-game and hit the VR mode toggle that finally calms everything down.
Which in part brings me onto why it’s taken me so long to beat this campaign—I have to set
aside a fairly substantial chunk of time just to set Squadrons up in VR and, hey, I’m busy.
Not only that, but the physicality of playing such a motion-intensive game like this means that,
on a very literal level, that’s all I can stomach. The build-up of strain from having such bright
screens so close to my eyes; supporting the weight of the headset; the lurching onset of motion
sickness from performing constant barrel rolls, etc.; I realise this is all personal and your
tolerance may vary, but playing any longer than I do would see these issues compound on each other
to turn Squadrons VR into a pretty harrowing experience if I didn’t set myself a limit.
But that’s just the thing—despite how negative all of that might have sounded, it’s precisely
that self-imposed limit that keeps things on the right side of pleasant and crucially,
highlights that VR can turn play into a much more conscious, mindful and honestly meditative process
than anything I’ve played before. Immersion is no longer solely the job of the designer here—I
have to check in on myself physically to ensure I’m able to get the most out of a created world,
and choose to step away if I don’t feel up to it. My play sessions might be more bite-sized as a
result, but they also feel less disposable, because I’m not mindlessly hitting buttons
for hours before simply stepping away from a screen when I press quit—I’m exiting a kind
of cockpit of my own. Much like the long process of setting the game up, there’s a
period of recalibration to my surroundings once I take that headset off. Sometimes that can be a
feeling of relief from discomfort. But I also imagine that’s probably what it would be like
to take your helmet off after being cramped in a cockpit for that length of time,
blinded by glowing panels and sweating like hell. But beyond that perhaps unintended verisimillitude
I guess, there’s just something about that ritual of setting up the headset,
of getting everything to cooperate with each other that made me appreciate it more when I actually
got into the game. It’s like music—any song you could possibly want to hear is available in a few
button presses from your pocket; your appetite for that band or album can be quickly sated. There’s
something to be said, however, for playing records on a really good turntable with great speakers;
shutting out the noise of the world around you and taking some time to really think about the
listening experience you want to commit to; the one you have to maintain, to get up in the middle
of to change sides. It’s potentially clunky—there are easier, more convenient ways of doing it—but
for some, it can also be far more enriching for how it takes the traditionally passive, background
act of hearing music, as a mere distraction, and turns it into active, physical listening.
As much as I still love the platform and the games I’ve played on it, VR is not an everyday
thing for me, but even with its numerous issues, what Squadrons is helping me realise is that,
that might actually be one of VR’s biggest strengths. The discussion surrounding VR
over the years has been so focused on how it can compete with the traditional console or PC
framework—how its inability to truly crack the mainstream just yet deems the whole
thing a total failure in the gaming world but it’s become ever clearer to me that this line
of thinking is missing the point entirely. VR is its own thing that, amidst the stresses
that surround all of us, allows me to stop, take stock both mentally and physically, and commit to
truly taking some time for myself in a way that this ever-chaotic world rarely allows. VR might
not be the simplest way to play, but it has the ability to take what would have otherwise been
a serviceable eight-ten hour game and turn it into a process that allows me to better get in touch
with myself—and that seems pretty powerful to me. I’d like to sincerely thank my patrons here—as I
stated at the start it’s your continued support that allows me to keep making videos and I can
never thank you enough for that. If you’ve enjoyed any of the videos I’ve put out and want to help
the channel continue so I can keep making more, you can directly help out as well as get things
like early access to ad-free video uploads by heading to http://patreon.com/writingongames
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in whatever form it takes. Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Artjom Vitsjuk, Lea Chinelo, Henry
Milek, Bryce Snyder, Lucas, David Bjork, Winter, Timothy Jones, Hibiya Mori, The NamlessGuy,
Tommy Carver Chaplin, Dr Motorcycle, Ham Migas, Shardfire, Rob, Ana Pimentel, Spike Jones,
Dallas Kean and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing
on Games. Thank you very much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.