Star Wars: Squadrons is only about two months away at this point from its October 2nd release date and today EA revealed a ton of new details regarding the intricate ship and pilot customization options.
We already knew there would be the opportunity to customize everything from the exterior design of your ship, interior items like bobbleheads, as well as components under the hood that affect your weapons and flight handling. From a distance it certainly seemed like there was quite a lot if depth. Now, it’s more clear than ever that this is certainly the type of game to encourage tweaking and tinkering.
Ship Component Customization
According to the blog post, you’ll unlock components that affect your ship’s performance by spending Requisition points — a currency that’s earned in-game only. EA has stated multiple times that there will not be any microtransactions. These components can offer either passive changes, such as bolstering defenses with a stronger hull, or active changes, such as swapping weapons.
Depending on the type of ship you’re flying there are up to seven component slots (2-3 passive and 4 active per ship) to fill:
- Primary Weapons (active)
- Auxiliary (x2, active)
- Countermeasures (active)
- Hull (passive)
- Shields (not all ships have shields, passive)
- Engine (passive)
As expected the primary weapons are your basic way of engaging enemies, think blasters, ion cannons, and other weapons you’ll be firing constantly during battles. Your two auxiliary slots on the other hand go to secondary abilities, such as tractor beams, repair devices, bombs, and more. You’re not allowed duplicates though, so you couldn’t for example have two repair units for your auxiliary slots.
Those three slots are all about active engagement usually, but your countermeasures are used for disengaging from combat most of the time, such as seeker warheads to take out missiles that are trailing you or sensor hammers to prevent lock-ons. Passive components are self-explanatory, they affect your stats and how features on the ship act, but don’t change what you can actively do. For example, switching to a shield that is more resilient to blasters but less useful against missiles.
It’s also important to keep in mind that all of this is in addition to power management during battles and the way that each cockpit has a completely different look, feel, and perspective in Star Wars: Squadrons.
“Between power management, overcharging, shield balancing or emergency power conversion, boosting, drifting, throttle management, primary weapons, auxiliary abilities, and countermeasures, the combat piloting experience has significant depth,” says James Clement, Lead Gameplay Designer, in the blog post. “You can learn the ropes quickly, yet you can look forward to discovering new techniques and tactics for months to come. On top of that, there’s a wealth of customizable components to choose from. There’s a healthy selection to start with and more to unlock through gameplay as you progress.”
Cosmetic Customization
In addition to being able to tweak what is under the hood of the various starfighters in Star Wars: Squadrons, you can also change the way your ships and pilots look using Glory points, which are also earned in-game only. Pilot appearances and cosmetics are used in both single-player and multiplayer.
For pilots specifically, options are quite exhaustive considering it’s a first-person only space combat game:
- Various heads to pick from
- Outfit designs and colors
- Torso apparel
- Legwear
- Helmets
- Gloves
- Voice styles
I’d imagine you’ll only see your pilot in menus and cutscenes, so this level of depth is really encouraging to see. You’ll get to choose from multiple different types of heads, outfit colors and designs, torso apparel, voice styles, and more.
Types of ship cosmetic customization options include:
- Dashboard figures
- Hanging flair
- Cockpit hologram
- Hull paint job design
- Decals
Enemies in Star Wars: Squadrons will be able to see the inside of your cockpit, if you enjoy showing off, when they watch back the killcam footage after their defeat. However, if you prefer authenticity, there will actually be an option to turn off all the custom designs and make everything look authentic to the films. That’s a nice touch for the hardcore fans.
“The holo-display, normally used to provide critical phase and objective information throughout the Fleet Battles doubles as a customizable image projector,” says Clements in the blog post. “There are also hanging flairs like a miniature Millennium Falcon and dashboard-mounted objects like a severed protocol droid head or an Ewok bobblehead. Then of course there are the ship exterior paint jobs and pilot avatar customizations, all made through the culmination of months of concept art, modeling, and collaboration with the team at Lucasfilm.”
And the cherry on top at the end of the latest Star Wars: Squadrons blog post is that you’ll be able to save preferred loadouts, like ship subclasses, for ease of access and saving.
Star Wars: Squadrons is shaping up to be quite the spectacle for space combat and Star Wars fans when it releases this October 2nd on PSVR and PC VR for $39.99 with full cross-platform and cross-device multiplayer support. For more on the game, make sure and check out our details breakdown of everything you need to know and don’t forget to read about new gameplay details from the latest footage.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
