Tie Fighter - Blog Posts

An Ode to Star Wars: TIE Fighter

    You are a member of the Imperial Navy.  Your allegiance is to the Galactic Empire, whose leaders are two of the most feared men in the galaxy.  You fly with fellow naval enlistees and officers in fighter squadrons.  Your initial ships have no shields - two to five hits and you are done.  You are asked to take out fighters that are faster, more well armed, and more protected than yours.  Their mission-to-mission fighter numbers are greater than yours.  Your side suffered a great loss a couple of years back, and you are part of an effort to gain the upper hand again.  As you fight the Rebel Alliance, traitors, pirates, and defensive neutrals come into the mix, complicating your mission and further testing your abilities.     This is a summation of one of the greatest PC games ever made, and one of my all-time favorite games in general - Star Wars: TIE Fighter.     The mechanics of the game are a refinement to its excellent predecessor, Star Wars: X-Wing.  A flight simulator focused on space combat, the player flies starfighters for the Empire, attacking ships and installations to gain advantage, inspecting cargo to capture or destroy, and escorting starships to their destinations.  The controls are just as simple and complex as before, requiring nothing but a keyboard and joystick but demanding a strong multitasking ability.  The graphics were a step up, representative of its time but of a quality that many modern games lack.  The music utilizes the same iMuse system, changing music whenever specific events happen, usually when enemies or allies arrive.  The sound effects are pure Star Wars, high quality and all.     So what sets it apart from its predecessor, and why does it hold such high regard?     First is the introduction of secondary and bonus objectives.  If you wanted to win a mission, you only needed to complete the primary goals, but the game pushed you and actually rewarded you for going above and beyond the call of duty.  You would get additional decoration for completing all secondary objectives and all bonus objectives, adding to the sense of accomplishment.  Also, you could progress through the Secret Order of the Emperor, an additional achievement path that motivated completion.  Most importantly, the secondary and bonus objectives would yield additional plot points only hinted at when pursuing the primary objectives.  What was already a solid story becomes filled with twists and turns that make it one of the best Star Wars stories ever told, reinforcing the universe  created.     Second is the difficulty.  In Star Wars: X-Wing, rival fighters were predominantly unshielded with low firepower.  In Star Wars: TIE Fighter, you started out with those unshielded, low firepower fighters.  You learned how to maneuver in those fighters.  You learned how to fight in those fighters,  You learned how to dominate in those fighters.  Once you started getting ships with shields and firepower, you became an unstoppable force with the skills you learned in the weaker ships.  The difficulty slowly escalated as the missions progressed, pushing your abilities to the limit.  However, the challenge was always worth it, and getting through the missions became achievements unto themselves - the mark of a true classic game.     Maybe the most significant mark it made, and what really set it apart from most games, is its expansion of a well-known story to profound depth, becoming a comment on war in general.     As a Star Wars fan, I followed the story how it was always presented - from the point of view of the Rebel Alliance, primarily our hero Luke.  The Rebels want justice, equality, and fairness; the Empire wants nothing but power and domination.  The Rebels are compassionate, giving, and always on defense.  The Empire are cold, emotionless, and always on offense.  The story's foundation was on a basic struggle of good versus evil.     Star Wars: TIE Fighter changed that.     The music mechanics may be the same, but the approach is novel.  A triumphant fanfare related to the "Imperial March" is used for the allies.  For the Rebel Alliance, the "Rebel Fanfare" from the films is made more ominous, establishing not only that they are the enemy but that they should be feared just as much as you are.      The opening cutscene of the game lays out the struggle from the Imperial point of view - the Rebel Alliance is an organized uprising that represents anarchy, and the Empire wants to restore peace and order.      You weren't shooting Rebels down out of sheer ironic joy.  You're protecting the order the Empire established and helping bring peace back to the galaxy.  You didn't just deal with Rebels.  Two traitors made up significant plot points - one defecting to the Rebels, and one entirely working on his own.  Star Wars: X-Wing had one traitor storyline, but never as plotted out as the two traitor storylines in Star Wars: TIE Fighter.  There were also pirates and neutral parties that came into the mix, moreso than before.     These moments establish something upon which not even the Star Wars movies touched - the nature of war.  There is never something as simple as good or evil in war.  In the simplest wars, there are only two factions.  In most wars, however, there are several faction with which to deal.  No matter the faction, you serve something greater than yourself.  You may have personal gain from it, but none of it matters if you neglect to serve your faction.  Depending on the viewpoint, you are the hero in one side's eyes and the villain in another side's eyes.  In the end, it depends solely on which side you are.     Any other Star Wars game that dabbles in the antagonist's viewpoint does so with kid gloves.  Never has a Star Wars game fully immersed a player into the opposing side as much as Star Wars: TIE Fighter did, and this immersion and respect of the craft is something that elevates the game to something unforgettable, something classic yet modern, something of a masterpiece.  The flight simulator genre may be in its twilight years, but the impact can be felt across other genres and games, most successfully in the real-time strategy classic StarCraft.  Star Wars: TIE Fighter is deserving of its stature in the top echelon of gaming and remains one of my all-time favorite games.