EA reveal how multiplayer matches will work in Star Wars Squadrons

Bill Cooney

EA’s newest Star Wars game finally takes players back to the cold vacuum of space to dogfight in X-Wings and TIE Fighters, and now we have more information about how the game will actually play from developers.

Squadrons was revealed during the EA Play event on June 15, and the excitement over the first true Star Wars dogfighting game in over a decade has been high ever since.

From the reveal, we knew that the game will have a 5v5 multiplayer mode, and the game’s creative director Ian Frazier filled us in during an interview with GameSpot on what all we can expect from the game’s multiplayer and single-player game modes and campaigns.

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We’ll finally be able to hop into the cockpit of a TIE Fighter in Squadrons, but what will matches actually look like?

Squadrons will feature both multiplayer and single-player options. In single-player, you’ll have the option to go into the campaign mode or participate in Fleet Battles, either by yourself or with a group of friends going up against the AI (which comes with varying levels of difficulty).

For multiplayer, we’ll get dogfights, which is your “whoever gets the most kills wins” game mode, and Fleet Battles, which is where your team of five faces off against another squad in a grand space battle where you have to destroy larger ships.

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Frazier said many of the devs working on Squadrons also worked on Battlefield 2’s space battles, which as you may remember, gave players the option use third-person view while in a starfighter. Apparently, they went back and forth on whether or not to add a third-person mode before sticking with the locked first-person cockpit view.

“The game is designed, from the ground up, to be first-person view,” Frazier revealed. “From just a practical design standpoint, if we had third-person, suddenly there’s always inherently a competitive advantage with third-person, because you have more peripheral vision. So the way we intended players to experience the game (in first-person), no one will, because you have a competitive advantage.”

A locked cockpit view does raise the question of how the game will balance the ships fielded by the Empire versus those of the Rebel Scum. Imperial TIE fighters and their variants have a front-facing opening, which seems like it would provide a much smaller sightline than say, an X-Wing, with its relatively wide-open canopy.

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Looking at these two and it’s no wonder TIE Fighter pilots always seem to crash.

“We found that the fact it (TIE Fighters) focus you forward, actually makes the game easier for a lot of players, because there’s just less stuff to take in,” Frazier explained. “The counterbalance in what you’re losing, you’re gaining in what you can focus on.”

There was a lot more info provided in the video than just the main points we covered here, so if you’re looking to become a hero of the New Republic or an Imperial Ace, it’s definitely worth a watch. As always, be sure to stick with Dexerto for all the latest Star Wars Squadrons updates, news, and info as we get closer to the October 2 release date.

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About The Author

Bill is a former writer at Dexerto based in Iowa, who covered esports, gaming and online entertainment for more than two years. With the US team, Bill covered Overwatch, CSGO, Influencer culture, and everything in between.