Wow, that's an incredible setup, and I still have doubts if to buy a throttle down the line.
Given it's free until Friday I've been trying the Arena Commander tutorial after a good half-day download.
My reaction is mixed at this stage, it's a strange Chimaera of a classic spacesim mixed with some hardcore simulation elements, and some of these elements seem a bit out of place in a game like this, am I led to believe that in a sci-fi universe like this they don't have some inertial dampener thing to avoid the effect of excessive accelerations?
Having my pilot almost pass out even when the g-limiter is active is a bit annoying considering that the way the enemies move in the tutorial you have to turn fast to maintain them in your sights.
Having the guns on gimbals is just weird for a joystick user like me (I guess it's for mouse and keyboard users, but then why the more simulative elements? Sincerely I don't know any fan of hardcore simulations that doesn't use a joystick) and when I finally found out how to put them in a fixed position I breathed a sigh of relief.
Interesting having a different impact point based lead indicator for each type of gun, but I wonder why the projectile weapon (so limited ammo I'm guessing) was defaulted to the trigger bank and the energy one to button 2 (fortunately weapon banks can be customized in-game), perhaps it's just my habit of avoiding binding weapons with limited ammo to the trigger if possible but I found it strange.
I still don't know if any of the missiles I launched actually hit the targets, but missiles act differently in every spacesim I've played so it's probably me not getting how they work here.
Also either the weapons in the tutorial are weak or the various drones and enemies are relatively strong for a tutorial mission as it took AGES to take them down.
The game is still very much an Alpha (had to copypaste a user.cfg to get it running without pausing every few seconds) but I didn't experience that many problems, of course with a Radeon HD7770 it's a bit slow but playable.
Crossing my fingers for Squadron 42 as I was never into Privateer type games myself
Me too, I find them really hit or miss, X2: The Threat was the game that made me stop buying games at day one (even though returning to it later I developed a bit of appreciation and was able to complete the main story), X3 I actually found it slightly worse, X3 TC I liked but then it starts with the spreadsheets again and capturing ships during storylines is supremely annoying, though I actually had quite a bit of fun with Privateer when I bough it from GOG.com, perhaps because there were less complications and a better story focus than the X series.
