Exactly what they said. Maybe someone will be able to pick up Star Wars 1313 (which appeared to have some promise) and some of the old properties, now that LucasArts doesn’t have them in their fumbling hands.
Okay, discounting the silliness of the TIE Defender and such in the add-ons, what space combat sim is as good as TIE Fighter, let alone better?
Wing Commander or Freespace are the usual contenders.
TIE Fighter is generally regarded as a top-10 computer game of all time. I probably spent hundreds of hours playing it.
Which is basically to say “Any other high budget spaceflight sim.” Which causes me to wonder at the praise for TIE Fighter, since usually games that are at best on part with and at worst, appreciably worse than all the other high budget competition in their genre don’t get that kind of positive press.
X-wing and Tie fighter were revolutionary and introduced a lot of stuff that Wing Commander and Freespace, among others, later copied. Wing Commander at its best never came close to Tie Fighter. Freespace 2 is IMHO the better game, but that was released fiver years later and owes a lot to Tie Fighter…
What do people think TIE Fighter did better than say, Wing Commander 2? I guess it had the energy management system, but that was kindof crap when half your ships didn’t have shields anyway, and broken when they introduced the stupid TIE Defender. Hmm. I guess they had ship disabling with Ion Cannons, and KIIIINDOF had different subsystems on larger ships?
But honestly, the lack of afterburner in TIE Fighter ruined the game for me. All the other “advantages” couldn’t make up for the fact that I never felt like I was moving fast.
I’m a bit disappointed to see Star Wars 1313 may possibly have gotten the axe, since it looked promising, but honestly LucasArts hadn’t made a good game since the 1990s, so it’s hard to get too choked up about it dying.
Yeah, never played Freespace but I did play through Wing Commanders 1 through 3. Loved them to death, great games. But Tie Fighter - at the time, roughly concurrent - had significantly more depth and variety in the missions. Not hating, love them both.
Liked X-Wing, like TIE Fighter, liked Wing Commander. (I think I might own every WC game released including crap like Academy; Privateer is probably my favorite.) That said, I haven’t even thought of LucasArts in years, not since they went to only Star Wars games. So I’m a little sad to see the studio go, but there’s always hope that some of the older IP could still be used. To me, this isn’t the same as EA buying a developer and then destroying it.
I had the deluxe or gold or whatever edition on CD-ROM. I think I was 12 when it came out.
Through the filter of my memories of the 90s, I remember feeling that TIE Fighter’s graphics were much cleaner and more hi-tech than anything else out at the time. The systems controls were robust enough to be important but not so complicated that they were inaccessible. The gameplay was tight, the capital ships felt large. The ability to replay a mission and jump into any ship you wanted was especially cool. The voice acting and cutscenes were all cool, too.
Then, on top of all of that, it was Star Wars.
TIE Fighter could have been a generic space shooter with a Star Wars theme tacked on, but it was a really good space shooter that had a really good Star Wars theme created for it.
That kind of confluence with licensed IP rarely happens, even today.
I loved Wing Commander and Freespace, but TIE Fighter blew them both out of the water. It has never been surpassed in its genre. And yes, it’s one of the ten best PC games of all time.
I think you have that backward; X-Wing was contemporary with Wing Commander III, in 1993 or so, with Wing Commander and Wing Commander II having come out years earlier in 1990 and 1991 respectively. So if there was any copying, it was the LucasArts games copying Origin, not the other way around.
Neither X-Wing nor Tie Fighter was anything special at all- had they not had the HUGE advantage of being in the Star Wars universe, they wouldn’t have been a blip on anyone’s radar for gameplay. They were well done and had good graphics for teh time, but as far as anything else went, it wasn’t super-special.
IMO, there was something kind of sterile about the X-Wing/Tie Fighter series- like a lack of chaos- everything moved too smoothly, and they weren’t chaotic enough. I don’t ever recall getting that lump in the gut feeling in those games that I routinely got in the Wing Commander games.
This sums it up really well for me; I attribute the ‘sterile’ feeling to the lack of a good way to rapidly change speed (they dropped the ‘afterburner’ concept that had been around since Wing Commander 1 and which, frankly, is absolutely the best design decision made in that game.) which meant that you don’t really have that ‘kinetic’ feeling of ships moving around really fast. This is doubtless a deliberate maneuver on the part of the developers, since A) They could not have failed to be aware of the mechanic B) “Star Wars Ships don’t have ‘afterburners’” C) It gives you that weird sense of everything moving very precisely that you also get in the movies when watching flights of TIE Fighters. It just doesn’t make for good gameplay. Also, the extreme lack of variety in ships and weapons made it pretty uninspiring, and the energy management system (the only real innovation the game made) really doesn’t add much when you only have two systems to route energy between.
About the best thing I can say about TIE Fighter is that they did a good job of allowing you to be the “hero” without completely demolishing the Rebel Alliance.
I had not heard of 1313 until yesterday. Can somebody please explain the appeal of the concept? Why on earth would you want to play a gun totting grunt in the universe of Jedi Knights?
Because it’s “gritty” and “for adults” but lets you continue to enjoy your boyhood love of Star Wars. 
I dunno, that’s all I got.
Sigh. Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle were fun. Can’t say I’m surprised though.
Trust me, it could work. Star Wars: The Old Republic lets you play two kinds of Jedi (Knights vs Consulars) or two kinds of Sith (Warriors vs Inquisitors) - and it’s still fun to play a Bounty Hunter, Trooper, Smuggler, or Imperial Agent.
Pity the game tanked - it needed more development time, and now they’re stuck in a free-to-play (with bonuses for subscribers) model and will probably never dig out of the hole they’re in.
There are compelling stories to be told in the Star Wars universe that don’t require the main character to be a Jedi. 1313 had a lot of potential.
I’m not sure how more development time could have helped The Old Republic. It was pretty well developed and solid on release. It’s a perfectly good game.
The problem with it is that it’s too much like all the other ones, with many asects of gameplay and character design just stolen wholesale from WoW and other games like that. More development time wouldn’t have changed that.
From what I saw of Star Wars 1313 it looked like Mass Effect’s game play in the Star Wars universe which seemed very cool to me and as others wrote, if nothing else, Star Wars The Old Republic showed that playing something other than a Jedi could be fun.
ETA: Re: SWTOR, if they had released all the story lines as eight single player games I would have bought every one. The audience wanted more MMO and less what made SWTOR different so that was what they did and I bailed. It was a fun game though.