Star Wars: Squadrons can teach us about reviving classic genres

gamedeveloper.com:

In 2020, EA Motive sprung out of nowhere with Star Wars: Squadrons, a compact dogfighting simulator that followed the footsteps of Star Wars: TIE Fighter and Star Wars: X-Wing. Its release was notable not only because of how popular those games were in their heyday, but also for the fact that not many flight simulation titles have made it to market lately. 

It's been such a long time since such games were mainstream that making a game like Squadrons might be considered an effort at genre revival. That made creative director Ian Frazier's GDC 2022 postmortem of the game's development all the more interesting. This wasn't just a look inside a successful Star Wars game, it also contained steps to consider when reviving classic genres.

Frazier's full talk tackled everything from snubfighter design to best practices for focus testing. Here's some highlights that exemplified what the game did so well.

Frazier's talk began with some familiar patter about how the Squadrons team comprised of so many Star Wars fans (game developers, being fans of Star Wars? You don't say). 

But that fandom came paired with development strategy. Frazier and his colleagues raided the archives for copies of the different Star Wars space sims from the '90s, rigged up some old joysticks, and had team members play them.

A key part of this effort was making sure that players both new and old, Star Wars fans and Star Wars fair-weather-fans, took a shot at these old games. The goal was to honestly assess what worked (and didn't work) about these old titles. Frazier said the team took it a step further, digging up old reviews and FAQs to read contemporary assessments about the flight simulator genre.

Frazier noted that the flight simulator genre had fallen out of