With a hopeful hard date on the Arena Commander release I’m really interested to see and feel SC’s flight model.

The ED one is sublime, intentional yaw nerfing to force you to use pitch and roll more. Yaw is really only useful for fine tuning aim or lining up your nose. This gives the game a more ‘flying through air’ feel, in line with the original Elite from the 80’s which I played on the BBC B. Showing my age now!

You have flight assist which is the fly-by-wire system making the space ship fly as if in atmosphere, though you still have access to 6 way directional flight via thrusters. You can turn FA off for a completely manual mode. Whilst this is (for me at least) very difficult to use all the time, turning it on and off during a dog fight can give you the edge. There are some truly masterful pilots out there who can dog fight with it off all the time!

Here’s me messing around with it early on in the Alpha, I didn’t keep the changed key bindings and have stuck with the presets and a couple of tweaks:

I’ve tried ED with the Xbox controller and a X52 pro. Using a HOTAS is like night and day difference compared to the controller. I can not recommend a HOTAS enough, especially one with a twist stick for yaw and a 4 way hat on the throttle for strafing. I believe ED still has issues with peripheral setups that appear as individual devices like the Warthog or CH Products; the X52 appears as a single device and has a pre set profile in game.

From what I saw from the AC/DFM demos, SC seems to have a more yaw bias that looks similar to Freelancer which I’ve played; probably surprisingly to most I’ve never played any Wing Commander games. They also have a 3rd person camera view not available in ED, though to nerf the tactical advantage it could give, there won’t have any visible HUD.

SC has a similar FA like mechanism called IFCS (Intelligent Flight Control System) demo’d here:

I’ll be revisiting this topic again with my experiences and preferrences in the future.