So Frontier's treatment of Elite is nearly making me quit it for good, especially with Falconeer being so appealing and Kingmaker demanding that I finish it. Brace yourself for a rant around input methods, 6dofs and the silent war between mouse and hotas.
The thing that irritated me the most with that game - other than all the other things - is that turning rate were tied to the ship's speed, in space. Made no sense. Enter Flight Assist Off, which gives you access to proper physics and the ship's full range of capabilities, at the cost of not stopping momentum. Now Elite, unlike most civilized space sims, applies this to all momentum, including rotations. Because of course you want to keep rolling forever like a russian meme when you press that input. But I digress.
The thing was unusable on MKB for that reason, until I discovered relative mode. See, the default input method with a mouse is acceleration-based. You give him a direction and the ship keeps accelerating to get there, meaning in FA Off mode, you spin faster than a Dead or Alive song. Enter relative mode, which allows you to only have zero-order-ish inputs, which allow for fine control. FA Off became usable, physics finally made sense and I was really happy flying in that game. I dare say it felt good and right. Wide, sweeping arcs and flying that felt like a proper space sim instead of a gamified, on-rails model.
Then I entered supercruise and I discovered a war, an ignominy that has raged silently in Elite ever since its beta 5 years ago. You can't switch relative mode off on the fly. You need to enter the options menu and do the whole song and dance ever. single. time. you enter the game's main travel method. How does supercruise feel in relative mode you ask me? Like having to travel miles and miles on your mouse mat because the game forces FA on in that mode. And considering you have to survive interdictions, this effectively renders FA off unusable in a practical sense for mouse users. I've tried binding pitch and yaw on the keyboard, but I doubt this provides the finer input I need to not be interdicted, and it feels bloody awful anyway.
The community has been apparently asking for this, for a simple input option that is so trivial to implement it makes me weep space blood, for at least five years. The only two reasons I've heard offered were the following : they do not care, or they do not want to anger their HOTAS users by making the game's flying more competitive on MKB. It is sneaky, and it is basically telling users to either pony up the dough to buy a stick or not enjoy the ship's full range of capabilities.
I'm putting the game on hold slightly because of that. It's bullshit. Even Star Citizen has those input toggles and it's had them for years.
sclusive I guess?
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