As Star Wars fans head into the home stretch of the wait for EA’s upcoming space shooter, the development team has revealed a ton of information to satiate those fans looking to have Star Wars: Squadrons progression systems explained.
As with almost every game out there with a progression system, you’ll earn experience by playing the game. Fill that bar and you’ll level up and earn Requisition, a currency used to unlock components for your ships.
Active/Passive Components
Components come in two flavours: active and passive. Active components consist of primary weapons, auxiliary components, and countermeasures. Unlocking components in this category means fundamental changes to gameplay. Converting your guns to ion cannons that shred the shields of opposing ships but do little damage to the physical structure, for example.
With four active component slots available on ships, modifications will allow players to tailor a ship to their strengths. Players with good aim might opt to swap their guns automatic fire into a burst-fire mode to do more damage at range, while those with potato aim might want to convert their cannons into a high fire-rate bullet hose they can sweep across the sky and hope for the best.
Active components also help shore up defenses, with countermeasure augmentations like seeker warheads to take out incoming missiles. Prefer to play more defensively? Use sensor jammers to help prevent missile lock-on from happening in the first place. If worse comes to worst and you take damage on sorties, use an auxiliary slot for a repair mech.
Passive components cover the hull, engines, and – if equipped – the shields of the ship, and they generally augment performance. You can specialize here as well though, choosing shields that are stronger against blasters for example – but these components often come with trade-offs. Boost your engine’s top speed and you might have to deal with it cornering like a space cow.
Daily/Operation Challenges
Once you have your ship outfitted, it’s time to start earning Glory. This is the game’s other currency, dedicated to unlocking cosmetics for both your pilots (on both Imperial and New Republic sides of the conflict) and starfighters. Like other progression-based games, Squadrons offers Challenges to undertake for rewards. Daily Challenges – like completing matches in a specific playlist, winning matches, or destroying enemies – offer an incentive to log in daily and play a few matches.
There are also Operation Challenges that will take more time to complete – the example given below involves completing 20 Daily Challenges during the Operation – an eight-week competition period where pilots will try to advance through the Fleet Battle ranks from Maverick to Galactic Ace.
If that’s not enough progression, there’s also your player level. This is separate from your characters, ships, and fleet rank. As you level up you’ll unlock Requisition points until 40. At this point, you’ll have earned enough points to unlock all components and can start experimenting with builds.
Want more? There’ll also be bonus events to earn Glory and other rewards. Progressing through the game’s campaign and the Fleet Battles tutorial also unlocks cosmetic bundles.
Now that we’ve had a look at Star Wars: Squadrons progression systems it’s easy to see how the developers hope to keep your interest. In a few weeks we’ll see if the gameplay is good enough to get your interest in the first place.
Star Wars: Squadrons launches October 2nd, 2020 on PC via Steam or Epic Games Store, PS4, and Xbox One.
