The flying was simplified as you say, it's the amount of commands you need to use that would be hard to do on a console. If you just take the function key commands of the old games,, that's more than you could control with a controller.
I gotcha now. Sorry, complete console gamer here with little pc gaming beyond Diablo 1&2 lol.
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WesR, yea other than the assassin's creed games, this was a total "F it, why not" moment. And I'm one of the disgruntled Division players who doesn't know if they want to come back...even though I did like it better than Destiny.
To elaborate a little bit...
First, the flight model in the old X-wing and Tie Fighter PC games was pretty different. By that, I mean that ships moved at different speeds and showed different levels of responsiveness. You had more control over the craft than in, say, Battlefront. You could pitch, yaw, and roll, or do combinations of all three (assuming your joystick let you). You really NEEDED a joystick to play, too.
Many of the functions could probably be replicated on a controller, but there are a ton of different inputs to consider. This included -- at least in later games -- targeting individual components, assigning stored targets to your computer's memory so that you could quickly check on something, being able to issue orders to wingmen and other friendly ships (which were obeyed to...varying degrees), setting shield, laser, and special weapon recharge rates (e.g. if your fighter mounted a tractor beam), and a bunch of additional abilities. In addition to just the basic joystick controls, you had probably, oh, 80-ish individual keyboard interactions you could use. Here's a link to the reference card for X-wing vs. Tie Fighter:
http://www.emperorshammer.org/to/files/wiki/xvt_cheat_sheet.pdf
Now, not all of those things are necessary on a console, I suppose, but most of them are. And there simply aren't enough inputs on console controls to do this. You MIGHT be able to catch the bulk of them with, say, a HOTAS setup like the Ace Edge pack that came with Ace Combat 6's special edition (that's a joystick and throttle control), but even then I think you'd be missing a few.
Moreover, remember that flight model stuff I mentioned? It's....VASTLY different from modern games. Everything was slower in many respects. Your ship responded slower, your lasers fired and flew towards the target slower, your missiles and such flew slower, on a straightaway you'd be flying slower even at max speed. In some respects, this is due to the fact that the game demanded more of your energy be focused on things like managing the craft, what with all of the various keyboard inputs and such. You needed the time to do things like punch buttons, so they couldn't have you moving at, like, the speeds you see in Battlefront. Some of it was also probably due to processing speed. Later games in the series (XvT and X-Wing alliance) sped things up quite a bit by comparison to the earlier games. But even then, it was still slower than console gaming.
I'd love these games to make a comeback, but I think they'd be playing to a very niche market.
I don't buy that many digital titles so the discounts probably wouldn't help much. About all i get digital is dlc. The problem with the Division is so much of it makes you deal with other people which i hate doing. It seems a lot of Ubisoft games are going towards always online multiplayer.
They did that with Watch Dogs. You could turn it off if you wanted to, but the default was that people could "invade" your game and vice versa. Certain unlocks in the game (decent ones, too) required you to do these jobs. I did maybe 4 and then decided I didn't like it. The theory of this stuff is always better than the reality. What's the old saying? No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.