If you like Star Wars games, you may occasionally lament that there just aren’t enough of them. You may even lament that some of them are just too hard to revisit, aged as they are by decade upon decade of jank and compatibility issues.
TIE Fighter: Total Conversion might address both of those woes, given that it’s both a port of 1994’s TIE Fighter into 1999’s X-Wing Alliance but also a substantial upgrade in its own right with its own tweaks—worth playing even if you’ve never touched the original. Oh, and it just got a massive update per a release trailer and in-depth update breakdown video released Feb. 27. In other words, there’s never been a better time to dive in.
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As the update breakdown explains, there are a few headlining changes. For one, the game is now split into separate installers for its “Classic” and “Reimagined” versions, which tinker with the original to varying degrees. There’s also stability improvements, including new “side process” executables which should help the game’s performance keep up with the team’s ambitions.
Speaking of, each concourse room—the in-game menus which got an animated facelift back in 2023—has been given an HD upgrade with new art, animations, and more. “Every single aspect has had a major facelift,” explains mod developer Angel in the video.
“It has been almost a year-long journey to get to this point, and whilst I’m sure there will be plenty of bugs, issues, and other things to address after release, we finally got it out there.” As Angel lays out in the video, getting this far took rebuilding TFTC for the 2025 version of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade mod—twice to account for both versions in the new update.
The future is even more tantalizing; in the above video, Angel says that considerations for upcoming updates include co-op and a third game version that sets the current balance pass into stone so future updates can push things even further. The sheer scale of what’s been done on both projects is dizzying, which was already true when PC Gamer senior editor Christopher Livingston called it TFTC “the perfect mod” five years ago.
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