PC Gaming Remembering Wing Commander: 30th Anniversary

[Husky_Khan]

I actually never played any Wing Commander game but I was told it was a pretty big franchise back in the day... as in back when Battletech and Babylon 5 were up there in popularity with Star Trek and Star Wars, at least among the truly depraved science fiction fans in that age of the world known as the nineties.

But on September 26th, 1990, the first Wing Commander game was released on something called MS-DOS.

Over the next decade, four more Wing Commander games, numerous expansion packs (before the era of DLC they called them expansion packs you see, your gameplay expands as your wallet deflates), several spinoff games, an animated televion series, ten novels and a Hollywood movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr, Matthew Lillard and that immediately recognizable old French guy that's in lots of movies.

Wing Commander then sort of just... faded away as a franchise. Games were cancelled, the movie just wasn't that good and the franchise, from what I can tell, was unable to move on narratively from the primary focus of the franchise which was a long ongoing conflict with a race of aggressive, expansionist furballs known as the Kilrathi Empire. Plus other games were released like Colony Wars, Freespace and Homeworld.

But Wing Commander was one of the first games (if not the first popular game) that popularized starfighter combat in PC games. It's weird talking about a franchise I know almost nothing about but... maybe I'll have a chance to check it out now and for cheap as well.

The entire franchise is currently 75% off on Good Old Games.

A look inside the cockpit of the famous Wing Commander series

A look inside the cockpit of the famous Wing Commander series

www.gog.com

Also...



Check out that Full Motion Video where Luke Skywalker and Gimli shared the same stage.



And an HD Reconstruction of the 1999 Wing Commander film

 

[gral]

Ah, yes, Wing Commander...

Of the entire main series, the only things I didn't play were WC Secret Missions 2(second expansion pack of the original game), WC2 Secret Operations 2(again, second expansion pack), and the Wing Commander: Prophecy free-to-download 'expansion pack' which was a repackaging of what they had done for the cancelled WCP sequel, with a few cutscenes tacked on.

As said above, the series never managed to move on past the events of WC3, where the Kilrathi Empire gets defeated: Wing Commander 4 was OK(good actors, decent plot, but it felt to me that they did it because WC3 was a success and they had to capitalize on it, without thinking much on where to go for the series - keep in mind EA had bought Origin Systems between the WC3 and WC4 releases), and I think Prophecy, which would be the start of a new Wing Commander saga, never managed to excite the fans at all(I seem to be a rare fan, in that I liked WCP more than I did WC4 - also, Chris Roberts had already left Origin Systems, joining Microsoft to eventually create Starlancer and Freelancer).

Add on to that the fact that most spin-off games were trash(Wing Commander Privateer was good, but it didn't need to be set on the Wing Commander Universe, as Privateer 2: The Darkening showed, Wing Commander Armada and Arena sucked more than a 5-dollar whore), and the abortion of nature that was the movie, and you can understand a bit why the franchise tanked - one of the first times I saw something of my adolescence getting destroyed by bad corporate decisions(both on Origin's and EA's part).

There's enough widows of the series out there to be funding Star Citizen, but that's another story(no, Chris Roberts; I like you, and I dearly wish for you to succeed, but you're not seeing my money until Squadron 42 gets released)....

Ah, there's a Freespace mod that is set in the same time as the events of WC3 game. Let me remember what was its name... here it is: Wing Commander Saga - The Darkest Dawn, done by Burning Earth Productions. There's a let's play of the whole mod on their YouTube channel.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I played the heck out of this series and I can confirm it was great. A year didn't go by without either a new Wing Commander or an expansion pack to the previous one. I didn't really keep with it in the later years to be sure as I'd moved on from that active level of gaming but from what I saw it declined quite a bit.

Wing Commander did have issues, not for me because I liked it that way but for a lot of gamers. It was basically a flight sim wedded to a soap opera/visual novel. In between your missions there were always lengthy character building segments where your character and the other pilots would do everything from play poker to discussing philosophy to getting in arguments to making out (with fade to black). Personally I liked it having such detailed world building and especially the character building. It made things an absolute gut-punch when somebody you'd gotten that close to got blown away in a mission.

Spoiler: Deaths

Two deaths in WC2 are especially wracking, Shadow and Spirit. Shadow's your first wingman in the game and she's just a country-girl militia pilot who flies patrols, not skilled enough to really bring the fight to the enemy but good enough to scout in a Ferret. You talk to her about her family, her friends, her hopes and dreams for the future. And then the Kilrathi invade that sector, she has to actually fight when the Concordia takes hit to the flight deck and enemy bombers are moving in, and dies trying right next to you.

Spirit is from the first game and has a long, long history with the MC. She's one of the few pilots to believe you're not a traitor during that arc, and then the real traitor gets to her. You and she are assigned to blow away an enemy supply depot, so the traitor arranges for her POW fiance to be transferred to the station right before she's sent to do a torpedo run on it, then sends her pictures. She winds up Kamikaze'ing the station because she can't find a way to preserve her honor.

The massive plot even affects actual gameplay. Different wingmen had different AIs to represent their neuroses. Notably in the first game, Iceman would never retreat no matter how you ordered him (he was very bitter after the Kilrathi genocided his home planet) while Maniac, the game's village idiot, did not check if you were between him and an enemy before firing. Fortunately you didn't have to fly with Maniac unless you were on punishment detail. In later games and would change AI behavior depending on the choices you made and your relationships. It was actually possible to make Maniac obey you though you pretty much had to break his spirit.

Overall this proved a weakness because a lot of twitch gamers weren't interested in the lengthy soap operas of the characters. But honestly the movie was the most baffling thing. The games were practically movies already. You could just about throw a movie together by recording the hours of cutscenes between missions and pasting them together. And the games had freakin' Mark Hamill and Thomas F. Wilson as the actors in the later ones. Instead they went with Matthew Lillard and Freddie Prinze Junior. Who the heck, when making a sci-fi epic, has Luke Skywalker and Biff Tannen on tap and decides to go with Freddie and Shaggy instead?

I know from interviews that Hamill himself wanted to play Maniac rather than Blair, but the developers felt that Mark Hamill didn't have the chops to play a crazy person and so made him be the straight man. Joker, can we get your opinion on whether Mark Hamill is capable of acting crazy?




Okay, one other equally baffling thing. Privateer 2. They removed your fighter's cargo bay and made it so that to move cargo, you had to hire freighters and escort them to other planets. Let me repeat that. They decided to make the game all escort missions. Who's dumb enough to make a game where all the missions are the single most loathed kind of mission in gaming?

 

[LTR]

I think I played the first Wing Commander on SegaCD when I was very, very, very wittle.

Maniac was useless back then and annoying and I'm sure the graphics now would make me think the game is unplayable as opposed to awesome looking like back in the day. But I don't know. The sale does intrigue me if only for my insatiable curiosity to see how everything has aged perhaps. Plus oddly enough I never did play any of the subsequent games.

I do remember Angel and Iceman and Paladin and Knight and the rather detailed conversations you could have with them and even specifically remember Iceman and Knight debating the finer points over which is better, fast and agile fighters (Iceman) or heavier armament and armor/shields which was what Knight was advocating and they even interjected with each other.

There was also a mission and kill board. I remember in my first playthrough I had eight missions and no kills. I was so terrible at that game.

And the choices you made in the game also meant changes in the greater storyline and whether the Terran Confederation would win or lose in that sector of space and thus the war itself. And in combat you could taunt your enemies ("Die Furball!") or they would taunt you when they shot somone down ("Another Dead Monkey!") Good stuff all around.

And it is a great scifi franchise. It is truly a pity it never really managed to sustain itself like even Battletech managed to do. But that is the problem with basing your game franchise around a single major conflict. It's hard to move on from it.

 

[LTR]

Jhadur is undoubtedly jealous she doesn't have a Holiday as based as this one.

 

[Bear Ribs]

One other interesting thing was how technology advanced in Wing Commander.

In WC1 the softest fighter was the Hornet, with 4.5cm of armor. Your carrier the Tiger's Claw had 24cm.

By WC2 the Ferret had 6.5cm and wasn't considered a viable combat craft, while the carrier Concordia had 500cm.

Fast Forward a few years to the Prophecy era and the Piranha had 250cm while the Vesuvius class was rocking 4000cm.

Weapons tech constantly changed too, such as phase shields making capital craft invincible to anything but torpedoes in WC2, requiring bombing runs for those, and then improved point defense that would take out your torpedoes requiring you to blow the turrets individually off a capital craft in later games.

 

[LTR]

Ben Lesnick put up some neat stuff on his Twitter account. Silhouette size chart of Terran Confederation and Kilrathi Empire ships that dates waaaaaay back to 1998.

 

[Agent23]

I am familiar with the franchise, a few of the books were decent, and IIRC written by William H. Keith of Bolo fame, I enjoyed the movie as a kid and got the games on GoG already, but I've never managed to actually get to them, since I'd rather play something with somewhat better graphics and controls.

The only Roberts games I've actually played were Conquest: Frontier Wars and Freelancer, Conquest was a decent StarCraft clone, but Freelancer is still in my top 10.