Admiral Tolwyn's Court Martial

Same here, I think they didn't show that trailer here in Germany...or at least I didn't see it.

Even in the US, video game trailers (at least, circa 1995) were regulated to the realm of trade shows and industry (re: gamer) publications, with the occasional video game store outfitted with a TV monitor (ah, Babbages...) that showed such video. This is a far cry from the present, with GameTrailers.com and GameStop with it's own in-store TV network.

There were, of course, video game commercials, but according to the CIC the WC4 commercial only played on SciFi Channel (which was still in it's infacy) a handful of times.

That being said, trailers are made by the distributor/publisher, and I'd think that those making the trailers only had a handful of completed footage and a rough outline of the plot, with no necessary prior knowlege of WC lore. "A man deranged by war" has a much better hook than Tolwyn's actual motivations, but I do wish they were a bit more creative/abstract, instead of ruining the final act's surprise for us!
 
Even in the US, video game trailers (at least, circa 1995) were regulated to the realm of trade shows and industry (re: gamer) publications, with the occasional video game store outfitted with a TV monitor (ah, Babbages...) that showed such video. This is a far cry from the present, with GameTrailers.com and GameStop with it's own in-store TV network.

There were, of course, video game commercials, but according to the CIC the WC4 commercial only played on SciFi Channel (which was still in it's infacy) a handful of times.


Except that Origin shiped many of their other games with the WC4 ad on the disk... such as the privateer gold box... and then there were the multipage previews in various magazines etc etc.
 
Except that Origin shiped many of their other games with the WC4 ad on the disk... such as the privateer gold box... and then there were the multipage previews in various magazines etc etc.

Good catch on the disk previews. Do you know if they were on only Origin games? It would make more sense - and reach a broader audience - if they were featured with other EA games, but I'm not aware of any examples.

I was talking about trailers only, though, because they probably are the hardest to find type of advertising back then. I know a quick look through the CIC's news archive can bring up many pages of in-depth reviews and previews from gamer magazines in all different languages - I'm sure many of them dropped the ball about Tolwyn's turn at genocide.

I think a lot of the pre-release misconceptions of Tolwyn's action comes from poor image control by the hands of the advertisers. They wanted to raise the hype that, amongst the star-studded cast, Malcolm McDowell played a major role, ultimately (except for the fact that we weren't supposed to find it out until the very end) as the main villain. Again, it was a bit of an easy cop-out (re: laziness) to mention Tolwyn's motives, instead of letting players discover things in their own right.
 
Still, it always felt to me like Forstchen simply couldn't let go of his favourite character, and wanted to get across one more time that this was a great big hero.

I don't know if we can give Forstchen much credit here, one way or the other. Forstchen's role in the novelizations was to turn the game's script into a very short outline. It's possible he made this call at that point, but it's more likely that Ben Ohlander, who wrote all the prose, provided this detail.(This is something Baen does a lot - when you see two names on a single story, the less famous one did the lion's share of the work.)

...Though, now that I think about it, there was no way for him to get it right - it was too bizarre for Tolwyn to kill himself rather than face a firing squad, so either the death sentence had to be changed so that Tolwyn could hang himself, or the suicide would have had to be removed so tha Tolwyn could face his execution.

Sadly, this is just another one of Wing Commander IV's oh-so-subtle 'they're Nazis... in Space!' references. Like Tolwyn, Goering went to trial, fought for his life and was sentenced to death... but 'showed up' his captors by poisoning himself the day before he was to be hanged.

The far more interesting interpretation, which the novelization reached for but ultimately failed to grasp, was the (American, anyway) tradition that disgraced military men will kill themselves rather than further embarass their country. It just doesn't make sense if he's already dragged the Confederation through a trial.

(I remember there was a famous instance of this *just* after Wing Commander IV was released -- an Admiral who shot himself when it was learned he'd been wearing the wrong service ribbons.)

I think it was a actually a mistake for Origin/EA to market WC4 that way. I would have rather liked to have been genuinely shocked at Tolwyn's actions but everyone pretty much knew that he was the bad guy because of the advertising.

I may be wrong, but my memory was that the 'revealing' trailer wasn't released (or at least readily available) until after the game had been released. The big problem in February, 1996 was that the reveal had been kept a secret... until the official guide put a picture of Tolwyn hanging himself on the page opposite where the ship specifications started.

The initial ad campaign was that the traitor was a surprise - the teaser poster was a somewhat misleading Blair and Tolwyn back to back, with a shadow figure behind them
 
Sadly, this is just another one of Wing Commander IV's oh-so-subtle 'they're Nazis... in Space!' references. Like Tolwyn, Goering went to trial, fought for his life and was sentenced to death... but 'showed up' his captors by poisoning himself the day before he was to be hanged.
Mhmm, which makes it even more ironic - Goering, once he was sentenced to death by hanging, fought for the right to be executed by firing squad as a military man - he poisoned himself to avoid hanging, not to avoid being executed. Tolwyn seems to have ended up doing the exact opposite.
 
Its too bad that jerkwad Blair had to mess up a good thing for Admiral Tolwyn. Imagine once the Nephilim showed up. Not only would Tolwyn have some super soldiers for the 'test of the aligned people' but he would have likely decided that the 'Big_Bad_Alien' menace wasn't good enough to be on top of the pyramid.

Humanity could be running the galaxy by now.
 
Its too bad that jerkwad Blair had to mess up a good thing for Admiral Tolwyn. Imagine once the Nephilim showed up.

If Tolwyn had his way, the Nephilim would have encountered the human worlds with 1/10th their population. The novel did a really good job of explaining the lack of foresight with "The Plan" by showing 90% of Telamon's population eradicated in just a few days, with the remainder falling victim to secondary diseases from the rotting bodies lining the street and breakdown of sanitation services.

I think Tolwyn's willingness to release an ultra-deadly, super-contagious nanovirus to both Confederation and Border Worlds planets was the crux of his case for genocide.
 
Civilian trial or court martial?

I haven't played WCIV in a good long while and it has probably been over a year since I've read the novelization.
Just a quick question: was it a trial, like one would find in the civilian justice system or a la Nurenburg, or was it a military court martial.
If it was a military court martial one of the duties of the presiding officers is to ensure future discipline and morale of the armed forces. So even if fellow Navy and Marine officers had presided over the trial the verdict would have probably been the same. You can't have your flag officers setting up rogue operations and erradicating civilian populations. Gives everyone else the impression they can do as they see fit and the chain of command breaks down.
If it was a civilian trial I would bet the Joint Chiefs and associated heads of the military were just as happy to hear the verdict that was handed down for the same reasons.
 
Just a quick question: was it a trial, like one would find in the civilian justice system or a la Nurenburg, or was it a military court martial.
If it was a military court martial one of the duties of the presiding officers is to ensure future discipline and morale of the armed forces. So even if fellow Navy and Marine officers had presided over the trial the verdict would have probably been the same. You can't have your flag officers setting up rogue operations and erradicating civilian populations. Gives everyone else the impression they can do as they see fit and the chain of command breaks down.

According to the novel, the trial was a full Courts Martial before the Admirality Court. It's interesting, though, that there appears to be influence from the Senate through Taggart, who insisted on the military to "clean its laundry in public, paving the way for full freedom of the press." Even after the war, the Confederation was running on wartime edicts, including the emergency decrees that came after the False Armistice. Tolwyn's trial was one of the first steps to re-gearing the Confederation to its tradional democratic state, after wartime operations that had lasted over thirty years.
 
Well... what can Mjav say?
He did read a "Fleet Action" just recently, and having only
WC, WC2, WC3 and WC4, mjav could only despise Admiral Tolwyn.
Having watched the WCA cartoon, he despised Tolwyn, too...
But after the "Fleet Action" Mjav is not so much sure.
Do we not see that Tolwyn risked everything to stop the Cats' plan?
Do we not see that he started the Black Lance sincerely?
Do we not see that Confed was really unprepared for bugs to come?
Do we not see that Tolwyn's Empire would crush the bugs without much effort?
Don't take me wrong, Mjav's a BW-sider.
But from the certain point of view Tolwyn was really saving a homo sapiens as a specie, wasn't he? And it is very natural that he killed himself, seeing that his plan of saving humanity had failed...
Of course it is only Tolwyn from novel.
Tolwyn from WC-IV game WAS A MURDERER WHO MURDERED WITH A SMILE, WAS A MANIAC WHO ENJOED HIS POWER.
Which one is your favourite Tolwyn? ;)
P.S.
To Mjav. ingame Tolwyn looks like famous marshal Zhukov, who is described by some historians as a cannon-fodder-style strategyst...
 
Well... what can Mjav say?
He did read a "Fleet Action" just recently, and having only
WC, WC2, WC3 and WC4, mjav could only despise Admiral Tolwyn.
Having watched the WCA cartoon, he despised Tolwyn, too...
But after the "Fleet Action" Mjav is not so much sure.
Do we not see that Tolwyn risked everything to stop the Cats' plan?
Do we not see that he started the Black Lance sincerely?
Do we not see that Confed was really unprepared for bugs to come?
Do we not see that Tolwyn's Empire would crush the bugs without much effort?
Don't take me wrong, Mjav's a BW-sider.
But from the certain point of view Tolwyn was really saving a homo sapiens as a specie, wasn't he? And it is very natural that he killed himself, seeing that his plan of saving humanity had failed...
Of course it is only Tolwyn from novel.
Tolwyn from WC-IV game WAS A MURDERER WHO MURDERED WITH A SMILE, WAS A MANIAC WHO ENJOED HIS POWER.
Which one is your favourite Tolwyn? ;)
P.S.
To Mjav. ingame Tolwyn looks like famous marshal Zhukov, who is described by some historians as a cannon-fodder-style strategyst...

Is this some kind of twisted poem?
 
I was just wondering about the facts surrounding his trial. "Guilty of Crimes against Humanity." I find to be someone... unspecific?

Its just another extension of the Nazi undercurrent. The Nuremberg Trials had the following indictments: Crimes against humanity, War Crimes, Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace.

Two of these certainly apply directly to the WC4 plotline .
 
A good portion of Admiral Tolwyn's life was mostly fighting in the Kilrathi War. He fought valiantly and than once the war was over, he had to adjust life without a war. The crime against humanity charge largely stemmed from the Telamon attack with bioweapons. If it was not for that, he probably would of gotten off relatively easier.
 
A good portion of Admiral Tolwyn's life was mostly fighting in the Kilrathi War. He fought valiantly and than once the war was over, he had to adjust life without a war. The crime against humanity charge largely stemmed from the Telamon attack with bioweapons. If it was not for that, he probably would of gotten off relatively easier.

Did he even witness Telamon though?
 
The 'Crimes Against Humanity' puzzles me for a different reason: what about his crimes against the Kilrathi? I'm hoping that any Privateer-style game set post-WC4 will have a group of rogue Kilrathi plotting to find and steal Tolwyn's corpse just so they can destroy it in a ritual act of revenge. Or, less amusingly, they could be plotting to assassinate his surviving relatives - what does Kilrathi 'honor' call for here?

Also, much as ChanceKell says, Confed with the Black Lance might have no trouble kicking the Nephilim to the curb, but would be pretty pitiful at keeping people fed, clothed, sheltered, educated... everything people need during the 99% of our lives we spend not being shot at.
 
Did he even witness Telamon though?

There's no doubt that, as leader of the Black Lance and the one who ordered the attack, he would have first-hand knowledge of the events from the pilots who made the attack. It's not like they would just drop the canisters and assume the nanobots worked. But, no, he was very far removed, physically at least, from the attack on Telamon.

Dondragmer said:
The 'Crimes Against Humanity' puzzles me for a different reason: what about his crimes against the Kilrathi?

Are you referring to the attacks against Melek's convoy, and other border skirmishes? There probably wasn't any direct evidence to pin Tolwyn, i.e. orders saying "attack Kilrathi, too!". Besides, Terran-Kilrathi solidarity was pretty non-existant at this point. Unlike, say, False Colors, where in order to appease the Kilrathi they put Tolwyn up to trial and stripped him of his rank and honors. Granted, it was ultimately all a ruse to let Tolwyn operate under Secret Ops, but the trial only happened because the Kilrathi demanded justice (and never got it).
 
I was just wondering about the facts surrounding his trial. "Guilty of Crimes against Humanity." I find to be someone... unspecific?

.....I don't know, execution just seemed a little harsh to me.

Tolwyn did get a life sentence, on account of his previous service. It doesn't happen in the game, but this was changed in the WC4 novel. And yes, he still committed suicide.

...it wasn't his life that was on trial, it was his genocidal spree.

Indeed...you can even see this in-game from the perspective of your choices during the confrontation on the assembly floor.

The things that really turn the tide are the revelations that Tolwyn has employed biogenetic weapons against civilian populations and is utilizing genetically enhanced soldiers to do his bidding. He's no longer quite "human" in a sense. He's decided that "human" isn't good enough..we need to be made "better."

It brings home the entire notion, as Blair puts it, that "we, as a race, need tinkering with...engineering! If a few billion die along the way? Well, they weren't worthy anyways! Why can't we be more like the Kilrathi?"

THAT is what brings the law down on Tolwyn...when he reveals himself and the assembly realizes that yes, in fact, he is a mass murderer and has tried to manipulate them into joining him in causing millions more deaths. It's a watershed moment in the storyline.

At that point, his death is assured. You can make the argument that what made him human died a long time before and this was just closing the loop...perhaps he was more like Hawk: he died years ago and wrapped himself in his duty.

Read what you want into his motivations for hanging himself...whether it's a final act of defiance ("I am not wrong!") or spite ("I deny you!") or soul-crushing remorse ("what have I become!?") or (insert your own opinion here). Whatever the motivation, his death closes the chapter on the whole Wing Commander Kilrathi War arc...and that was the point, right?
 
But the events on prophecy makes you say "oh, now i see your point, admiral".

About the trailers, the only one i saw before playing the game, was one that started something like this:
"For half a century, humanity fought a deadly war against the kilrathi. With victory came peace, and a simple life, for the confederation's greatest hero". And then it shows part of the scene of Blair finding Maniac in the bar at the begginning. That trailer in particular, is shown like a movie trailer, and it doesn't show anything about Tolwyn being the "bad guy".
It made me want to play that game, badly.
 
But the events on prophecy makes you say "oh, now i see your point, admiral".

About the trailers, the only one i saw before playing the game, was one that started something like this:
"For half a century, humanity fought a deadly war against the kilrathi. With victory came peace, and a simple life, for the confederation's greatest hero". And then it shows part of the scene of Blair finding Maniac in the bar at the begginning. That trailer in particular, is shown like a movie trailer, and it doesn't show anything about Tolwyn being the "bad guy".
It made me want to play that game, badly.

Yeah the one i saw was somewhat different.
 
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