It's too bad; I've heard, in such a way as to believe it, that the recent Syndicate was a pretty good game. I never got into the original Syndicate myself, and while it was almost certainly an excellent game I don't think it ever had the impact Wing Commander did (in terms of sales or long-term recognition.) Does EA not realize that Wing Commander is the game that made PC gaming (and game development in general) what it is today? I think that's been lost to the sands of "IT HAD THE GUY FROM STAR WARS IN IT!"...
It's not mentioned in these articles, though, but the game he specifically mentions that they're bringing back is, of course... COMMAND AND CONQUER.
Now listen, I am not one to call for the violent, lawless murder of anyone. I do it so rarely. Maybe once a day, at MOST. But we need to get a bunch of people together, head out to California and put out of our misery whichever leftover Westwood hosebag is still hiding out in EA's corporate structure and funneling millions of dollars to Command and Conquer relaunch after Command and Conquer relaunch. You want to know if this game is going to make any money, EA? Maybe glance slightly at the balance sheets for the last seven or eight times you tried this.
- Singleplayer/coop campaign. Doesn't have to be branching but would be nice.
I do think Wing Commander is possibly the ultimate co-op franchise and I'm not altogether sure why EA hasn't realized that. They pour money into trying to make 'Army of Two' a thing and now they're retrofitting Dead Space as a co-op game... just give us a damn Wing Commander where we can be each other's wingmen.
I doubt you'll ever see a 'branching' game again. Doing it the way the Wing Commander I did was already too expensive by 1991, it'd never pass the cost-benefit analysis phase in 2012.
I'm not sure whether I would like a WC MMO. Perhaps not. I'd prefer a new Privateer like it was in the '90s. IMO MMOs kill franchises, but that is solely based on my own experiences and a personal view.
This is probably a hard argument to actually make; I mean, they made (and are making) more Ultima and Warcraft games after Ultima Online and World of Warcraft came out... and I can't really think of any other game franchises that became popular MMOs in that way (broad media licenses maybe, but it's the same story with Star Wars and Star Trek... single player games still in development.) So I think this is another one of those 'admit it, you just don't LIKE this thing' cases... and I'm perfectly happy to admit that I don't like them either. I want a fictional world I can lose myself in, not one that's being messed up by other people.
That said, I'm pretty sure big budget MMOs are dead, dead, dead. They died a few years ago, we're just seeing the last dregs come out now. The audience has moved past the necessary fee structure and no one is willing (or able) to put the kind of money into development that you need to unseat World of Warcraft (which will itself fade as free-to-play games become more sophisticated.) (The big Star Wars game that will never, ever make any money for EA is the nail in the coffin... and I can't even think of another serious MMO on the way.)
And maybe not even a space shooter. EA could play it safe and make a "Wing Commander: Space Marine" game in the Battlefield engine or something. I would still buy it, even though I don't like FPS the way they are now, with the tube levels and regenerating health and too much ammo and all that things.
Well, let's face it, Wing Commander IS an FPS... it just doesn't have a floor. There's no physics to speak of. Regenerating health? Shields. Ammo limits? Missiles. (I actually worked on a Wing Commander Battlefield pitch which would have been pretty cool. It would have had both space combat and ground fighting in the same engine.)