I would love to hear more about that "WC2 ist not a Chris Roberts project". WC2 is my favourite as well and I thought, it was a brilliant sequel to the first one, as it was doing almost everything right.
In 1991, Chris Roberts and the core team were doing Strike Commander--that's why he only has a producer credit on Wing Commander II. At the time, Origin's philosophy was that their rock star developers would pioneer new technology and then journeyman teams would amortize the expense of those projects with sequels/spinoffs/etc. You see the same thing with the Ultimas--Garriott moved on to Ultima VII an then VIII while other teams made use of the engine his team had created with the Worlds of Ultima games and Serpent Isle (respectively.) (And the same with Strike Commander of course. The original plan was that the Phoenix Force and Privateer teams would use the engine... in reality it ended up being Pacific Strike and Wings of Glory.)
That's actually one of the big issues Roberts had with Wing Commander IV. He expected that having turned in that massive hit he would be allowed to move on to his next world-shaking dream project, a game called Silverheart. Instead, EA insisted that he do a sequel to Wing Commander III on an incredibly tight schedule...
But now that you (Loaf) mention it: SM1/2 are excellent bridges to WC2, but SO1/2 didn't really feel like theey were bridging anywhere. WC3 totally started all over again, with Hobbes being the only reappearing WC2 character (or am I missing someone?). While WC2 had the argument on its side, that 10 years have passed, the new fighter style of WC3 was something, that puzzled me for a long time.
Yes--because the thought at the time was that Strike Commander would ship in early 1992 and then that engine would be available for a Wing Commander III developed by the same group that did II. Then Strike slipped and Chris Roberts decided to take back creative control of 'his' franchise.
As for the characters: Wing Commander II had a cast of 21. A third of them die during the course of the game (Spirit, Shadow, Khasra, Minx, Crossbones, Downtown, Jazz) and by the time scripting for Wing Commander III started three more had been 'given' to Baen as the lead characters (Bear, Sparks, Doomsday.) Out of eleven remaining characters, eight appear in Heart of the Tiger: Blair, Angel, Hobbes, Thrakhath, The Emperor, Maniac, Paladin and Tolwyn.
... which means that only three characters from Wing Commander II actually go missing: Talon, Major Edmond and Stingray (and one of those ended the game crippled and no longer able to fly!)
But my point is still: We have sort of contradicting sources, so what decides whether something is canon or not? (You can blame my confusion to Star Wars because they have a bajillion levels of canon there and some people react almost religious when you "DESTROY STAR WARS" by quoting something which isn't.)
Star Wars has unfortunately kind of monetized 'canon' in an unpleasant way. None of that 'levels' bullshit means anything to anyone who matters... it's just an elaborate way to avoid turning off fans who would otherwise (as we see in the Star Trek community) choose not to buy "non canon" products. (No, no, this 1983 Marvel comic is still 'real', it's just... uh... orange level... so... you know, no one ever has to reference it... and... they can freely contradict it... but still please buy copies.)
In reality, a "canon" is much more open ended and maleable than any hardcore fan wants to believe. In a massive, massive shared universe like Star Wars or Star Trek where you have dozens of writers working on dozens of projects each year the licensor sets some rules... generally that you can't contract particular things. Despite Lucasfilm's PR campaign, that usually boils down to "don't contradict what's in the movies or TV shows." That's because those are 99% of the audience--the 1% who remember a fact established on a Happy Meal box in 1982 just don't matter (and are going to buy your product no matter how mad they are that you made the giant space rabbit orange instead of green.) And with these massive properties, that "canon" isn't even harshly enforced--no one expects a new contract writer for a Star Trek book to be responsible for picking over 800 hours of TV.
... and that's just for licensees. NONE of this matters to the core rights holders. It should be obvious by now that if EA or Lucasfilm or Paramount wants to completely change their own history, there's absolutely nothing to stop them. There's no hard "canon" to the guys writing Star Trek 14 or next week's Clone Wars episode... or Wing Commander 6. All of that is to say that 'canon' doesn't matter to anyone in the way that fans obsess over it... if Chris Roberts wants to change the story, he will.
Now, what is "canon" for Wing Commander, even if this isn't a hard and fast rule? With our comapratively small body of work it's everything--if you're licensing a Wing Commander card game or a novel or something of that nature you're allowed to pull from anything you want. Are there contradictions in there? Sure--there are in every franchise... but having a canon to refer to is the start of the process, not a code of law.
And are there any official statements about why the scene was cut?
Yes--it was a cut made very late in the process because more space was needed. Origin decided that they needed to (unofficially) support the still significant audience of people using first generation 1X CD-ROM drives. Those drives couldn't read the now-standard 74-minute discs... so everything had to fit onto 63-minute ones. And they had to make these cuts very late in the process which meant there wasn't time to rethink gameflow. The scenes that were removed (this one, the newsbriefs) were ones that weren't tied to any action.
If you were to take out a choice scene or a scene that's rewarding a choice then you have to go back and rebalance everything--that's why Hobbes' video is cut while Flash showing up to remind you you're the reason he's still around wasn't. It's also why the scenes went back in in the console versions--the standardized nature of the Playstation and 3DO meant that they could use larger discs without killing any potential sales. (Honestly I'm not sure the whole idea was even to make as much money as possible as it was to avoid a technical support nightmare.)
Yes, but don't get me wrong. There are some parallels: Paladin is now brown-haired, Tolwyn does not like Blair, though he liked him in WC2, all ships are replaced/different, the Kilrathi look "different", Hobbes is a different character altogether. If WC3 was a mediocre or bad game, or the story was badly written, everyone would cry over those things as well. But since Wing 3 was great, it doesn't matter .
Heh, tell that to the Compuserv flight sim forums in 1994--longtime fans were LIVID over the changes. That's one of the things that taught me never to take fan reaction very seriously... people will ALWAYS be furious about whatever the latest release is, no matter how good or bad it is.
You know, he has a point. If the Wing Commander movie was a cinematic masterpiece, nobody would be complaining that the Rapiers look like a 1950s jet with a gattling gun bolted on the nose or that the Tiger(s) Claw looked like a giant submarine in space.
In fact, if the movie were better I'm willing to bet people would be praising those exact things. In a world where everything, including historical war movies, is going all CGI, here's a big science fiction story striving to use real aircraft? What a cool, unique choice--especially compared to Lucas, who was simultaneously busy trying to airbrush out all his set built X-Wings! The command ship is a submarine in space? It's a natural fit and a clever thought--a different course from Star Trek and Star Wars and a good analog for selling audiences on the hostile and lonely environment of the space war.
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