My thoughts on Standoff

Sylvester

Sylvester

Vice Admiral
I must commend all of you greatly. This game is worthy of the name Wing Commander. Its better than Prophecy, and the cutscenes are better too. :P I have not gotten this excited playing a computer game in a long time. After multiple retries, while using a Rapier at Hero difficulty, I finally kept the Kats busy enough for the bombers to nail the Snakeir in Episode 3. I pumped my fist in the air when she exploded, something that I haven't done with a game in a long time. In Episode 4, weaving around those Frigates and Destroyers to launch torpedoes was awesome. And then I had the pleasure of expending all of my torpedoes on the Hakaga. All of them hit but of course that wasn't enough. But victory was still ours as I sat smiling watching the other bombers kill the thing from afar. The story is great, the missions are great. You should all be very proud, and I can't wait for Episode 5!
 
Couldn't have said it better myself. You guys went and made the Wing Commander game that I always wanted. Standoff is one of the most incredible community projects on the net.
 
Yeah I have to admit the same. I recently went back and played prophecy and was like... holy #$%& the graphics are better in Standoff!!
 
Starkey said:
It is a great game indeed, and Ep. 5 will make it even better :cool:
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As my fellow tester stated, you will be quite happy with the final results.

Now don't let Quarto see us posting to the CZ instead of testing...or we will be in big trouble. :p
 
Its better than Prophecy, and the cutscenes are better too. :P
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I don't think this is the kind of praise the Standoff team would want. Standoff wouldn't be anywhere without Prophecy at its core.
 
I did not mean to suggest that Prophecy is a bad game at all. On the contrary, I thought it was outstanding. I think Standoff is better. I wasn't referring to the graphics or the new features. I just like the missions and the storyline better. And as for the cutscenes, it was a joke referencing that I actually prefer Standoff's talking head cutscenes to the FMV in Prophecy.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't think this is the kind of praise the Standoff team would want. Standoff wouldn't be anywhere without Prophecy at its core.
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I don't think anyone intended to bad mouth Prophecy. We all do love the game. At least what I'm saying is that a game created by a group of third party fans (No offense guys!!) came up with a game that is at least visually more pleasing then some of the more professional games out there including Prophecy for its time.
 
As much as I love the praise, it's not really fair to compare Standoff to WCP graphically. You may like our story better or whatever, and I love to hear that, because WCP has (like every other WC game) pretty damn good storytelling, light years ahead of videogame standards... but if you think the graphics are better it's really because it's 2009 now. We have patched the game to use newer gimmicks. We can also count on people to have better hardware than they did in 1998... etc.

As an example, Standoff's most detailed textures are 512x512, which are very low-res by today's standards, but which would crash the game on just about any video card in 1998. WCP's most detailed textures are 256x256 which was pretty much the gaming standard back then.
 
Also, when it comes to graphics, you'd really have to compare Standoff to a WC game of today.

I mean, here's a small bit of food for thought. Today, WCP is 11 years old. When we started on Standoff, it was WC1 that was 11 years old. To compare WCP to Standoff is like comparing WC1 to WCP.
 
Unknown Enemy was started in 1999 (and then restarted in 2000). Standoff was started more or less around 2001 - Eder can tell you more precisely, because I wasn't involved right from day one. In any case, the very first news update about Standoff is from May 21st 2001.
 
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The idea of what eventually became Standoff was born when I first decided that I was going to make my own mod, sometime after having left the the X-Wing Alliance WC TC team due to some disagreements with them.

The symbolic date I chose for my own personal annual celebration of Standoff's birthday is April 15th, when I made my first post related to Standoff here on the CZ. IIRC, I have also made that the date when Episode 1 starts. :p

Nothing from that period has survived into the final version of Standoff, though. All the models and such that I had from back then have since been re-done. Heck, I've even re-done stuff that was considered "final" in the release of Ep 2 already.
 
Gotcha. So Eder (and other team members too), once Standoff is done, are you going to take a break from game design for a while, or is there another project in the works?
 
Strictly speaking, we did have plans for UE2 - plenty of them. I imagine that, had I wound up working in some typical eight-hours-a-day job that has nothing to do with games, I'd probably consider doing UE2 after Standoff (and also, Standoff would be long finished already).

As it is, when you work on games for a living, the inclination to make games in your spare time somewhat declines. Eder and I talk constantly about what we could do in a future WC project. But will we actually start a new project after Standoff?

Hell, right now, I'm having problems finding time to meet my Standoff obligations. It's not really the satisfaction that keeps me going these days - it's the perspective of no longer having those obligations hanging over me all the time.
 
I didn't know you made games for a living. That's awesome. Our of curiosity, what company do you work for, if you're allowed to tell? Do you do similar things that you do in the making of Standoff? If Standoff is any indication, you're very good at what you do, and I bet the games you work on are quality...
 
No, no, I'm not allowed to tell. You know, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you ;).

Ok, seriously. I'm afraid reality is far less glorious than you might hope - as far as my past projects are concerned, I definitely wouldn't put any money on that bet you mentioned :). For the past three years, I worked for the Polish company called City Interactive. The company has always specialised in value titles, so the emphasis was on getting games done fast and cheap (which, believe me, is a huge challenge - I may not be too proud of the games I'd worked on, but the work was definitely interesting, challenging, and very educational).

Anyway, most of the titles I worked on while I was there were mindless FPS games - things with names like Terrorist Takedown 2, and so on :p. That having been said, I did get to work on two games that had something to do with Standoff - arcade flight games. The first was called Wings of Honor 2: Battles of the Red Baron (yeah, our game titles were always that bad :p), while the latter was Combat Wings: Battle of Britain. That last one, although it was actually one of the first things I did while working at City, is one of the things I'm proudest of, and actually got one or two good reviews.

(as for where I'm working now - well, I'm trying to start a new company now. So, I won't say too much about it, because our plans are still likely to change a lot... I am, however, hoping that our first title will be something like Combat Wings: BoB, except better, and with much more storytelling)
 
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