Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Well dosent WCP use the same old PTC idea again with the big bug plasma cannon that can automatically destroy any large enemy ship(not that we see it action that offten due engine limitations)? IMHO they were running out of ideas at that time maybe thats the reason they started using old ideas from past games.
I don't think "big gun" really counts as an original idea betrayed.
I'm also not certain what 'running out of ideas' means in the context of an extremely formulaic sort of game... if anything, Prophecy displays more innovations in the small areas in which a Wing Commander game might be allowed to innovate than previous titles did.
On a grander scale I'm not sure what running out of ideas means *at all* -- it's one of those pop culture criticisms we like to throw around when we don't have anything else to say. Does it actually happen? I've been alive a good while and I've never reached the point where my brain simply stopped working... so I find it hard to ascribe to anyone such a situation (particularly in a case where that 'anyone' is a large group of professionals, most of whom are different from the previous group of writers and game designers...)
And lets also be careful throwing around the term 'engine limitation'... if you don't specifically know that something cannot be done by the engine, don't say it. This sort of claim has made a mess of all kinds of things over the years (look at the claim in this very thread about the Wing Commander 2 ships -- we do not need BradMick 2020 going back and proving that Prophecy can very easily display an explosion because we've decided it's an easy answer.)
Now, consider this: there is absolutely no dramatic element to the Phase Transit Cannon. It exists for a single reason: to answer a question no one ended up asking. Specifically, the continuity issue of what happened to the Sivar's weapon. Origin felt that would be an issue among the fanbase in 1991 -- it wasn't. The PTC doesn't even show up referenced in dialogue until the second Special Ops package. There's no grand romantic story about the PTC... ever. It's just a line in a manual, there's nothing to copy.
The "Plasma Weapon", on the other hand, is an *entirely* dramatic object -- it's something that exists in the context of Prophecy's storyline and is created specifically so that it can't have an effect in the game. They learned their lesson with the PTC (and the Sivar weapon and the Lance and the Excalibur...) -- super weapons aren't fun. So, the Midway gets a gun that, as we're told before it's ever even used, fires only once.