This is the third of three 'environment' concepts which seem to draw on the background imagery of the classic games. This one offers a black hole capable of sucking in ships and a quasar-style anomaly which would have had an unknown effect. This is part of a series of beautiful Wing Commander Arena concept images graciously provided by Gaia Industries. You can find the original article here. You can thank the guys at Gaia by picking up Street Trace NYC on Xbox Live Arcade! -- Original update published on December 23, 2007
It makes me think of Enigma for some reason. On that note, did we ever "see" the black hole in Enigma? Were these starfields supposed to be backdrops for a top-down version of Arena, or are they purely concept art?
I hope these aren't too boring for you folks - I think they're incredibly cool, myself. We're closing in on the home stretch for Arena art updates... and there's a few cool ones left in the queue.: )
I enjoy them, no question. I am rather introgued by the idea of Arena being a normal top down shooter.
I have a few screenshots of that... but I don't think we'll be allowed to share them any time soon. Ask again in 2017.
I think they are great. It's nice to see all the effort that went into making Arena and making it feel like WC as much as possible even when it's from a different perspective.
As far as I know there are only two spiral galaxies that are visible to the naked human eye from within the Milky Way--Andromeda and Triangulum. These two would be visible pretty much from anywhere in our galaxy where the line-of-sight is not blocked. I always figured that the spiral that we get to see in the games was Andromeda.
