Look, I'm not gonna touch the gender-bending thing. I do think it's utterly stupid, and I think it weakens the stories and characters whereever it appears. Choices are interesting when they matter. "Be anyone you want, do anyone you want" is a pathetic attitude for a game designer to take. It's an attitude that deprives all relationships and choices of any real value. Dragon Age and Mass Effect characters are ultimately just blow-up dolls for players to play around with.
I won't go deeper into that, however, because it's ultimately an irrelevant sideshow. What I'd really, really like to object to, is this whole "in the future, our military will head out into space and spend their days having sex" thing that seems to be creeping more and more into our sci-fi. What in blazes gives with this? I totally get that you'll have the occasional romantic subplot, as we see time and again in WC (actually, too often - and I say this as someone who wrote such a subplot for Standoff), but for crying out loud, officers and soldiers don't spend their days looking for someone to have sex with, regardless of whether we're talking random casual sex, or deep relationships. They have actual jobs to do, you know, and there are regulations against this kind of thing. The last thing a commanding officer will tolerate is out-of-control relations-building in a military force. That's why historically combat forces have tended to be segregated by sex - because the last thing you want is a soldier disobeying direct orders in order to run off and save a lover in the middle of battle, or to the contrary - holding back because they don't want to assist someone who jilted them. I loved how WC actually played around with these points - Spirit's internal conflict in WC2 made sense precisely because it was built around one of the inherent dangers of battlefield romance. WC3 had you lose the game if you tried to avenger your dead lover - and then if you went for another romance, you had to deal with one of two very stupid and immature "unrequited interests", who all of a sudden refused to do their jobs (and come on, who at the time didn't think - hey, Rachel/Flint, get with the programme). WC4 had Sosa acting stupid if you chose to do your job and let Catscratch die. WCP's main character is actually the orphaned product of a wartime relationship, who's still dealing with the consequences of his father's spur-of-the-moment romance. Even Standoff had its duty-vs.-romance conflict. But all these things worked, because they were used so sparingly. The moment things moved towards a "90210, but in space and with evil cats" feel, in Academy and the movie, you could see straight away that something just wasn't right here. There are so, so many positive things to say about both Academy and the movie, but both of them would most certainly be far superior stories if the romance was restricted within the bounds of what WC usually tolerated. Ironically, this was less a problem for the movie, which even had a sex scene, but at least touched on the negative consequences of wartime entanglements, than for Academy, even though all the romance there was limited to the middle school "she's got the hots for you, man!" level of infantility.
So, yeah, building on what
@-danr- said (and what he said I said
), I would really hate to seea Mass Effect-ised Wing Commander. I always loved that Wing Commander, while always pulpy, managed to generally retain a reasonable degree of emotional realism. I loved how we've had many ex-military fans over the years who'd say, that yeah, when you lose someone from your unit, Wing Commander gets it right. I can't imagine anyone ever saying that about Mass Effect.
Oh, and what would I actually like to see in a Wing Commander 1 remake? While probably it's best if no such remake is ever made, I actually do think it would be pretty cool to have a remake that integrates Academy and the movie into its storyline (...while perhaps having the player play LaFong instead of Blair?
). Beyond that, though, I'd stick to a close replication of the original. For instance, I don't see what being able to walk around the Tiger's Claw could possibly add. Sure, have a few more locations for the sake of cutscenes (and yes, have more cutscenes, and more actual story in cutscenes), but don't make me work to get to them. Wing Commander is about flying, not walking.
I'd also love to see such a remake buck the trend by not offering an array of difficulty and customisability options. Look, both approaches are fine. I have no real complaint about WC3 and onwards offering such options. But I also rather liked how with WC1, everyone played the same game. How "I save the Ralari" brags were never tempered by someone saying "yeah, but you played on rookie!". I think for all the accessibility-related benefits of customisability (and these are huge benefits, undeniably - especially these days, time and again I find myself playing games on easy simple because I want to experience the game, but don't have the time to learn to play them properly), games lose something through customisability. We don't expect a movie to be tailored to our level of competence.
I think that's about all I'd have to say on this topic. I'm tempted to fantasize about other details, but at the same time, I don't really want to be drawn into a lengthier discussion, but because I'm perpetually short on time, and because these days I just don't think there's much value in talking about hypothetical remakes.