Anyone else think that in Prophecy...

A

AKUMA1

Spaceman
The interaction with the nephelm (or however they names are spelt) ie the enemy was quite "weak"/limited? Aside from hearing and seeing them in-combat, during the FMV scenes there was hardly an footage of them, more about the goings on, on the midway....Also I thought the designs of the ship for the aliens were quite unimaginitive and didn't really look like fighter craft... (maybe used to seeing the Kilrathi ships so often before, hence I thought they were not very well designed in this game...) granted it was the 1st time I actually saw anything from Prophecy in all these years since its release so it could be easy to criticise it now....

But overall I thought it was an Ok entry into the series but definitly not the best, aside from perhaps the improved combat engine, which was a lot better than Wing Commander 4, (naturallly its a case of improving all the time..)

These are my thoughts from the video walkthrough I've seen of the game....now I'll soon be checking out the special ops/secret ops of the Prophecy pack....
 
I believe the intention was to have later games which would develop the Nephilim more. Remember that the Kilrathi personality in WC1 had even less revealed to the player than we do of the Nephilim in Prophecy.

As for ship design, the Nephilim ships were originally designed by famed concept artist Syd Mead, if that means anything significant to you.

Certainly the game engine was a big step forwards - WC4's engine was only a minor update from WC3, most of the work for that game went into the movie segments, I believe.
 
Like Wedge said, and I do not believe that the Bugs have such an interesting culture we would need to get to know. Maybe they have a queen? like insects? and you would have never known until maybe part 3 of the announced trilogy...
 
I never liked the Nephilim ship design either, but I loved the kilrathi ship design in wing commander 3 though!

I don't know, I don't think they would ever have been able to make something interesting of the bugs, I never liked the "mysterious" insect idea at all. And the bug that you get to see at the ending where Blair dies is a total joke. They could have gone for some sort of reptile like creatures or something instead...

WC prophecy is a pretty decent game though! :)
 
The plot of Prophecy suffers as a sort of backlash to the heavy storytelling in Wing Commander 4. Back then, a lot of fans and a lot of critics (such as they were) didn't like that there was *so* many cutscenes in the previous game and especially after Roberts left, EA decided to return closer to the "arcade" stylings of the original WC game.

I agree that it seems a step away from the "progress" of writing from WC3 and WC4 - but at the same time, I really like that you're simple observing what every other pilot is. You're completely left in the dark for the entire game, down to Blair's fate (I think he's dead, but whatever). I think the game's budget limited the scope which helped "tighten" some things but also made the game feel a little claustraphobic after you were allowed to go to the bridge, bar, briefing room, gunnery control, etc on the previous ships you served on.
 
Most things that happen are from Casey's point of view. You get to see things Casey's way but also you wouldn't know as much like in WC4.
 
Yeah the much awaited "trilogy" that prophecy was meant to begin, a Wing Commander: The Next Generation, type of theme....thats another point as well, blairs death was a bit a bit ridiculous, you'd think the alien creatures would be more fearsome! They should have looked at the Predator movies for inspiration!! This game and Starship Troopers also going for the "bug" theme for aliens, I think both were released in the same year ironically? 1997?

In anycase, the series didn't exactly go out on a "high" with this game....or even set a precedent for things to come as Origin were originally looking to do back then....
 
LeHah said:
The plot of Prophecy suffers as a sort of backlash to the heavy storytelling in Wing Commander 4. Back then, a lot of fans and a lot of critics (such as they were) didn't like that there was *so* many cutscenes in the previous game and especially after Roberts left, EA decided to return closer to the "arcade" stylings of the original WC game.

I agree that it seems a step away from the "progress" of writing from WC3 and WC4 - but at the same time, I really like that you're simple observing what every other pilot is. You're completely left in the dark for the entire game, down to Blair's fate (I think he's dead, but whatever). I think the game's budget limited the scope which helped "tighten" some things but also made the game feel a little claustraphobic after you were allowed to go to the bridge, bar, briefing room, gunnery control, etc on the previous ships you served on.
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Yeah, I had no problem with most of Prophecy's storytelling style, and the gameplay focus felt like a nice return to the balance of WC2. However there were some minor issues I had. The introduction to the nephilim was nice and creepy and then all of the sudden they learn english and the opening mystique seemed to disapear somewhat. Some of the acting wasn't too great, with maestro being pretty annoying for the most part... a poor man's Maniac. And then when you hit the third disk, it's like there's two disks worth of missions with a quarter of the amount of cutscenes. The balance felt a bit off in the last act. Some of that, I believed, was indeed the aformentioned budget or lack thereof (it cost about 7percent of what WC4 cost to make). But the gameplay felt really good... and even better in Secret Ops

AKUMA1 said:
Yeah the much awaited "trilogy" that prophecy was meant to begin, a Wing Commander: The Next Generation, type of theme....thats another point as well, blairs death was a bit a bit ridiculous, you'd think the alien creatures would be more fearsome! They should have looked at the Predator movies for inspiration!! This game and Starship Troopers also going for the "bug" theme for aliens, I think both were released in the same year ironically? 1997?

In anycase, the series didn't exactly go out on a "high" with this game....or even set a precedent for things to come as Origin were originally looking to do back then....
Click to expand...

There were a lot of things Prophecy did right for the few things it did wrong. It definitely had some of the best gameplay of the series. It helped usher in 3D Accelerated gaming as the norm, and over all turned a decent profit at the same time. But the lack of a conclusion to the "new trilogy" decision was probably already in place before the game ever shipped. Despite early online marketing calling the game the start of a new trilogy, moves were already underway at Origin to switch from making single player games at all to online games, thanks in part to the success of Ultima Online, and less so due to the absolute failure of Freespace 2 to sell at all.
 
I don't think it was Prohpecy's fault. The genre itself sadly was dying. Yes there were some others afterwards, but they all weren't succesful enough (at least not in the modern, mass-market-oriented sense). I personally did play Starlancer as well as Freespace 2, but neither of them very much, read: only 2-3 missions.


I really liked Prophecy. I have to admit I never liked Wing Commander III for some reason, and I did never play Wing Commander IV. Part of the reason for it is I could never get my hands on it (when it was new I didn't even have a PC powerful enough), another part is I read about it and it seemed everything I disliked about WC3 had been cranked up even further.

When I heared about the "return to the roots"-approach of Prophecy I got hyped and I really liked the game. I would have hoped they would continue the series, but I didn't care that much when they didn't, partly because for a while I kinda lost interest in the Wing Commander series, oriented myself more towards the "mainstream" (real-time strategy and first-person shooters) and later when I got back to the series I mostly played WC1.

WC1 is my favourite of all the games. WC2 is better story-wise (the story is really engaging, while the first one doesn't really have much of a story - apart from what goes on in your head of course ;) ), but gameplay-wise it doesn't stand a chance against WC1.
 
Wedge009 said:
Remember that the Kilrathi personality in WC1 had even less revealed to the player than we do of the Nephilim in Prophecy.
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You know, this is one of those things that we all repeat so often, we've forgotten how utterly false it is :). Between Claw Marks and the WC1 dialogues, we get a heck of a lot more info about the Kilrathi than we did in WCP.

(of course, it helps a lot that the Kilrathi conjure up very strong images in our heads - once we're told they're basically Japanese cats in space, our imagination fills in a lot of the blanks. This doesn't happen with the Nephilim, because... well, they're ultimately just bugs)
 
Quarto said:
You know, this is one of those things that we all repeat so often, we've forgotten how utterly false it is :). Between Claw Marks and the WC1 dialogues, we get a heck of a lot more info about the Kilrathi than we did in WCP.
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The war with the Cats was already going on for decades, while the bugs just came marching in and you were put right in front of them, it is only logic that you have no info on them. :p
 
This game and Starship Troopers also going for the "bug" theme for aliens, I think both were released in the same year ironically? 1997?
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It's no coincidence--you'll find bug-like aliens in abundance in the late 1990s for the simple reason that this was the exact time when CGI had become cheap and effective enough to create them but not yet humanoids/mammals/etc. (Starship Troopers is a bigger deal today, but it was a flop at the time--but both Star Trek and Babylon 5 were doing CGI bugs as their villains at that same time--Species 8472 on Voyager and whatever the aliens in Thirdspace were called.)

You know, this is one of those things that we all repeat so often, we've forgotten how utterly false it is . Between Claw Marks and the WC1 dialogues, we get a heck of a lot more info about the Kilrathi than we did in WCP.
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Only because we turn a somewhat cynical academian's eye towards the first half of the ICIS Manual... which is, in actuality, an excuse to give us all sorts of information about the Nephilim that we shouldn't reasonably know yet. :)

(of course, it helps a lot that the Kilrathi conjure up very strong images in our heads - once we're told they're basically Japanese cats in space, our imagination fills in a lot of the blanks. This doesn't happen with the Nephilim, because... well, they're ultimately just bugs)
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It's not for lack of trying--Prophecy spends just as much time trying to assosciate the aliens with Old Testament destruction as Wing Commander I did telling us the Kilrathi were the Empire of Japan (if not more--the name, all the talk about prophecies and armageddon... the fact that they're literally a plague of locusts...). I just don't think the idea struck as much of a chord with players.

Also, we talk about Wing Commander Prophecy being a deliberate creative decision to 'go back to its roots'... but what we usually left unspoken is that there wasn't necessarily that much of a choice. The jump fron Wing Commander II to III to IV wasn't sustainable--the series couldn't quadruple its budget with every new game. Prophecy's new direction wasn't so much a decision to get rid of things people loved as it was a way to sell the game at all.
 
I disagree with all the points raised in this thread in criticism of Prophecy. Right from the beginning, Prophecy had things working against it. It was introducing a new enemy. Blair wasn't the main character. The FMV was scaled back significantly. And I was as unhappy about all of these things as anyone at the time. But within five minutes of trying the demo, I was won over with the fantastic gameplay - the best, in my opinion, since the original.

Once the full game came out, I was already looking forward to it a lot just for the gameplay. But I found that the story and atmosphere and characters really pulled me in right from the start. The "Old Testament" cloud of doom they tried to create really worked for me, and the mysteriousness of the enemy really helped to enforce that. The unknown is scary, and I was always always wondering what was going to happen next.

Now, I will say it would have been disappointing if we had never learned any more about them in sequels, but I thought it really worked for the first game. And I was highly disappointed we never got those sequels and now never will.

The only thing I will say in criticism of the new enemy is matter of consistency. I felt they were initially presented to us as a race of cold, calculating bugs who felt nothing. Which would have been a nice change from the Kilrathi, who were so concerned with honor. But then the alien pilots would say, "I die with honor!" when you shot them down, which seemed odd to me. So I wasn't really sure which it was. But that's a minor point. I was very interested in learning more about them in future games, and I thought the mysterious nature of them in the first game worked quite well.
 
The other thing I found quite astonishing was that there were missions in the game were you would go in and attack a MASSIVE dreadnought/mothership/deathstar call it what you want but it was huge, and you'd think a massive spacecraft of that size would have HUGE weapons, but all it was was small little turrets doted about various parts of the ship which were not too much trouble for the Midway fighters, and I was like what? Look the size of the thing! I thought it would shoot out some massive projectile or something....

But as mentioned before, the combat sections or in-flight were the best parts in terms of look and presentation *minus the bland designs of the alien aircraft...all the rest ie the fmv was strictly average if anything...
 
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