BREAKING NEWS: First Arena Screenshots! (February 22, 2007)

I can't speak for everyone, but I lurk here a lot and only come out when someone digs up the old WC corpse to rape it a little bit. WCA looks like a fun little online shooter, but it's far from the 21st century coming of Wing Commander. Where's our first-person space combat sim? WHY have these gone out of style? :mad:

What the hell is wrong with you people.. Arena is the fun, action-packed, fast paced, and great looking Wing Commander game everyone's been waiting for for the last ten years. Being top down doesn't make it any less of a game (just look at the Escape Velocity series). Hell, it doesn't even pretend to be the next big main series game you're so god damned afraid it's raping. It's just a fun multiplayer game set in the WC universe. Why the hell is it that when czacen makes a Howeworld mod based on WC, or when AD did his Half-Life thing, everyone went "OMG, DiFerant WuNg Coomnader, hAuw cul!!!!!11!", but when EA makes a fun multiplayer online arcadeish shooter set in the same universe, you all deceide they're raping the game cause they hate you so much. It's plain stupid.
 
I'm gonna have to be unpopular a bit and say I have mixed emotions about this.

I LOVE the fact that EA still have Wing Commander on their minds in some way. Could this be the start of something awesome to revitalise the series? I hope so.

But it's not a Wing Commander game to me. WC had a plot where I would get sucked into the game via the plot and the characters. From what it looks like, there is no plot. It's an arcade game with pickups for crying out loud. Pickups that will spawn wingmen for you or something equally ridiculous. a virtually 2d plane? Ok ok, yes it's an arcade game on a console... but that's my point... the only WC game I can think of with this lack of depth is WC Academy.

There's a number of different series/bands/whatever that I used to support as much as I could.. even when what they released wasn't really what I was hoping for - I thought that if I kept supporting them then there'd be more, and the next time it'd be better. Didn't happen that way. If this is successful then EA will probably think this is the way the WC series should go.

The game will probably be fun, and good for a muckaround. When I first heard that there was a new Wing Commander game coming out for the XBox i immediately thought i would have to go and buy one just to be able to play it. Then I saw the gameplay vid and read the article about it. Definitely changed my mind.

Summary:
Pros: Love that EA is still thinking about Wing Commander.
Cons: Disappointed it has resulted in a seemingly mundane arcade shooter.
Overall: I have more hope for the WC series continuing now (though I always believed it would come back)... I just hope it doesn't follow the formula of Arena.

you said it better than I could
I hope the game is successful though, since if it fails EA will probably never go back to WC. But I hope that if it succeeds EA realizes it's because of the huge existing WC fanbase and rewards them with a WC game of the style we all became fans of

to me this looks to be to WC what those Mech Assualt games are to Battletech
 
to me this looks to be to WC what those Mech Assualt games are to Battletech

I think it's actually a little different. MechAssault is a full-scale retail game. Arena doesn't make any pretensions like that. It's a Wing Commander game for a specific platform - XBox Live Arcade. You have to kind of understand that whole thing first, and then you see that it's not dumbed down, and it is much more elaborate and upscaled compared to its competitors in that market.
 
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