BREAKING NEWS: Wing Commander Prophecy on GOG! (November 7, 2013)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
At long last, GOG has released Wing Commander Prophecy! For $5.99 you can download the gold edition of Prophecy plus an array of cool extras. The package includes both Wing Commander Prophecy and Wing Commander Secret Ops, the last two WC titles developed by Origin Systems. This means that only one Wing Commander PC game remains unreleased: here?s hoping Wing Commander Armada is coming soon! Grab your copy of Prophecy Gold here.




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Original update published on November 7, 2013
 
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Even though WCP had pretty lame enemies and almost no suspense the dogfighting is really fun. And I think the main reason for this for me is: the radio chatter. It's adds greatly to the atmosphere of a furball when you hear taunts flying all over, pilots from other wings asking for help and your wingmen responding, other wing leaders ordering their wing into formation and best of all: "Shit, ejecting!" - "All pilots in this wing receive orders from me now."
 
Yeah, it's sad how Prophecy had the whole 'large chaotic battle' almost nailed down perfectly in terms of chatter, then the series just sort of went away. Imagine it taken to the next level with full Pacific carrier groups in space constantly updating and giving orders to one another.

Also, the Nephilim weren't really lame as much as poorly presented. It's difficult to take the whole infinite numbers thing seriously when that's about how many you kill throughout your average mission. Some of the background stuff was fairly horrific, though.
 
Mekt-Hakkikt said:
Even though WCP had pretty lame enemies and almost no suspense the dogfighting is really fun. And I think the main reason for this for me is: the radio chatter. It's adds greatly to the atmosphere of a furball when you hear taunts flying all over, pilots from other wings asking for help and your wingmen responding, other wing leaders ordering their wing into formation and best of all: "Shit, ejecting!" - "All pilots in this wing receive orders from me now."
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Yep. It's something I tried to re-create in Dogfight 1942, but, alas, failed dismally. Well, there were many problems with that game, budget issues, management issues all resulted in a "less than perfect" product. But on this particular note of voiceovers, I actually learned something - post fact. Namely, that tauns only work in sci-fi :). My first instinct was to fill the air with voiceovers in exactly the same way that WCP had done, by having Allied and Axis pilots taunting each other, issuing orders, reporting status and so on. We did this... and then found that even though the Germans were speaking German, and the Japanese were speaking Japanese, it just seemed... silly. We ended up cutting out the enemy taunts, and even then it didn't work too well, because even just the Allied taunts were jarring, it made the pilots sound unprofessional.

I guess sci-fi is simply more teenage in its conventions - somehow, it doesn't seem weird at all to have thirty-five-year-old Blair screaming "In your whiskers!" in the middle of a dogfight :). In WCP, I guess you also had the fact that the enemy were bugs, and the human taunts helped to drive this feeling that you're not really fighting an enemy, but rather an infestation.
 
Dyret said:
It's got more to do with mood than genre... slap some rocket engines and tesla-guns on those WW2-fighters, and the taunts would fit right in. :D
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Yeah, but we were told the game has to be serious - and for many different reasons, this actually did make sense.

As for why taunts don't fit into WWII... I think it's simply a question of perception. In the 1960s, when memories of the war were vivid and living, we'd easily have gotten away with such a game (but no hardware to make it on... and no us :D). Today, most WWII veterans are, well, dead. Those who aren't dead are old, old great-grandfathers - and those who are dead are remembered as grandfathers. Respected, wise, calm, steady and so on. And here you are, showing them as young, foolhardy, crass-talking delinquents... it just doesn't work. Who cares that these guys really were young and crazy? Hard-drinking, womanising, emotional? Who cares that modern research indicates that people in the 20-25 age group have more in common (in terms of behaviour/logic/intellect/emotion) with teenagers than with adult... and that in WWII, you could go all the way from recruit through wing commander to being dead before hitting your 25th birthday? None of this matters now, because those young men had gone on to be old men and are now remembered so.

Worse still, the whole war has become mythologised. The Germans were all evil Nazis - no traces of humanity there - while the Japanese, oddly enough, have been turned into victims. They're poor, innocent and misunderstood, they really only attacked because the US attacked them first (by denying them fuel for their conquests!). To suggest, as we did in no uncertain terms, that the Americans of the period could possibly have felt a burning hate towards the Japanese - well, that just puts you way beyond the pale, makes you an evil racist. Yes, we did get marked down in reviews for the horrible racism of US pilots talking about the Japanese as "Japs" :D.

In any case, whichever way you look at it, taunts come out wrong - either you get complaints about them being too hate-filled, or you get complaints about them being too juvenile. It doesn't help that taunts are absolutely the single toughest thing to write that you can imagine, because they are heard so repeatedly, and if it's even remotely jarring the first time you hear it (like "in your whiskers!" in WC3, or some of Blair's awful WC4 material), there's a good chance you'll utterly hate it after playing through a couple of missions.

Well, at least we can still get away with taunts in Wing Commander :).
 
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