Digital Antiquarian Explores Enigma Sector (March 4, 2018)

ChrisReid

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The Digital Antiquarian has posted a lengthy review/history of Wing Commander 2. The author has done quite a bit of research and shares a lot of important background information that sets the stage for how the game was made. There's lots to sink your teeth into here, although the middle portion discussing the game's narrative seems to be overthinking it a bit. Vengeance of the Kilrathi's cinematic half may not be some sort of high art form, but it certainly was one of the most engaging storylines ever made at the time. Ultimately what it comes down to the constant drive to strike a good balance between gameplay and story while factoring in the constraints at the time. Check out the full article here.

Most of all, though, Origin poured their energy into the story layer of the game — into all the stuff that happened when you weren’t actually sitting in the cockpit blowing up the evil Kilrathi. Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi took an approach to game design that could best be summed up as “give the people what they want.” With barely six months to bring the project to completion, Origin combed through all of the feedback they had received on the first game, looking to punch up the stuff that people had liked and to minimize or excise entirely the stuff they seemingly didn’t care so much about.

One element we do have to call out is the suggestion that WC2's speech pack was some sort of "cash grab." At the time, the price of floppy disk production was overwhelming the company and was a contributor to the acquisition by EA. Every kilobyte mattered, and many things had to be cut to fit on an economical number of disks. It would have been impossible to include the speech pack as a freebie at first. On the flip side, most people actually did end up getting speech for free when WC2 Deluxe Edition was widely released on CD and made the speech files practical to bundle in.

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Original update published on March 3, 2018
 
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These articles are so odd.

I want to love them so much. I don't disagree with his criticism of Wing Commander II at all; I think they erred quite a bit by bringing the camera too close to your face… dropping touches like the killboard, the freedom to decide who you talk to, the earning medals and ribbons, seeing the larger war effort on occasion… those were all unfortunate choices that make for a game that's not as replayable. I think he gets all of that right (save the disdain for the pulpy story; I would point out the same issues and end up saying the decision not to care about them is exactly makes the game world right.) And even where I don't agree, I think Wing Commander deserves much more criticism than it has actually received, given its importance to gaming history.

What bugs me is how he adapts selections from the story to justify his own positions on things in kind of sketchy ways. The source for most of the history is _Software Meets the Movies: Making Wing Commander I and II_, a lengthy article which appears at the end of Mike Harrison's Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide. You can find the original here: http://download.wcnews.com/files/documents/MakingofWC1.pdf

It's a story worth retelling, for sure, but his interpretation is often frustrating. Here's an example from the start of the piece where he talks about The Secret Missions and Wing Commander Special Edition. He bases this on the final page of the PDF I linked, which talks about The Secret Missions and the decision to release them at retail. In the Digital Antiquarian article, the author goes on to suppose that Secret Missions' mission design is inferior because it was an afterthought and then follows that thought to decide that Secret Missions 2 is superior because it was allowed to use the Wing Commander II branch of the engine to add additional features.

Except none of that is true! He leaves off the key (first) three words of the original story: "earlier in the year." The Special Edition and The Secret Missions were planned when Wing Commander went into full production, not just before (or after) release. The 'extra hard missions' theme was a design decision made from the start, not something they were forced into by the limits of the previous project. Instead, Secret Missions 2 is the afterthought: the separate executable doesn't mark a significant update to the engine, it's because wc.exe was designed with slotting in the planned Secret Missions but NOT additional campaigns. There are no additional gameplay in sm2.exe; it has a better frame limiter but doesn't add mechanics: you can take any mission from Crusade and run it in the original game and it will work fine (the 'Drakhai' will display as the respective aces for each ship as it's the same AI sets renamed.)

An odd way to set the tone for the whole thing.

Interestingly, that same page explains exactly what Chris was saying in the update… the Speech Accessory Pack wouldn't have been possible from a materials standpoint. If you're interested in some of the math, a big release from Origin at that point in time would ideally have a $6.00 materials budget, which is the cost of printing the box, stickers, manuals and media. A 3.5" diskette was $0.72 towards that budget, which means that with seven disks Wing Commander II has already used up $5.04 with $0.96 left over for the Joan's booklet, install guide and box. Add three more for the speech and you're in the red!

Anyway, he does all this again after the criticism, sharing the original script and the finished introduction by the way of insisting that there's been some mistake, that an intentionally maybe-sinister thing has happened and can't be explained. But we know exactly what happened: going up against disk budgets! There were working builds of the game with a significantly longer intro that included the courtroom… and they were reduced into a single conversation with Tolwyn that uses the common office sets and portraits. (Which makes you wonder: is that left out because he didn't come across it in his research or because it would directly contradict his following paragraph about the sound disks?)
 
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These articles are so odd.
From an academic perspective, I find it kind of annoying that he only lists his sources at the bottom of the article, without referencing with in-text citations. This is not any great fault on his part, because it's the way most journalists write (they rarely provide sources even at the end, which he at least did), and it's the way most of these game history blogs work. But it makes it very hard to filter through the account and figure out where he's basing on previous claims and where he's making his own claims. Needless to say, this would have clarified a lot in terms of the mistakes he makes.

For example, I had a look at the 2013 Chris Roberts interview (published 2016) he mentions and quotes in the article. And sure enough, there's Chris Roberts himself saying SM1 was an afterthought that came from having leftover assets. Chris Roberts makes it pretty clear the decision was made after the game's release - differently to the Making WCI and II account from the Ultimate Strategy Guide. Based on that, it seems that he didn't so much ignore the facts or misrepresent them; rather, he simply made the decision to believe one source over another. Had he properly referenced the article with in-text citations, this would have been clear.

Had this guy provided proper referencing, the source of his mistake would be clear: faced with two conflicting sources in this 2013 interview and the Ultimate Strategy Guide from 1990, he simply chose to go with the newer and more personal account from Chris Roberts. This is a mistake, but I think it's one of his more understandable mistakes - after all, the account from the Strategy Guide is only clear about when the idea of the Special Edition was proposed (and even that is a very fuzzy "earlier in the year" - when?). It doesn't necessarily follow from that that Roberts immediately proposed the add-on disk; it could be something that occurred later. But it could also have occurred exactly at that time, and it's clear from the Roberts interview that after 23 years, he's hardly a reliable source (and who could blame him?). In any case, it's far too little to go on, if you're going to make the claim that this is why SM1 had weak missions (weak missions, of course, are a problematic claim in itself).

And yeah, the SM2 thing is even more surprising. At least with SM1, it's possible to see where he's coming from. But the idea that SM2 was built on the WC2 engine...? What source could he possibly have found to suggest that? That having been said, even with no evidence whatsoever, there may be something to that claim, if you strip it of the gameplay hyperbole, and concentrate only on the frame limiter. Undoubtedly, WC2 did begin as a code modification of WC1, and undoubtedly up to a certain point, it would have been relatively easy to take a new function from the WC2 code and insert it back into WC1 (just look at the non-interactive WC2 demo). However, you would want to be crazy-careful with stuff like this, and that's undoubtedly why only the frame limiter was inserted (and of course, it's easily conceivable that the frame limiter was developed for SM2 in response to player feedback, and then ported into the WC2 code). I mean, any code-based gameplay change would require a very substantial additional amount of testing of the whole package, which not only would make SM2 more expensive to develop, but also could be difficult given Origin's QA department would have been small and constantly overworked with multiple projects.


Interestingly, that same page explains exactly what Chris was saying in the update… the Speech Accessory Pack wouldn't have been possible from a materials standpoint. If you're interested in some of the math, a big release from Origin at that point in time would ideally have a $6.00 materials budget, which is the cost of printing the box, stickers, manuals and media. A 3.5" diskette was $0.72 towards that budget, which means that with seven disks Wing Commander II has already used up $5.04 with $0.96 left over for the Joan's booklet, install guide and box. Add three more for the speech and you're in the red!

Anyway, he does all this again after the criticism, sharing the original script and the finished introduction by the way of insisting that there's been some mistake, that an intentionally maybe-sinister thing has happened and can't be explained. But we know exactly what happened: going up against disk budgets! There were working builds of the game with a significantly longer intro that included the courtroom… and they were reduced into a single conversation with Tolwyn that uses the common office sets and portraits. (Which makes you wonder: is that left out because he didn't come across it in his research or because it would directly contradict his following paragraph about the sound disks?)
I don't know if he would have come across this stuff in his research. He's dealing with old games, so of course he should have come across some stuff about disk costs and how they affected decisions. But maybe he didn't; certainly, the numbers you cite here are completely new to me, and I thought I was fairly well-versed on all the development history stuff that can be found on WC history. This would be information you'd do well to post for him as a comment. Certainly, his comment about the Speech Pack being a blatant cash grab is extraordinarily out of place. It's impossible that someone who looks at games history would be entirely unaware of the extent to which space availability affected game design at that time.

Oh, by the way - he mentions the game cost $50 and the speech pack was $25. Is that actually correct? I'm not sure why, but I was under the impression that at the time, the game would have been closer to $25. Do you know the original prices for these?
 
Credit to him, then, I had assumed it was unsourced. It is still wrong - Chris is thinking in terms of the initial product design, not something that was added after the game was made... and you can see that in the docs archived here, the weekly production notes and the materials checklists.

I think the Wing Commander II engine bit is a misunderstanding of Secret Missions 2's general role as a prequel... the game itself isn't technically different from WC1, but it did intentionally introduce a lot of the WC2 story (with a story by Ellen Guon and introductions for characters like Tolwyn and Hobbes)... and some of the development prototyped processes that would be followed in WC2 -- like the first in-house 3D ship model... but not the WC2 engine!

The prices are off, but not in the direction you're thinking. MSRP from Origin for Wing Commander II was $79.95 with the Speech Accessory Pack an additional $19.95. In practice that meant it was around $60 at retail at launch plus $15 for the speech pack. Games have gotten much, much cheaper as they've become more expensive over the years!
 
Credit to him, then, I had assumed it was unsourced. It is still wrong - Chris is thinking in terms of the initial product design, not something that was added after the game was made... and you can see that in the docs archived here, the weekly production notes and the materials checklists.

I think the Wing Commander II engine bit is a misunderstanding of Secret Missions 2's general role as a prequel... the game itself isn't technically different from WC1, but it did intentionally introduce a lot of the WC2 story (with a story by Ellen Guon and introductions for characters like Tolwyn and Hobbes)... and some of the development prototyped processes that would be followed in WC2 -- like the first in-house 3D ship model... but not the WC2 engine!

The prices are off, but not in the direction you're thinking. MSRP from Origin for Wing Commander II was $79.95 with the Speech Accessory Pack an additional $19.95. In practice that meant it was around $60 at retail at launch plus $15 for the speech pack. Games have gotten much, much cheaper as they've become more expensive over the years!

Yeah these aren't out of the ordinary for titles from that era. I remember paying somewhere in the realm of 70-80 for copies of Space Quest 4 back in the day as well.
 
Origin games were typically about $10 more than other studios; so a contemporary Space Quest in 1991 might have been $69.95.
 
Origin games were typically about $10 more than other studios; so a contemporary Space Quest in 1991 might have been $69.95.
That sounds about right, and the exchange rate usually meant I would pay a bit more than that. The average exchange rate CDN - USD was about 1.15:1 in 1991. A game that retailed for about 69.65 in the US would be around 80CDN though the price differences did not strictly go off the exchange rate and other things factored into the prices.
 
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