Digital Antiquarian Explores Wing Commander's Leap to Interactive Movies (March 5, 2021)

[ChrisReid]

The Digital Antiquarian has posted a lengthy article on the history of Wing Commander 3. Much like his previous works, the piece is extensively researched and draws on both archival materials and personal interviews to build the historical context for game. It's a good recap of what WC3 was and how it came to be. The later parts of the article shift more into a meta review from the perspective of 2021. Our author here comes across as fairly critical of the more formulaic missions, binary nature of the plot choices and cheesiness of big space cats. He seems to realize the tonal shift is somewhat jarring after talking about how impressive a product WC3 is, so he ends on a conciliatory note. You can check out the full article here.

The presence of so many recognizable actors on the set, combined with the broader mass-media excitement over multimedia and CD-ROM, brought a parade of mainstream press to the shoot. The Today show, VH-1, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere magazine, the Associated Press, USA Today, Newsweek, Forbes, and Fortune were just some of the media entities that stopped in to take some pictures, shoot some video, and conduct a few interviews. At a time when the likes of DOOM was still well off the mainstream radar, Wing Commander III was widely accepted as the prototype for gaming’s inevitable future.

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Original update published on March 5, 2021

 

[Wedge009]

It's one thing to talk about opinions and another thing to talk about objective evaluations. The author and some of his commenters seem to agree that WC3 was 'objectively' bad. Even with a 21st century perspective, I find that hard to universally agree with given the 'retrospective review' video posted about just some weeks ago that seemed to be positive overall about the game, even with whatever caveats the reviewer gave. I - and I suspect most readers here - will want to disagree with him on the point of WC3 being 'objectively bad', even if he does make some reasonable criticisms.

I tried to read most of the article even if I skimmed over some parts (it's a long read), but one thing that stuck out to me was his assessment that Mark Hamill - and the actors in general - performed competently but 'without much heart'. I remember Mr Hamill and Mr McDowell speaking glowingly of the future of 'interactive movies' (as cringe-worthy as that might sound in the 21st century) and I may have a biased opinion, but I thought he and the rest of the cast acquitted themselves admirably even without considering that the idea of veteran Hollywood actors performing in a game production was largely new territory. I recall the aforementioned retrospective reviewer seeing the acting as a positive as well.

I can understand much being made of the 'movie' side of WC3 - it was certainly the excitement for me when I first heard/read of WC3 back in the day. If I try to think of the game-play aspect alone, perhaps it is fair to give some criticism that it wasn't as polished as it could be. I thought it was a pretty good adaptation of RealSpace for the next iteration of WC and certainly the move to 3D models was another exciting point when discussing the game at the time. Could it have done better? I suppose - I remarked elsewhere recently that the untextured ground missions didn't look great (something that was rectified for WC4). I don't think it's fully accurate to claim that WC3's game-play was no improvement from WC1/2 - while I missed the torpedo runs of WC2 (and I accept not everyone enjoyed that particularly aspect), I recall there are individual turrets on capital ships that wasn't possible before with sprite rendering. It's a small detail, but in a long and detailed discussion such as this article, it seems like it was glossed over just to make the point 'surprisingly little changed'. And while some of the missions may have seemed repetitive, there are some new things in mission design like skipper missiles and defending Locanda.

I can see that the author tried to be more positive at the end, even admitted that he enjoyed the game for himself. Opinions are fine and all, I'm just not so sure it's accurate that WC3 was 'objectively' bad, even when considering it was a product of its (strange) time.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I am with Wedge, I do not like these pieces at all.

They're always some generic angry nerd opinion (right or wrong) couched in something purporting to be an interesting, lengthy history... that's pretty much 100% rewritten material from the official guide (down to the image breakouts which are taken directly from the book!). They always rely on 'there's sure a lot of text here!' to imply to people who don't actually read them that they must be very smart.