Doodads

Bob McDob

Bob McDob

Better Health Through Less Flavor
This is the writeup on the WCA series that ran in PC Gamer waaaaaaaaaaay back in 1996. If you're interested I could type up the rest of the stuff. It features an interview with Richard Garriot and an explanation of why the P2 beta ran superfast :). Basically, I''m trying to save as much stuff as I can befor ethe issue falls apart.



"ON SCREEN!"
Wing Commander goes Hollywood as ts very own animated series deubuts this month...

Wing Commander III and IV actors Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, and Malcolm McDowell are reprising their roles as Colonel Blair, Maniac, and Admiral Tolwyn by lending their voices to "Wing Commander Academy", a new 12-part animated series to debut on the USA network. It's kind of a "Wing Commander: The Early Years" set in 2655 - 20 years before the first Wing Commande game, and tracing the exploits of Blair and his fighter pilot buddies as they're thrown into the forward battle lines against the Kilrathi, in their last year of training. While still learning their craft, Blair, Maniac, and Bowman (voiced by Dana Delaney of "China Beach" fame) fly missions against the Kilrathi from aboard the TCS Tiger's Claw commanded by Commodore Tolwyn.
"Essential elements for the series were easily drawn from the games," says the show's producer Larry Latham. "The show is very cinematic as opposed to cartooney, very stylized in its approached, but still grounded in the covenants of good storytelling." The prequel format was decided upon to make the principle characters younger, and so appeal to a cartoon audience. "We didn't want caricatures of the characters", says Latham, "but we did need everybody to be a recognizable, earlier version of themselves. And the planes look like they did in the games, only with the technology taken backwards a bit".
Not surprisingly, Origin already has plans for a spin-off "game of the TV show of the game" featuring the show's cartoon animation rather than live action movie sequences, due to appear early next year. Look out for the show itself on Saturdays, during USA's "Action Extreme Team" slot.
 
Wing's Commander Takes Flight

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts has left Origin after nine years of pioneering work. Gary Whitta spoke to him about his future plans.

A nine-year era came to an end last month when one of Origin's most prodigious talents announced he was leaving to set up his own games company. Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing Commander series and Origin's interactive movie pioneer, has moved out of Origin's offices and across town, where he is currently putting together the money and personnel for his new venture, Digital Anvil. But why leave one of the biggest and most successful developers in the business? "After Origin was sold to Electronic Arts, it became so big that it lost a lot of focus - it got to the point where I hardly knew half the people who worked there," explains Roberts. "With Digital Anvil, I want to get back to the feeling of a small creative team." The most significant change is that Roberts will no longer have anything to do with the Wing Commander series that he pioneered. Fans of the series will no doubt be sorry to see him go, and Roberts himself will miss working on further installments of the story. "It's like bringing uP a child, and then being asked to give him up at the age of 12" he says. "It stinks, but I sold Wing Commander to EA when Origin was sold, so that's just part of the price I have to pay". Nevertheless, Roberts is still connected with the Wing Commander movie currentlybeing touted around Hollywoodm and if the project ever goes into production he'll be involved.
In the meantime, all of Roberts' energies are concentrated on getting Digital Anvil up and running. Once a team has been assembled (the founding members are already in place), theyll be working on two types of games: multi-player action-strategy titles in the Command & Conquer mould (Roberts and his cronies have been addicted to C&C for quite a while), and more of the interactive movies that Roberts is best known for. "Right now we're looking at producing a Command & Conquer-style game that is currently cvalled Conquest, and a Privateer-style game with the working title of Freelancer. I want the opportunity to work more on the space combat side of things, because with Wing Commander III and IV, I though the focus was more towards the movie sequences and the space combat isn't quite how I would have done it if we'd had longer to complete the project." Roberts is keen to get back to the kind of movie sets he presided over during Wing Commander shoots, but intends to use the footage he films more creatively - with a Digital Anvil office also setting up in Los Angeles, Roberts plans that the company's games will spawn TV and movies, with the footage for all versions shot together.
Also planned for development at Digital Anvil are Silverheart, a game Roberts started developing at Origin based on the works of sci-fi author Michael Moordock, and Brute Force, a 3D action fest. But don't hold your breath - the first Digital Anvil game probably won't appear until at least the end of 1997.
 
Interview with Richard Garriot

Has Origin settled into a pattern of producing series of games rather than individual products? Ultima and Wing are established brands, and Crusader is going that way too...
Well, that whole series policy predates even Origin. The Ultima series was what founded Origin, and with something like Wing Commander, anything that successful has to have a sequel. But between Wing Commander and Crusader, we've published around eight original non-sequeled titles. It's definetly our policy to say that once we have a formula and a plan style that we think is effective, we'll continue to pursue it. It's never beem a written company policy as such, but it's definetly high on our ageneda. If you ask our staff, they'll probably tell you that we put most of our efforts into developing sequels, but I actually think the reverse is true. There;s usually one sequel going on for each of our top two properties, and everything elese is something new. We're still pursueing things like 3D point-of-view games...everything we're planning to do outside of Wing Commander, Ultima, and Crusader are all-new, original games.

Ultima IX and Ultima Online obviously represent the future of that series, but what's next for Wing Commander?
Well, we've had Wing Commander I, II, and III, which had their heavily intertwined storiesthat we call the Kilrathi Saga; and Wing IV was a solo product. But Wing Commander, which we're doing now, starts a whole new series. It's the opening chapter in a series of two to four new games which will form the new series. The Wing Commander games so far have been about flying missions and then coming back to see movie sequences which you fairly indirectly affect. What the team really wants to do now is much more carefully intertwine those two elements, so you'll start out on the fringes of the battle, but by the end, you'll be in the front lines and at the critical junctions of the battle; and your wins and losses are directly tied into the story in the sense that the foe you shoot down in space is the character you would have otherwise run into in the cinematics, We're also working on another Wing Commander project with a working title of Maniac Missions, centered around the character played by Todd Wilson. The whole project only came about because Tom is such an interesting character.

Do you see Wing Commander and Ultima as ageless properties or do you envision a time when they will have run their course?
A little bit of both. I think what we'll do is give them breaks periodically, and or re-invent them. For example, with Ultima IX I'm purposely closing the Britannia history which has evolved throughout the series, specifically so that after IX I can sit back and evaluate the series and decide where to take it from there. It's time to ask, is the online environment where the next round of Ultimas should be created, or now that we've moved into this 3D virtual environment in which we can create great stories, is that more important? It's kind of a fresh start for the whole series.




To be continued later.
 
That is very good news (what Bob put below), and even if there is a WC game that isn't flying, I would buy it.
 
The rest of it...

Fascinating stuff. I promise to get some newer things up (oh, and check out Lord British's new gig, Lineage.

At the moment, though, you seem happy with the approach you use in games like Wing Commander IV.
Yes, we're pursueing both approaches, and you'll see them moving colser together. If you look at Wing IV and The Darkening, the interactivity in the movie sequences is already much better than it was in Wing III. And from the outlines I've seen for Wing V, I know there are some very clever ploys to make those sequences still more interactive on a constant basis, rahter than just clicking A or B when tyhe movie pauses. They're comig up with better ways to make that more fluid and make those branches more relevvent. The other trick with interactive movies is thatif you're at a branch and you make a selection, you only get to see one branch or the other, which means you've wasted the whole other half of the branch. Now we're finding better ways to utilize footage effectively, so if we've beuilt twoi very expensive sets and you choose to see set A, we'll get you past set B as well before toy leave the area.

How big a blow was it to lose Chris Roberts, who was pioneering this area for Origin with the Wing games?
Chris is still loosely associated with us, so we haven't lost him completely, but yes he was clearly a key member of Origin from a variety of standpoints. We'll miss him from many other aspects of his managerial contribution than from Wing Commander specifically. Just like Ultima has grown far beyond me as an individual, the same is true for Chris and the Wing Commanders. There's a contingent of us here at the office who feel that Chris was driving the Wing Commander stuff so much towards movies that he was neglecting a good aspect of the gameplay department.. One of the reasons for Chris's departure is he's not really interested in making games anymore, he wants to make movies, and he's one of the few people who I think might be able to cross from games into movies. He's taught himself the ropes pretty well.

There was speculation a while ago about a Wing Commander movie...
That's still;a reasonably likely event. We're already doing an animated TV series with Wing Commander Academy, and we have a movie deal waiting to be sighned. But there's an interesting difficulty right now, with George Lucas planning the next Star Wars series, there are lots of studios who want to work with George and don't want to piss him off.
 
Here's one of the more recent FreeLancer reports. I'm dedicating this copied report from PC Gamer to all those who lost their lives today, at least until I can come up with something more honorable.

('s a side note, I've converted the Book of LOAF into Microsoft Reader .lit format; mostly for personal use...though I hope I can get the go ahead from the Admin gods... :))




NOW Freelancer

>>With a back catalog of games that includes the Wing Commander series and the Privateers, CHRIS ROBERTS has great credentials; enough for Microsoft to trust heavily in Freelancer, which won 1999 E3's "Best of Show" award.

1 When you sat down to create Wing Commander, what were you hoping to achieve as a gameplay experience, and how is that similar (or different) to what you're trying to do with Freelancer?
I wanted to combine the visceral action of first-person 3D - being in a fighter - with the context of a story with real characters. In other words, I wanted to make a game that made me feel like I was inside a film like Star Wars. Freelancer also tries to ground your experience, but as a game experience, it is much more free form, allowing you to play many different roles: merchant, bounty hunter, explorer, mercenary, or pirate.

2 Is the evolution of a game series from WC toFreeLancer(in spirit rather than name) purely down to technological features, or has game design decisions and directions affected the games you'll create today?
Technology definetly factors in, but I would have to say game design and direction probably has the strongest influence on the games I'm trying to create today. I'm really focused on making the experience accesible to the widest range of players as possible. I think console games have been doing a much better job of this than PC games, and it's is something that I think our industry needs to address if we want to capture a wider audience.

3 Care to comment on the cost to produce WC against any ballpark numbers forFreeLancer?
Not sure Microsoft wants me to. Obviously a game as large and ambitious as FreeLancer isn't cheap to produce...

4 Obviously WC became a huge franchise, with four games, tens of millions of production costs, and a movie. With the Internet and new ventures, what do you see as the possibilities for FreeLancer?
Hopefully FreeLancer can enjoy the same success as Wing Commander, and the fact that we're building an online persistant world that players can exist in beyond their single-player experience will certainly help.

5 What's the best "insider" story that you have about the Wing Commander series, or the creation of any of the games?
Originally I was trying to come up with a name for the aliens mankind was going to be fighting in my new space game, Squadron (which became Wing Commander.) Finally, after a long night at work I gave up, putting a placeholder in. It was created because I saw these aliens as killing with wrath... Kill... Wrath... Kilrath... I tacked on a "i", wrote down Kilrathi and decided it would do until I came up with a real name.

6 WC's legacy is the cinematic story line, multiple endings, and the real feeling of being in a space fighter cockpit. Pretty impressive. What would you hope that FreeLancer's legacy will be five or ten years from now?
An interface that finally broke the "sim" barrier and opened the genre to new players. A rich and truly dynamic living universe that evolved, engaged and reacted to players both online and not. A visual and audio attention to detail that put the hallowed "suspension of disbelief" one step closer in PC gaming.




THEN
Wing Commander
>>DEVELOPER: ORIGIN >>RELEASE DATE: 1990
REMEMBER THE BIT WHERE...
You first sat in a Rapier and blew the hell out of a wing of Dralthi? Or how about the time when Christopher Blair gets wrongfully sentenced for the destruction of the Tiger's Claw? The WC series was one of the most engrossing games ever, and every space action game released today is still compared to this classic franchise.
 
Originally posted by Bob McDob
...wrote down Kilrathi and decided it would do until I came up with a real name.
Click to expand...
An old story, but I'm glad he didn't change it. Despite the simplistic origin, I don't think you could think of a better name.
 
CONCORDIA PICS!!!!!

YEEEEEEEEEEEH!!!!! GO CONCORDIA!!!!!

connie2.jpg


AND TIAMAT!!!!!

tiamat2.jpg


As you can see I got my Confed Handbook today. :) So WATCH OUT, CS Iason!
 
You should really put your pictures somewhere that doesn't suck so you don't have this problem every time you try to post a picture.

TC
 
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