I never understood why Tolwyn hated Blair so much.

I do like the overall idea of having Hobbes betray you because that IS a real betrayal... and I think the game does a magnificent job of making you feel bad about your own actions over I'm not at all fond of the modern trend of deciding favorite characters are too precious to harm or to ever have bad aspects. Kill your darlings!
Now that I've said that ...... I am extremely disgusted with WC3's handling of Hobbes.

First of all, I think the Hobbes choice should be branched, thus player should be able to get a story for Hobbes to survive and return to Ghorah Khar or even become one of the Kilrathi elders after the war, which echoes certian points of WC2 and Freedom Flight.

My point is that if the team did not like to have a big kat around the player, then just do not let him appear in the story.
 
They wrote the first draft of the script but I think the process would surprise people: like the original Wing Commander, the script came *after* the mission design. So Chris provided them with a general direction for how he imagined the story (which they've said explicitly included the Hobbes plot) and they went from there creating characters and all the interactivity. In fact one of the few things from the planned mission tree they wanted changed was moving the Skipper mission up to the start of the game... and you can see how doing that that broke the difficulty curve!



I'm split on it overall. I do not particularly like the 'overlay' aspect of the story... and to Chris' credit, he removed it from the PC version of the game... I just think it never should've existed in the first place.

I do like the overall idea of having Hobbes betray you because that IS a real betrayal... and I think the game does a magnificent job of making you feel bad about your own actions over I'm not at all fond of the modern trend of deciding favorite characters are too precious to harm or to ever have bad aspects. Kill your darlings!

(A variant that would've worked better to my mind had they time and the ability to reshoot anything--which they didn't!--: have the 'test' site for the Behemoth be Hhallas. Blair gives Ralgha a knowing look at the briefing but he's lost in thought. The audience knows he's Ralgha nar Hhallas so this is important. Same betrayal happens and we end up getting a holo mail about how he respected Blair but he couldn't in good conscious destroy his home planet...)
Yeah Manchurian candidate trope just doesnt do it for me. But as a whole, i think the traitor sub plot was not handled well in 3. None of it was ever really fleshed out well to me. Threads opened to never have any real satisfying conclusions. From cobra, to radio rollins. Plus the traitor plot was just done in WC2. I have no problem with any character dying, if its executed well. Hobbes whole arc in three felt rushed, and unsatisfying to me.
 
Now that I've said that ...... I am extremely disgusted with WC3's handling of Hobbes.

First of all, I think the Hobbes choice should be branched, thus player should be able to get a story for Hobbes to survive and return to Ghorah Khar or even become one of the Kilrathi elders after the war, which echoes certian points of WC2 and Freedom Flight.

My point is that if the team did not like to have a big kat around the player, then just do not let him appear in the story.
Yeah they wanted the hobbes character to do a 180 on a dime and chose a lazy way to do it. Loaf's idea is already 5 times better than what they did.
 
Yeah they wanted the hobbes character to do a 180 on a dime and chose a lazy way to do it. Loaf's idea is already 5 times better than what they did.
As we can see from Freedom Flight, there is a long story of Ralgha's choice to support the Ghorah Khar resistance against the imperial royal family. It had a conflict of political interest behind.

I still view the characters of WC2 and WC3 separately. Even the fur color is different.
 
Wing Commander III's production wasn't a huge secret like a modern film, though... in fact, the major parties all walk you through the whole process in the interviews at the back of the official guide! Including exactly how Wing Commander II played into their story for the game. And if you ever look through the set photos, for instance, you can see WC2 screenshots stuck up right next to storyboards and costume designs... so it's a lot less /this didn't matter to them/ and more /this mattered in a different way to them than it does to me/.

Very true, I didn't mean to downplay the shear amount of effort they did to make the story what it is.

"This mattered in a different way to them then it does to me". Is exactly it, I very much agree.

Yeah Manchurian candidate trope just doesnt do it for me. But as a whole, i think the traitor sub plot was not handled well in 3. None of it was ever really fleshed out well to me. Threads opened to never have any real satisfying conclusions. From cobra, to radio rollins. Plus the traitor plot was just done in WC2. I have no problem with any character dying, if its executed well. Hobbes whole arc in three felt rushed, and unsatisfying to me.

Absolutely, It was a total crime the left out that one scene where Hobbs leaves a message for Blair. It wasn't much, but it was at least something. I know it was for technical reasons, but still, it's one brutal cut to have to leave out.
 
"This mattered in a different way to them then it does to me". Is exactly it, I very much agree.

But the result was that the entire art style and story shifted in a different direction. The characters have different looks, the machinery has a different art style, and the story reveals a different atmosphere.

Absolutely, It was a total crime the left out that one scene where Hobbs leaves a message for Blair. It wasn't much, but it was at least something. I know it was for technical reasons, but still, it's one brutal cut to have to leave out.
To me neither the absence nor presence the of this scene is reasonable.

Absence - Things aren't even clear.

Presence - Deus ex machina.
 
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As we can see from Freedom Flight, there is a long story of Ralgha's choice to support the Ghorah Khar resistance against the imperial royal family. It had a conflict of political interest behind.
I never really understood why Roberts seemed to dislike this aspect of Wing Commander II. I think the story is that he wanted things to be more clear-cut, but then in IV you fight a civil war against your own comrades who are trying to commit genocide, which seems a hell of a lot darker than anything that was ever planned for the previous games.

I really like the political aspects and I think they define the Kilrathi more than anything else; certainly other people think so, look at Freedom Flight, Voices of War, Jukaga in End Run/Fleet Action, Academy, the entire plot of False Colors, the asides in the movie handbook and so on. This is the kind of thing other series try to shoehorn in years later when they feel they need more "depth", but here it came about organically and with surprising consistency in portrayal across the board. I guess there are people who still feel embarrassed that the major antagonist of the series are "furry Klingons", as if that were a bad thing (and I think a case could be made that the Kilrathi are far more internally consistent than the Klingons ever were). This is pulp sci-fi, and they're good pulp sci-fi characters. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
 
I think a case could be made that the Kilrathi are far more internally consistent than the Klingons ever were
Sorry I'm not a native English speaker, what do you mean by internally consistent here? Thank you!

Well, I don't see any problem with "furry Klingons", whether in pulp sci-fi or not. Actually, more importantly, an existing work has attracted its fans, then in the sequel these fans' preferences should be given proper attention. From this point of view, I am optimistic about the new Mario movie, while the previous old live action version was too... Similarly, FF7 Re is also stably continuing the aesthetic style of the original art design, instead of quickly changing the comic-style character design into real face scanning like what Capcom did in RE 2, 3 Remake and DMC5.

The same problem also appeared in WC Movie. I'm surprised why Hunter became a character like Hawk? Is there any similarity between this character and Hunter in the game? If such a character was needed here, then why not let him be Hawk? I am a fan of Freedom Flight and this Hunter makes me uncomfortable.
 
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I always liked Tolwyn's character development through the games. His arc (to me anyway) was very much a logical progression of an honorable military officer dealing with a difficult command situation for years that turns into a "Space Hitler" by virtue of having led humanity through a war that often times appeared hopeless and required, by the end, to abandon any concept of "rules of war" (not targeting civilians, use of weapons of mass destruction, etc) to ensure humanity's survival.

I don't think it's far jump from what was required to win the war against Kilrah to what Tolwyn became in WC4- an "ends justify the means at any cost" because who knows when the next extinction level threat against humanity will be, regardless of the human (or Kilrathi) or moral cost in preparing humanity to face said threat. It's kind of like playing Stellaris on harder difficulties- if you aren't ruthlessly crushing/subjugating nearby empires/factions and developing technology like your empire's life depended on it, you will get crushed by the end game crisis.

RE: Tolwyn/Blair (and admitting I'm not super up on the lore outside the mainline games)- I thought the transition from 2 to 3 was handled well in relation to their relationship. As outlined by LOAF, Blair has lots of reasons not to like Tolwyn by the start of WC3, and I always figured Blair perceived the transfer to the lackluster Victory by Tolwyn as another thinly veiled move to show his displeasure with Blair for the loss of yet another carrier Blair was based on (this time the Concordia). (Though I seem to recall reading on the forums that in the books, Blair wasn't even on the Concordia when she went down)

Frankly, every time I see Malcolm McDowell in anything, I see Admiral Tolwyn, not "generic bad guy" when I play WC3 or 4. It's probably one of my favorite roles of his. He just nails the arrogant Admiral. :)

RE: Hobbes as a traitor- I loved and hated this reveal when it happened. I appreciated that it was the last person I suspected of anything, especially given everything that happened with Hobbes in WC2. By the same token, given everything that happened in WC2, it made it seem like the politics of rebel faction of the Kilrathi in WC2 was retconned away, and it made Hobbes' rather complex character up to that point seem kind of cheaply thrown away. Whoever had the idea of using Hobbes' home planet for testing the Behemoth- that would have been an awesome justification to make him turn. :)
 
By the same token, given everything that happened in WC2, it made it seem like the politics of rebel faction of the Kilrathi in WC2 was retconned away, and it made Hobbes' rather complex character up to that point seem kind of cheaply thrown away.
If I remember correctly, Ghorah Khar seems to be basically not mentioned after SO1. I think the production team didn't focus on this part of the plot.

If you consider the story of Ralgha in WC2 and Freedom Flight, even the age of Hobbes in WC3 looks so incongruous, not to mention that the fur color does not match.
 
But the result was that the entire art style and story shifted in a different direction. The characters have different looks, the machinery has a different art style, and the story reveals a different atmosphere.

Correct.
Presence - Deus ex machina.

Not sure what you mean by this. If you could explain this reasoning? I could see it being anyoing who fans of WC2 that would have hated this whole subplot. But the addition of this scene wouldn't have made that any worse I'd think. Anyway I don't see deus ex machina. Just the logical outcome of what they had already laid for story in wc3.
 
Correct.


Not sure what you mean by this. If you could explain this reasoning? I could see it being anyoing who fans of WC2 that would have hated this whole subplot. But the addition of this scene wouldn't have made that any worse I'd think. Anyway I don't see deus ex machina. Just the logical outcome of what they had already laid for story in wc3.

I assume I am using the correct phrase. I mean, it's a set-up with no foreshadowing and almost no echo in the sequels, just introduced here to "solve" the problem. And I don't think this additional (also forced) design can make sense of the story.

A more brilliant way of writing, for example, is in Zootopia, a story in which all the important clues are used in the foreshadowing-echo technique. i.e. The clue of the last major twist was laid in the kids theater play at the beginning. And that's just the script writing in a single movie production. Series involving multiple works require even more attention to this issue.

For another, yeah, I think this design is not friendly enough for (at least a lot of) WC2 and Freedom Flight fans. What is more, I think this late forced additional settings to negate the design of the previous work is very dangerous to deal with. I know of one example, Konami's Contra: Shattered Soldier introduced a story that showed that the humans in earlier Contra story were the baddies, meaning that players had been playing the villains' pawns for several times before. Fortunately, Contra is not a game series that emphasizes the story, so not many fans care about this.
 
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Sorry I'm not a native English speaker, what do you mean by internally consistent here? Thank you!
No problem, it's probably not clear for native speakers either.

I mean that from II onward the Kilrathi have been portrayed as feudal warriors ― in the intro PRINCE Thrakkath goes to meet the EMPEROR and he's dressed like a medieval lord. All the subsequent works play off that, with the intrigue in Freedom Flight, Fleet Action and Academy. The Forstchen books and supplementary works like Voices of War played off the notion of them being feudal samurai warriors, but it's still working off the original idea. Compare that to the Klingons, who started out as grey antagonistic humans, then moved to grey antagonistic humans with forehead makeup before being retconned into honorable space samurai warriors because they needed a backstory for Worf. But for the first 20 years of their existence that backstory didn't exist.

And while we're on the subject of appearance the Kilrathi have stayed much more visually consistent too. Apparently the decision to make them giant cats was made by an artist, Glen Johnson? I don't know if modern games would let someone not involved in planning make that decision.

But going back to space cats, sometimes I feel like the reason the series has stayed dormant for so long has been because there's some kind of embarrassment over that. Chris Roberts has tried to remake them repeatedly, in the film and the initial pitch for what became Star Citizen, and they all look more Tolkien Orc-ish. I'm not sure I like that; I wouldn't have made the Kilrathi anthromorphic lions and tigers myself, but somebody did, and it's what they've been in the overwhelming majority of their appearances. That's not something you can disown.

I think there's a trend sometimes to "gentrify" sci-fi works, especially the more pulpy kind, to try and make them more "serious", but if you do that to something like the Kilrathi you risk sucking their identity out of them. And anyway I think a lot of genre works take themselves too seriously and just end up looking pretentious. Wing Commander has always taken itself seriously, even if some of the things that happened in it objectively looked less so (space cats enslaving space birds). That's the best way to do it. It knows what it's doing, and it knows that you know it knows.
 
Apparently the decision to make them giant cats was made by an artist, Glen Johnson?
Yes, as I know, he created the concept and provided us awesome works, such as the portraits in Claw Marks. Also, as I know, Denis Loubet provied us a lot of awesome Kilrathi portraits, too. (I just would like to tell you how happy I was when I got his "like" on my fanart!)

My personal feeling is that Kilrathi portraits in WC1 and 2 are both exquisitely drawn. The characters may look fierce and dangerous (Thrakhath) or even ugly (Kilrah emperor), but that's from how the roles look. The presentation is beautiful. Sorry, I don't know if I expressed it correctly. In some later works, the modeling of the characters looks not so good... I would like to say... awkward.
 
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I never really understood why Roberts seemed to dislike this aspect of Wing Commander II. I think the story is that he wanted things to be more clear-cut, but then in IV you fight a civil war against your own comrades who are trying to commit genocide, which seems a hell of a lot darker than anything that was ever planned for the previous games.

I think this is where press interviews and reality divide a little... I don't think there's any genuine desire to make the story more clear-cut... it's more that he didn't like the 'cute' aspect that he felt snuck into the games when they weren't on his watch... big friendly cat people, aliens based on different human animals and so on (he very clearly feels the same way about the anime/Robotech inspiration for the visuals in the earlier games).

(I mean, I think both takes are wrong... the latter more than the former... but I see where they're coming from, especially in 1994.)
 
I think this is where press interviews and reality divide a little... I don't think there's any genuine desire to make the story more clear-cut... it's more that he didn't like the 'cute' aspect that he felt snuck into the games when they weren't on his watch... big friendly cat people, aliens based on different human animals and so on (he very clearly feels the same way about the anime/Robotech inspiration for the visuals in the earlier games).

(I mean, I think both takes are wrong... the latter more than the former... but I see where they're coming from, especially in 1994.)
I get that but then chris kind of went that way with the kilrathi in 4. I know he wasn't fond of any of the puppetry from the 2 games or even the movie but he did make them look extremely cutesy and Dosile in four, with the big eyes.

Back to hobbes, I get that he would have never introduced him into 2 if he had made the game but hobbes was there and I think he was a very compelling character. that got whiplashed 180 degrees in a lazy way, to the detriment of the story in three.
 
Denis Loubet provied us a lot of awesome Kilrathi portraits, too. (I just would like to tell you how happy I was when I got his "like" on my fanart!)
I was going to mention Denis Loubet too as an example of artists having an impact beyond their field: he created the radar system used in all the games, and then copied by other series such as Freespace. It's still the best design I've seen, especially for a 2D game; the only other good ones are either 3D versions or small refinements.

I think this is where press interviews and reality divide a little... I don't think there's any genuine desire to make the story more clear-cut... it's more that he didn't like the 'cute' aspect that he felt snuck into the games when they weren't on his watch... big friendly cat people, aliens based on different human animals and so on (he very clearly feels the same way about the anime/Robotech inspiration for the visuals in the earlier games).
I've realized over time that the way Chris Roberts feels about Wing Commander is different from the way I feel about it. I think the ship designs in the first and second games are magnificent, the best in the series, and I would want the inspiration for a new game to come from that. The biggest thing that's frustrated me about Star Citizen is not the development or the pace of progress, but actually the art style ― it moved away from the subdued but colorful aesthetic of the initial prototypes to a more realistic but also more hodgepodge look that I can only describe as not having "color balance". I also think that the cartoon look of the early games is overblown, it's more distinct if you look at the game assets in isolation. It isn't something that I felt when actually playing the game, and I was actually surprised at how subdued everything looked. It felt a lot more like the RealSpace games than I expected.

As far as the aliens go, I can get where he comes from, even if the Firekkans only appeared in two scenes (and anyway, to bring up Star Citizen again, aren't there giant bird people in that?) But I don't think the solution is the way the movie or Star Citizen did it, to try to strip the "animalness" away, because then you still have a giant man-like creature, only now it doesn't have any kind of personality. Maybe try to keep the cat look, but take away the "man" part, try to break up the figure to something that would be adapted to the conditions of a different planet. Stockier and more hunched-over maybe? Above all I would want to keep the hair, because even if it's based on human perceptions and thus not "realistic" it's an important hook to the tribal aesthetic the Kilrathi have developed (although I think everyone agrees Wing Commander is not a realistic series).

But still, even if my favorite look of the main games are the first ones, I like the more brutalist look in III and IV (and the bright blue skybox in III, how is not cartoony?), the more angular look in Prophecy is interesting and the ships developed for Secret Ops are gorgeous. I always liked the movie designs even if they could have used more color. This is a series that has always reinvented its style every few years and I think that it's ended up stronger for it, because it doesn't fall into the trap some series do of having everything look the same at all periods all the time but also because it was able to bring in new people to redesign it. It reminds of me of what Johnson and Loubet did creating things that impacted the game far beyond their position, and also from that infamous quote of Warren Spector, the one where he says that games aren't created by one person ("says the creator of Deus Ex and System Shock"). I think having this mix of different designs and looks is a big strength of this series, and I wish that there were a way to capitalize on that.
 
"realistic"
I don't think a character with a Terran animal face necessarily means unseriousness and childishness.

Please allow me to use Zootopia again as an example. In my opinion this movie uses a bunch of furry cartoon characters to showcase extremely serious and deep topics: racial issues, stereotypes, bullying, politicians' private tricks and political conspiracy, even those grey areas in the adult world... A serious story doesn't necessarily need a bunch of stern-faced Marines played by Schwarzenegger and Stallone.

By the way, I remember there was a kind of outdated notion that all those cosmic battles with laser guns were kids' tricks, and that serious stories belonged only to historical and modern dramas.
 
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If you consider the story of Ralgha in WC2 and Freedom Flight, even the age of Hobbes in WC3 looks so incongruous, not to mention that the fur color does not match.

In all fairness, the manual stuff is all gloss added after the fact... and all the ages are suspect. Blair, too, is too young... if he's 32 in Wing Commander III then he's only 17 in Wing Commander I!

I don't think a character with a Terran animal face necessarily means unseriousness and childishness.

I should be clear, I totally agree with you (and honestly I suspect Chris would today, too). Like Bob, I LOVE the style and the choices in Wing Commander I and II. But I can also imagine how Chris Roberts would've felt differently in 1992: his desire going into this was to try his hand at doing lots of different games... but at age 25 he's suddenly Mr. Wing Commander and he sees that's going to be his public persona for the rest of his life (and already starts to chafe about it). And when you're 25 you think that the way up is to move away from what you think of as childish things... cartoons and talking animals!... not just because they're assosciated with kids but because they're also pretty directly copied from other IPs... so you have this drive to push to make what is now your legacy your own thing. The Kilrathi are an especially easy thing to latch onto there because they explicitly weren't something he'd thought much about in making the first game... his pitch was 'alien mutants' and it was so unimportant that Kzin-loving nerds on the team were allowed to do their own thing... and then Wing Commander II made that bigger and made it what people assosciated with the game (space cats!)... you don't have to agree with him to see how that would shape what he was thinking then.
 
Also Wing Commander II feels a lot less cartoony when you're playing it. For a long time I had only looked at the game through screenshots and thought that the ships looked cel-shaded, but when I actually played it again I was surprised how much it felt like the later 3D games.
 
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