Major changes to WC:T

C

Chevieblazer

Spaceman
it's been a while since the last news on our wing commander mod for nexus. this was mostly due to the fact that i redid large portions of the mod.
the problem was my story. it was the main and only reason why i ever wanted to make a wing commander mod for nexus(or any WC mod).
unfortunately, when i wrote it, i had only a pretty vague idea of the wing commander universe as a whole. i had played wc1, but i had no idea about the background (partly because my "version" did not include a manual or anything). so i created my own.

the more i learned about the canon wc universe, however, the more i realized that apart from a few spooky analogies, it did not really fit together, which caused a dilemma: on the one hand i like the wc universe far to much to just go and present an "alternate timeline" kind of thing, but i also did not want to just drop my story.

what i basically did now was to take up the thread where the canon history of the wc universe ends, in the middle of the bug war, and i spun it on to fill the gap to the point in time i had originally intended my story to take place, in 4013.
WC:T is now called "Wing Commander: Messia"
i have tried to keep a visual style very close to that of wc 1 and 2, but also enjoy the freedom to develop the story and universe i had originally intended.

i know most of you will say something like "WTF???" , but please take a look before you judge.
you can find a detailed "history" of wc:me here
a whole load of screenshots of confederation vessels can be found here
and last but not least, a few shots of the mysterious enemy are here

enjoy
 
wow....just....wow. and that's not a good wow. that's the wow of 'man, this is so incredibly awful i can't think of anything else to say...'
 
Some Confederation fighting some weird aliens in the year 4013 may still seem as great as Wing Commander to you, but don't expect anyone else to like it.
 
wow....just....wow. and that's not a good wow. that's the wow of 'man, this is so incredibly awful i can't think of anything else to say...'
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Intelligent criticism or none at all, please. Simply telling a project it's awful isn't helping it.

Now, that said, I have the same personal reaction as everyone else: this is something that probably seems clever only to you. Ignoring Eder's very accurate criticism, there's a fundamental flaw that's further throwing everything off: 2,000 years is a very, very, very, very long time. You don't jump ahead 2,000 years in a drama because you want to name a new carrier the 'Bengal Mk.[sic] II' -- you jump ahead 2,000 years when you want to go from copper phalanxes to F-22 Raptors. Political organizations, human ethics and every aspect of technology will be unimaginably different if you jump 2,000 years ahead in a story.

(When Wing Commander wants to build a clean slate in terms of having new ships to build a game around, it jumped ahead five or ten years... the time it wanted to completely change society, it jumped ahead a hundred years. Take that as a yardstick.)
 
apologies.

i would say that my main problems (aside from the odd jump in times) would be the direction of the art. while consistent, the designs are left wanting. They're not to terribly interesting, and the textures are needing some sprucing up as well, especially for designs that are supposed to be 2000 years in the future, they look really old. i'd suspect that confed would continue on its design style from prophecy. things would become sleeker, instead of bulkier. overall the designs just feel very haphazard to me, and wanting.
 
Um...This is what I have to say;
I was looking foreward to it when it was in 2654. The whole 2,000 year gap is wierd. You would have to do a lot of back story to make it flow right. I mean at this point you might as well make it a mod that has designs inspired by WC but not actually WC.
 
Mh......

I think within the timeline you posted are two things that could make a story on their own without going to much into the future.
- Bug war continous
- Kilrathi rebellion/Messia (where the titel Messia would fit when played from the Kilrathi side. Something I would find interesting)

Other things you could do and I would like to play is the big battles of the history.
For example the battles to slow down the Kilrathi right before the "Battle for earth" and then the battle itsself.

I think when you go deeper into the history and what is know you can find other interesting parts you can tell. Best thing would be to search someone who knows a lot about the entire universe and discuss it with him...or simply discuss it open here...their are enough people with the needed knowledge.

For going so much into the future is hard to make belivable....Loaf posted the reason. How do you think you can make it belivable thhat people realy thing "wow I am 2000+ years in the future" without finding all the common elements we have today?

One last thing about the title...Messia. Well I would connect a more relegious story with it...like that Kilrathi-messia you made in your fiction.
I would say keep tactics as title. It fits better to the gameplay IMO and what the game should represent.

Oh and I can't see the pics...is it possible to post them not as a attachment?
 
Hey powell, you ought to sell him on one of the campaigns from WCAAO for his plot. That gives him alot of options, and I think (from my understanding anyway) it would fit well with a Nexus Mod.
 
Anyway, now that the server is back online (no idea what was wrong, incidently):

WC:AAO is Wing Commander : Against All Odds. We are a Forum Based Role-playing game that gives players command of Task Forces or Fleets and pits them against our Admin team in a battle for total victory over the Kilrathi Empire.

The RP started in 2657, we're not very canon (it's tough to do that with our RPG), and has developed from there. We also have room to add new players if you're interested, but it's differant then other RPG's because we don't focus on Individual Fighter combat or on Player Vs. Player RPG.

Each of the engagements is carefully thought out and discussed by the admin team to decide which direction we want the game to go in. While this may make the game seem "Scripted" we have total secrecy from the players, so they never know what we're going to throw at them. =P

We've been experiancing a bit of growth but I stress that we are still a developing RPG, this means that if you get involved now you can have a degree of influence over the game, and how it gets set up and turned out (we add new rules almost every week as we discover things that are unclear).

Anyway, hope that's a good summary of what we're doing.
 
I like your models but... to me they don't give that total Wing Commander feel. They have the look of Confed scavaging parts from old carriers and fighters and putting two different halves together. Also, some of them feel too big but that may be just me. Other than that they look good.
 
ok, thanks you for the feedback.
i must say, i'm somewhat dissapointed, though. not because of the negative response, i was expecting that, but that nobody got the clue about the "mysterious attackers". i thought it was pretty obvious, especially with the sceens of those ships.
i guess i'm not spoiling all that much if i say that those new enemies are the messian kilrathi.
which is also one of the main reasons for the immense time span between the known wc parts and wc:me. the kilrathi had to basically rebuild their entire civilization from scratch. i don't want to go into too much detail about the exodus, but just think about how long it took humans to recover or re-aquire all the knowlege lost with the fall of the roman empire.

as for the confederation, yes of course they could all be flying organic ships by now, however, they have remained without any major challenges through all those centuries, which led to a very lame development, especially in military concerns. if there are no enemies to fight, would you rather fund research of new weapons or new fertilizers?
of course there hasn't been a complete standstill. for example, confed fighters are only half the size of the ones from the kilrathi and bug wars, but they have the same protection and firepower. i suppose you could say space force has worked more on refining existing weapon systems then creating new ones.

as for the ships, well i guess that's the negative way to put it. i mean, i wanted to keep the visuals of wc1 and 2. first because i like that style more than say the wc3 one, but also to give a sort of visual recognition (e.g. hey, that looks like a rapier! or hey that looks like a gilgamesh!)
 
You're missing the point people are trying to make you realize: a fan project is supposed to appeal to the fans... and Wing Commander is a successful series - it doesn't need reinventing by a fan. Wing Commander doesn't need a 1500 year leap in the future, it doesn't need new Kilrathi, it doesn't need ships that are smaller but still look like WC1 ships.

Wing Commander fans don't need WC1 in the year 4013 where Chevieblazer instead of Origin decides what is "contradicting" and what isn't... even if you are a genius, plain and simple, no WC fan will care about a fan project where some random guy on the internet decides what to keep and what to throw away about their favorite series.

By arbitrarily changing stuff around for no reason other than "I think the originals are too contradicting", you're not making your game any more appealling to anyone but yourself. No WC fan cares what *you* think about the original games - they're still the games we all love, and their contradicting storylines are the ones we'd love to play.

Nobody has any reason to believe you are capable of coming up with something better than the WC universe Origin has given us... so when you base your fan project around Chevieblazer's Edited Version of Wing Commander, you're automatically making it less appealling to everyone.

Now, if you absolutely can't bring yourself to work with the contradictions in the WC timeline, then I guess that's the best you can do... but it's a shame, because just by living with some contradictions (which you don't even have to agree with all that much) and sticking to estabilished WC canon, your game would make a lot more people happy, and you'd get a lot more recognition for it.

Do you think I like having those stupid WC3-looking Concordia things around in Standoff? No, I hate their damned guts. :p I'd love it if all the carriers mentioned in FA were Bengal or Confederation class. But they're not... so if I go and make my game about how WC3 never existed and all the carriers were actually Bengals, half the people who would otherwise love Standoff will instead laugh at me and go play Half-Life 2 or whatever it is people play these days... because anything's better than playing a game that brings back some fond memories of the old WC games just to have some random guy distort them according to his preferences a second later.

I think the bottom line is, if you want us to play your game, you're gonna have to make it work with our universe, no matter what you may think about it. Or you might just go on and make a game which you'll love, but which nobody else will care much about.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
At the moment I think it's nothing, it seems our server has gone dead, which is not encouraging.
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Hopefully that didn't set you back too much.

Chevieblazer said:
ok, thanks you for the feedback.
i must say, i'm somewhat dissapointed, though. not because of the negative response, i was expecting that, but that nobody got the clue about the "mysterious attackers". i thought it was pretty obvious, especially with the sceens of those ships.
i guess i'm not spoiling all that much if i say that those new enemies are the messian kilrathi.
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What are "messian kilrathi" supposed to be? I can tell you one definite thing right now. The more attention to detail and the established universe you pay, the more people will be interested into looking further into your mod. As it stands now, you can't even see any pictures at that other forum without registering, and why would one of us bother to go look at them if your game seems to be so detached from Wing Commander at this point? If you expected all the negative responses, why are you going in this direction? Who is this mod for? Nexus players have lots of Nexus mods, and Wing Commander fans have lots of Wing Commander mods. It seems that you're driving this project to neither group at this point.
 
messia isn't about changing the canon, how could it, since there is no canon for this timeframe.
it also isn't about getting rid of contradictions. actually, if you had looked at the screenshots i linked, you'd see that the ark royal still follows the visual traditions of the concordia or ranger class.
ok, i get your point that nobody is supposed to expand the wc universe as it is, but actually, the wc universe doesn't fall into a black hole just because ea doesn't want to use the license any more.
i mean, what about the yuuzan vong and the expanded star wars universe? isn't all that different, really, or an even better example, knights of the old republic. is set 4000 years before the 6 canon star wars titles. and yet it is still very much star wars.

and the contradictions i could not live with was the contradictions that would be caused if i put my story in the middle of the wc universe, because that just didn't fit there.
yes ,i would have preferred to stay in 265ties and 60ties, but it wouldn't work. now of course you could say"then just loose the damn storyline if it won't fit" but as i said in the very first sentence of this thread, that story is the reason i started this project in the first place.

i mean i could propably write here all night and it wouldn't change you oppinion an inch, but at least i hope you see my point better now
 
ChrisReid said:
As it stands now, you can't even see any pictures at that other forum without registering, and why would one of us bother to go look at them
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sorry, i didn't know that. i was under the impression they had a guest feature. we don't have a website, since i don't know how to biuld one or anyone who does.

as for the messian kilrathi, this is from the history i posted on the other forum. i'll post the whole story here tomorrow:

2751: the messia
even after almost 60 years, the population on most kilrathi planets were still unable to feed themselves, many totally dependant on confed aid deliveries. more and more kilrathi grew frustrated with their condition, being dependant on the weak humans.
and then there was one to rally them.
Ashrem Kren did not belong to a noble clan. Nobody even knew which clan he belonged to, but since most clans were unable to feed their members, many listened to him anyway.
Ashrem called himself the Sivar'Sajaar, the chosen of sivar, and he claimed that the poverty and the bug invasion were punishment from sivar for the kilrathi had fallen from their true path, the path of the warrior when they surrendered after the destruction of kilrah. on several world in the vukartag-kilrah sector border region, a slow economic, and more notably military ressurection began.
confed intelligence eyed his movements with suspicion, since his speeches and agenda were very much anti-confederation.

2772:the sivar rebellion
after two decades of military resurrection it became clear that in Ashrem's eyes, there was only one way the kilrathi could redeem themselves and make themselves worthy in sivar's eyes again. the archfiend, the confederation would have to fall.
in june 2772, legions of kilrathi troops and fleets of warships made their move and attacked the confederation outposts remaining in vega sector.
unlike the start of the kilrathi war and the end of the cease fire, however, tcn was more than ready for them.
unlike the kilrathi, who had barely managed to regain their strength, the confederation had prospered in the 90 years since the end of the bug war. two new entire sectors had been colonized, Telamon and Gondor Sector, both on the far side of avalon and hawking sector. also, landreich, with most border wolrd systems dead, had been repatriated 15 years before.
the kilrathi met a fleet that owned them by 50 years of technological development, not to mention new weapon systems based on analyzed nephilim systems

2773:
only a few months into the fight, most of the new pride of the kilrathi people floated in ruins around long dead planets in the vega sector, and confed fleets were converging on the realm of sivar's chosen from multiple directions. but they did not surrender. not this time. Ashrem knew he could not outfight the armada closing on him.
in a last effort to save his cause, he and his followers packed all they could scavenge into the remaining ships and left. thousands of kilrathi from dozens of worlds followed with everything that was jump capable. as per orders of grand admiral Stern, the confed fleet let them go.
 
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