Next Wing Commander Game

Private_Maestro

Private_Maestro

Spaceman
Okay I know there has probably been a lot of these threads, but I want to know what the chances of another great WC game being made, when and made by who?

Is there anything fans can do like petitions or something? Anything just for another game :( lol

Cheers!
 
There's no official game coming up, but there are many fanprojects in the works.

As for petitions, no one cares how many fake people have signed there to continue a game series that ended six years ago. This would be a pointless and futile exercise.
 
Yeah I have been following the projects for some time now, Unknown Enemy almost felt like a whole new game I had bought in a box down at GAME or HMV.................

Would EA ever think of making a new one in the future? Or sell it on to another company?

I keep thinking that in a few years dwon the line, nobody will be around to keep up this sort of progress for a game that will be so old. Except a couple of people who are 14 right now and only have Prophecy, SO and WC3 like me lol. Just hope LOAF's grandchildren don't auction everything off.......
 
What about a petition? Look around you: we've got hundreds of people working on games, fiction, websites, models, heated debates, conventions, archives and dozens of other kinds of amazing projects... the wcnews.com front page alone brings this information to thousands of people interested in Wing Commander each day. It's been six years since the last major game was released, and the online community -- and the offline community! -- is stronger than ever. So look around you: we *are* the petition. Our continued existence and the fact that we have thrived is more telling than any soulless collection of e-mail addresses could ever be.

I don't have anything but a gut feeling to share with you. People contact me all the time to ask if the fact that I'm so passionate about the fact that Wing Commander will live on means that I have some sort of inside information. I do not. I have some fantastic facts, the stuff that we'll someday look back on and say "of course it happened!". I can tell you that Wing Commander was once the best selling game in history. I can tell you that interests shift, and I can point to a million examples of it happening. I can tell you how the people who grew up with Wing Commander are now taking over the gaming industry themselves -- that's how we got the most technologically advanced GameBoy port in the world, because a group of fans went out on a limb and convinced Electronic Arts that they should be allowed to do it. I can also tell you how much the people who made Wing Commander love the series. I know people who moved on from Origin to developing *Star Wars* games. You all grew up in the same decade as I did, so you all know what an amazing fantasy that must be... but I've had these people tell me they'd give it all up to do another Wing Commander.

So, no, I don't have any inside information -- but I will stake anything you ask on the belief that there will someday be another Wing Commander game.

What can we do in the meantime? I know the comparison to Star Trek fans in the sixties is no small cliche among individual fandoms in the modern day. The lesson people take from the Trekkies is that a written petition will get them anything they want -- and that's a bad lesson, because it just isn't true. What's more important is what happened after the original Star Trek was cancelled in 1969 the fans stuck together for ten years. They kept building their international community, writing fan fiction, organizing conventions and reminding the world how much they loved their series. After a while, the powers that be couldn't help but give Star Trek another shot -- and it's been running consistently since that time. (And they had far less tools for doing so than we do in this connected world of the future.)

Keep building the community. Write fan fiction. Make fan made games. Paint fan paintings. Archive what we know about Wing Commander. Tell anyone who'll listen how great a community we are. Show your children how cool Privateer is. Dress up in costumes, meet Wing Commander fans. Argue about physics. Play the hell out of the games you have -- track down the ports that you've never tried before. Let everyone know you're crazy.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I can tell you how the people who grew up with Wing Commander are now taking over the gaming industry themselves -- that's how we got the most technologically advanced GameBoy port in the world, because a group of fans went out on a limb and convinced Electronic Arts that they should be allowed to do it.
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so could they maybe be convinced to do another pc game?
 
I know I don't know much about these things. But it does seem to me like a lot of space-flight sims keep being released. Mostly cause I learn about them here. I get the impression that they're still popular. And if they're making entirely new ones hoping people will catch on to them, I don't see why a new official WC game wouldn't be made considering what a huge following it has. And it does have a huge following right? As far as other space-flight sims go, WC seems to have the largest following.

I could easily be entirely wrong though. Star Wars games seem to come out every month. And the ones that are actually more space-flight didn't seem to do as well as the role-playing ones.

I will say this though: as much as I'd love an official new WC game, as far as all the current WC games that exist, as well as all the great fan projects that there are, personally I've still got plenty to chew for awhile. Basically, I just feel that I've still got plenty of great WC stuff to play and replay to hold me off until another official game is released.
 
Thanks, will just hope they realise all of the people who would love to see another offical game.....

Well, will just have to wait a few yars til I have the money to buy all the rest of the games off eBay and try out everything like going to DragonCon and stuff :D
 
A petition? I seem to remember people petitioning EA and Origin for a Win9X port of Privateer, so that we could play it on our new computers. Boy, that idea got shot down. :(

However, I believe, as LOAF says, that there will eventually be a new WC game, simply because fan communities this large and this dedicated don't grow overnight, nor on just any tree. I only fear that the next WC game will be given over to those who don't know the true love of WC, and it will be some poor excuse of a WC game. That is my fear.
 
Well, we'll theorize on, keep the faith alive, and live on hope agaionst hope that one day we will be redeemed (no wonder that so many active Christians can be noticed across the forum [Ooops, don't pick that up, let's make it a separate thread, okay?])...

Since I'm not in the gaming industry, I can only take a long shot - but because I'm somewhat 'in' the industrial software industry, maybe I'm not too far off target.

Wing Commander is an asset, a trademark, still a benchmark that other space operas & sims have to compete against. It's almost like Elite, but with less of the Braben/Bell backstory problems. People argue about it, love it or hate it, compare the versions, and discuss the movie [to keep this neutral] - but they still talk about it. It's like the old VW Beetle - gone, but alive.
EA management does know this. If they're not totally out of focus, they keep track of developments, and compare the market success of recent games in the same genre. If X2 ore EVEonline sales increase, the WC asset tag will rise in the books.

BUT: I don't believe EA will actually make another WC game, at least not soon. The idea of space sims, exploration & trading games, and interactive storylines has been bled dry at the moment. Ironically, if there were less space sims now, the chances would be better - but after Freelancer, the Star Wars franchise and the few quite profitable MMORPGs, the market is not yet hungry enough for the return of WC. To come back to the Beetle - that was the opposite situation, a market in demand of a nostalgia car *with* the latest technology, and except for the PT Cruiser nothing else around. But EA will not stand up to face to competition in the current situation, for fear of being just another serving of the same.

I do believe that EA will sell the license sooner or later. If one of their high-potential highly-developed well-promoted new products will fail to get its margin worse enough, they will need a booster to their cash flow. With lots of small companies acting up, with people marketing games they developed with a very small budget and crew [hey, Milo..], corporations are quick to think about divesting and cleaning out the attic. It will be an expensive article, and it will need years of lawyertime [I don't have the wildest idea about the copyright situations of all WC games, and sundries], but some company will buy it. Since they're not talking about it now, I suspect that that's what's in their strategy plan - unlike the endless announcements and reveries about Frontier's Elite IV, the asset is hidden to keep its value.

So, yes, going by past experience in software licensing, I believe that there will be another WC title, someday. Another company will buy the rights (maybe only to one aspect, or one license to make another game), and sit on it for a while, maybe employ some talented kids and let them work on it in the backyard. When the time is right, they'll throw it on the market, and either rake in our money, or just shrug if it fails. Quality? By today's standards, technology is not the problem anymore, and talent is readily available [have you CVs ready] - so, yes, there's still one out there. Probably made by M*******t [*shudder*], probably featuring Anime characters [*shudder*], probably needing an motion-sensity camera gadget that reads your movements and cuts you right into the FMV. Probably with cuddly toys, probably with a flowerpot on the dashboard.

Won't it be a day...
 
Keep the community alive is the most effective thing we can do. The Shadowrun community did the same thing and now Fanpro has bought SR and is taking it all sorts of places. In addition, Microsoft has put in an application to purchase the rights for a shadowrun game (prolly for Xbox).
 
I've kinda wondered on this for a while...seems to me like EA would want to do a Wing Commander game; not the kind of WC game that we are used to but a cheap, small budget production that costs them little to develop. Why? Because they know that they can move copies on the name alone. Almost every single space title that has been released in the past 6 years is compared in some shape or fashion to Wing Commander. Almost every reviewer says at some point in his review, "Almost reminescent of Wing Commander" or "It's certainly no Wing Commander." Seems like EA would want to "test the waters" by putting out a small budget, no-real-loss-if-it-fails game out there and see how it does.
 
Maj.Striker said:
Almost every reviewer says at some point in his review, "Almost reminescent of Wing Commander" or "It's certainly no Wing Commander."
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I've noticed that too. Every low-budget (or not so low budget) space-sim released always gets the "Remember the good ole days of space-sims like x-wing, tie fighter, and wing commander? Well this isn't it! But it's fun anyway." From Freelancer to Space Interceptor (which I'll probably grab). A low budget WC would still be fun. I'd be fine with going to little to no voice acting if it meant a true WC sequel.
 
Wing Commander would definately have the highest expectations as a space-sim game. It wuld sell a lot of copies if another game was made, I don't see why EA don't....

They have loadsa money can't they afford to be creative with it instead of bringing out expansion packs for Medal of Honor and stuff? I bought the expansion packs (contradicting maself lol) but they weren't anything special......
 
FPS games are currently hotter than flight sims, so they're dumping money into that magic pot while the magic lasts. When the FPS craze dies out, they'll start exploring other avenues. It might be another trend or two before space sims and flight sims come back to the market (but I hope it's not).
 
Maj.Striker said:
I've kinda wondered on this for a while...seems to me like EA would want to do a Wing Commander game; not the kind of WC game that we are used to but a cheap, small budget production that costs them little to develop. Why? Because they know that they can move copies on the name alone.
Click to expand...

This also gives us such wastes of blank CDs as Final Fantasy series. (How is it "final" if the thing keeps going?)

I don't know about anyone else, but personally I'd rather wait for a new good WC game, then get a "quickie" WC game that is, to borrow from Fleet Action, the warmed leavings of a male cow.
 
so could they maybe be convinced to do another pc game?
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The story basically goes that Raylight got to do a WC game through a back-door. They developed a "WC-like" technology demo called 'Star Giants' which basically copied the look and feel of the original Wing Commander game (you can find pictures in our archive). EA wasn't sold, so they showed it to a company called Destination (not *that* Destination), which holds a license allowing them to port *any* EA title to the GBA. EA apparently wasn't happy about this -- they insisted that the game ported be Prophecy instead of WC1 (since there are a few potential legal issues regarding work for hire done on the original game), and they were generally absolutely no help during the development. (Which is why people like Hades and I are credited in the 'Thanks' section -- we tracked down 3D models and script outlines and whatnot for Raylight). I'm told WCP GBA sold fairly well -- which is great for a third party Nintendo release...

Anyway, I wouldn't expect that EA would ever sell the Wing Commander license. It's just not part of their business model. If the idea were anything but a fan dream, we'd already be seeing a huge Garriott-driven media campaign to convince them to give up the non-MMO Ultima license. :) EA's business is selling games, not developing technologies or licenses... to do so would only be to compete with themselves. They'll sit on Wing Commander until space games are popular again -- it's just what they do. If they sell it and it makes someone else a million selling title, they're screwed... and no one else will buy it without thinking it can sell in the first place.

Wing Commander is a tricky pickle for EA. On one hand, Wing Commander has (in the past) been one of the best selling games in history. It has also, however, been one of the most expensive games ever made. EA has a lot of legitimate worries: can they sell a Wing Commander game without Chris Roberts' name on the box? Can they sell a Wing Commander game after the $14 million dollar standard set by Wing Commander IV? Can they sell a Wing Commander game to a market that wasn't overly interested in Freespace or StarLancer? Can they sell a game after the movie went unseen? Once one or two of these worries are alleviated then they might be a lot more interested in building the franchise. If somebody puts out Freelancer 2 and it ships a million units, EA will be making a new Wing Commander game overnight... and in my mind, it's only going to be a matter of time until that happens. There will be interest in space sims again someday. Yes, it sucks that Origin isn't leading the field anymore... but that, too, will change as investor confidence grows.

To the latest question -- can we do a 'cheap' Wing Commander? In my mind, yes - in all sorts of variations.

The *ideal* relaunch for the Wing Commander franchise, in my mind, is either a 'modern' version of Super Wing Commander for the current consoles (PS2/X-Box/PC) or the oft-attempted Privateer Online. The first one plays off the nostalgia factor behind the original Wing Commander, and it sells a 'proven' game in a beautiful new wrapper. The second is just a beautiful concept that EA made a legitimately bad choice (one of the few bad *business* decisions I'll credit them with) cancelling in the first place. Privateer Online would have complemented UO perfectly, sold to a different demographic but be interesting enough to attract all sorts of attention...

But we can do it without a huge budget. We could even do, god forbid, a cheap FMV game. Want to 'relaunch' Wing Commander? Do 'Wing Commander Academy' -- stick Tom Wilson in front of a blue screen and write a little story about how you're a new pilot and Maniac is going to teach you to fly... do it half funny, berating dialouge and then interrupt it with an alien invasion that you fight through, earn his respect and your wings. Medal ceremony at the end. Failing that, license one of the modern 3D engines and build a non-massive multiplayer game around it. Armada was a wonderful idea that didn't sell because it was ahead of its time -- people today would love to play Wing Commander against eachother over the internet or X-Box live, given the chance.
 
Death said:
This also gives us such wastes of blank CDs as Final Fantasy series. (How is it "final" if the thing keeps going?)
Click to expand...

It should be noted that it is a Japanese game saga and the words "Final Fantasy" aren't anything but a cool name to the Japanese. In the original Japanese it is fainarufantajii... just a phonetification of Final Fantasy... it isn't "final fantasy" translated to Japanese.

Anyway the story goes that Square Soft was bigtime financial trouble and Final Fantasy was their last try at releasing a game, after so many failures... it was their final fantasy, so to speak. It ended up being a Dragon Warrior killer and selling like crazy.

However you can blame Enix for the latest few Final Fantasy games, since they call the shots after acquiring Square back whenever it was.
 
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