Pick Your Own Golden Age of Wing Commander (April 8, 2018)

[ChrisReid]

Today's new poll asks what your favorite year was for Wing Commander. Rather than looking at a particular product, this survey examines which cluster of items at a given time you think was best. The groupings are approximate. For simplicity we didn't list everything, such as how Secret Missions 2 falls into 1991 for example. A few years are highlighted by ports where they are particularly noteworthy, but we skipped most of them. The GOG and Baen releases are also spread out over quite a bit of time, so we just highlighted when the bulk of them came out. If there's a case to be made for something else, let us know in the comments!



The last poll asked what platform you'd be most interested in for a new Wing Commander game. The Quine has been an option in most of the previous iterations of this question, but it never got all that many votes. It's interesting how popular it was this time around. Last time, the PS4 narrowly edged out the Xbox One, but the Xbox One X came out ahead this round. The PS4 Pro and Playstation VR combined to have a comparable percentage, but PS Vita was also removed.

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Original update published on April 8, 2018

 

[Mekt-Hakkikt]

I'm torn between 1993 and 1994. In 1993 everything I loved about Wing Commander was out, the WC universe was perfect with the release of Privateer. But I remember how excited I was about Righteous Fire and Armada...and also how WC3 did not sit well with me at all.

 

[Quarto]

I didn't hesitate much to vote for 1997-1998. It was a glorious period, with Wing Commander appearing to be going very strongly forward even without Chris Roberts (and of course, towards the end of this period, more and more news of the film starts appearing). WCP and SO were wonderfully polished gameplay-wise, and in many ways felt like perfect Wing Commander gameplay, after the excessively difficult and unenjoyable WC4 gameplay. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. Of course, today we know that this was all an illusion: that WCP wasn't a new show of strength for the franchise, but a desperate last throw of the dice, developed in an increasingly hostile atmosphere and with a comparatively tiny budget. But still, for a couple of years, everything seemed wonderful.

By the way, about the periods - I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to be pointing this out given my involvement with UE and Standoff... but what about fan projects? Now, I doubt that anyone in their right mind would vote for 2000-2002 (the UE period), or for 2004-2005 (first Standoff episodes), or even for 2008-2010 (end of Standoff, and Saga release). I would assume everybody would rather pick a period with official releases. But still, adding these options would allow you to fill in those gaps that otherwise exist in the poll.

 

[ChrisReid]

I can make a case for every single time period up there, but I think 1996 really had a lot going for it. WC3 was still on everyone's mind and coming out on multiple different platforms. WC4 was a phenomenal experience - that was the first time I basically binged a game from morning to night day after day until it was over. Kilrathi Saga, Privateer 2. The level of cross media exposure was crazy: you had Wing Commander on TV, you had Wing Commander in comic/card game stories, you had new Wing Commander books coming out, you had WC in Magazines . There were the first rumblings of the Movie, Maniac Missions, WC5, etc. And that's really when a lot of the online community came together from all the many different bits: AOL Keyword Origin, agwc newsgroup, Origin's Official CZ, DAlnet #W-C, Aces Club, LOAF's CIC, my WCNews page, WCHS, people forming groups to play long distance Armada, etc all in one communal internet space for the first time and buzzing about all the products I just mentioned. All of this sets the stage for the 1997-1998 timeframe where WCP/SO up the engine bar, the CIC at wcnews.com comes together and production of the Movie commences.

The fan poll is a good idea, but I think there's actually so much to highlight there that it'd fill its own poll. It starts to get hard to figure where you draw the line. You'd have to include the Homeworld mod, Flat Universe, Ascii Sector, Flight Commander, etc, and many of those overlap with gradual phased released rather than one time you can point to, so not so clear cut.

 

[Wedge009]

I took the Quine because PC was no longer an option (yes, I know that it's probably the least-likely real-world option). I wonder how many others might have done the same.

I remember the mid-1990s being where I was perhaps most excited for WC even though I didn't get to play the 3D games until many years after their release.

 

[ChrisReid]

I took the Quine because PC was no longer an option (yes, I know that it's probably the least-likely real-world option). I wonder how many others might have done the same.

PC wasn't an option the last several times we ran this poll either (at each major console generation since 2003), and in those cases Quine only got 8, 10 & 6 percent. So I'm really curious what was different such that the Quine proportion tripled this time around.

 

[Wedge009]

I don't remember those older polls... anyway, back to the topic I remember talking a lot with my high school friends about the upcoming movie and the games in general. This was before I had played anything beyond WC2/Privateer, so it was a really exciting time.