The Art of Wing Commander Arena - Part Thirty-Five (December 5, 2007)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
This was one of the earliest menu mock ups made for the game - it's very different from the finished product! Note the single player mission option and the fact that both the fighter and the space station seen in the image were not used in the finished game.


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This is part of a series of beautiful Wing Commander Arena concept images graciously provided by Gaia Industries. You can find the original article here. You can thank the guys at Gaia by picking up Street Trace NYC on Xbox Live Arcade!


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Original update published on December 5, 2007
 
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Very nice.

The station looks like it is designed to handle several large capships. Reminds me of the two conning towers on the Concordia class with some docking ports on the sides.

This is actually very near what I always imagined Ragark's massive refit station to look like in FC. Massive arms for most of the fleet along with large amounts of space for hangar bays and machine shops.
 
Very nice indeed. I like the colour scheme and the background, I guess even more than the actual one. The space station thing reminds me of something from TIE Fighter or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.

Wing Commander: Conflict would have been a good name but since the SP did not make it into the game, I think Arena is more fitting.

BTW, would it be possible to get the SP campaign as downloadable content?
 
I doubt we'll see any DLC - it didn't sell as well as BBR, and they weren't quick to release the update for that...

If we do see DLC, though, I'm betting it'll be the heavy fighters - I believe the game was built with adding them back in mind.
 
OK, though I more wondered if it was technically too difficult to implement a SP campaign. But if I think about it, there's no reason why.

I, too, would guess that extra fighters would be the first thing to be downloadable. Too bad it it does not happen. I still have 1000 MSP I saved for something like that.

Do you have any reference numbers how well Arena sold?
 
From a purely 'save this game' standpoint, a single player campaign addon would be a *great* idea - because you create a whole new audience for the title... it's a lot of work, though, so probably won't happen.

I don't have any sort of official numbers, sorry.
 
I think the problem with Arena - marketing-wise - is that the name of the IP doesn't mean a lot to many younger gamers, or purely console gamers (thanks to a cold and lonely decade's interim). To many Halo-junkies, it probably just looked like just another random Arcade title.

Not to mention that Wing Commander was born and bred on the PC, and it's kind of shooting oneself in the foot to test a market for the series using A) A console, and B) an XBox Arcade shooter title. They were hoping to snag people with the affordability and the massive multiplayer, but you're hardly going to rope the same audience / demographic of a true WC follow-up.

Just feels like apples and oranges to me.
 
Yeah... I think that two of the big problems (keeping in mind that I haven't seen any sort of post mortem) are:

* The press is awful. The folks at Gaia built a great game which got torn apart through no fault of their own. It was an amazingly *fun*, quick, interesting, affordable, bright and technologically advanced title (for the pl atform)... and it got ripped apart by a bunch of know-nothing new-media jackals whose understanding of review is that being as negative as possible, for whatever reason, draws in hits and kudos. I think it's *very* telling that the print media, with their multi-month lead time which makes them immune to internet sentiment, was entirely positive about the game.

* There's not a built-in audience for Wing Commander. I know, we're great - we're the smartest people in the universe, we're the most dedicated fans, we have the greatest game... but we number in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands... we can't make or break any game, no matter how much we want to.
 
Yeah, one need only watch the active members counter on the main CZ page. It's moved back up recently (maybe LOAF's space points?) to 252. It seems to always hang out around that mark. Although, I'm not exactly sure what it uses to calculate activity.
 
It says how many registered users have checked in over the last 30 days. It was artificially high for a while because people were registering for the Standoff scoreboards.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Yeah... I think that two of the big problems (keeping in mind that I haven't seen any sort of post mortem) are:

* The press is awful. The folks at Gaia built a great game which got torn apart through no fault of their own. It was an amazingly *fun*, quick, interesting, affordable, bright and technologically advanced title (for the pl atform)... and it got ripped apart by a bunch of know-nothing new-media jackals whose understanding of review is that being as negative as possible, for whatever reason, draws in hits and kudos. I think it's *very* telling that the print media, with their multi-month lead time which makes them immune to internet sentiment, was entirely positive about the game.

* There's not a built-in audience for Wing Commander. I know, we're great - we're the smartest people in the universe, we're the most dedicated fans, we have the greatest game... but we number in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands... we can't make or break any game, no matter how much we want to.
Click to expand...

Something else that came to me earlier at work today: Team chat is great, and of course a first for the live arcade, but there's absolutely no indication it's even present within the game. After a match finishes, everyone can chat together but why did they make it so that teamspeak is enabled while you are waiting for a match to start. It's a little annoying when there's only two people waiting a long time to try and start a team game...
 
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