Wingmen in WC: Prophecy

Glabro

Spaceman
Does anyone else think that the redshirt wingmen in WC: P added hugely to the game?

I'll tell you why: it's the Jagged Alliance effect. The side characters are voiced in an interesting or funny way and given unique in-game dialogue, and most importantly, are mortal. You start to care about them, and losing them in a mission and seeing them go KIA on the kill board makes you feel like you're really fighting a war where people die.

Who remembers Goblin? "I can take you with one gun tied behind" in a thick country accent or when responding to a call for assistance, the happily yelled "This sounds like a job for....ME!"

Luckily Goblin survived my tour, though other friends, like BoomBoom, TBone and Ogre were lost.

It's curious that it's their very mortality that makes me care about them. I didn't care one bit about the plot characters, for example (well, Maniac is always Maniac of course, can't help but like Tom Wilson there).

I just wish some of the other squadrons' members could die on their own missions when you're not flying for them. Those Diamondbacks only ever got one KIA and I think that was a plot-related death.

Here's hoping future games have more of this. Sadly, Standoff only featured mortal redshirts in the final episode (I'd really love a version where you can run short on people or ships if you're not careful).
 
Absolutely. Even though "Redshirt" wingmen were also availabe in WC 4, they didn't make as big as an impression on me as they did in WCP.

And I love Goblin for his line "Leash too short...can't...breathe!" :).
 
Yup, can't really call 'em Redshirts if they're immortal, either...

Never heard that Goblin line. Must be fun. Assuming you get it by not letting him break and attack.
 
"How come they NEVER clean these seats?!"

WCP Wingmen had lots of expression, sadly, many of them were as one would call "clones"
 
Here's hoping future games have more of this. Sadly, Standoff only featured mortal redshirts in the final episode (I'd really love a version where you can run short on people or ships if you're not careful).

I'm not really sure what you mean by this - are you not aware that ship losses and totals are calculated continuously in Standoff? Usually you get a little (in-game) email letting you know the current status of the wing on board the ship, and if there aren't enough ships it can affect things.

I remember my first play through with Standoff (I think around the time Ep3 came out) I failed the first episode because there weren't enough ships left for me to fly either the last mission or the one after it.

And I'm pretty sure it featured mortal wingman throughout all the episodes, not just the last one but you'd have to ask to make sure.
 
Of course I'm aware that ship losses are tracked, however, everything is reset between episodes.

Wingmen are immortal until episode 5.

Anyway, I don't blame them, Standoff is amazing, and I've read the are technical reasons for all of this.
 
Standoff's wingmen are immortal until Ep5 - here's why, when it came up in a different thread.
Quarto said:
You are, of course, absolutely right. Up until Episode 5, all our pilots were actually immortal - they always ejected. And this is pretty unnatural, for a rag-tag wing like the one we see.

The truth is, it was purely a technical concern. For reasons I don't even remember any more, we had trouble using WCP's automatic-wingman-assignment option. Remember how in WCP, you'd have different generics every time you flew a mission? Well, this didn't work for us. I guess we probably just used it wrong, and then got so used to the idea of it not working that we never got around to checking what we actually did wrong .

Anyway, so for every mission, I had to plan who'd be flying it. Had we made our pilots mortal, I would have no way of knowing who'd be alive at this point, and therefore, I'd have to use each pilot exactly once, and assume that he may be dead afterwards (this, incidentally, is the case for most pilots in Episode 5 - once a pilot is permitted to die, he never appears in another mission regardless of his survival). This would have required a lot more than 40 pilots, obviously...

Of course, had we used the WCP system, we'd soon have run into another major issue - the fact that the system in WCP was broken (incomplete, if you prefer). There was no way of tracking the number of still alive pilots and/or making them immortal if the number of living pilots got too low - so, if you take too many losses in WCP, sooner or later the game will crash at the start of another mission, telling you that "squadron <x> ran out of pilots". This was a consequence of the game being told to launch another ship and put a generic pilot in... only to find that there were no more living generic pilots. In WCP, most people never saw this - there was a huge oversupply of pilots. But in Standoff, this would have been a nightmare. Even had we found a solution that prevented the game from crashing by limiting the number of ships being launched... well, by about the end of Episode 3, the loss of pilots would be a far bigger concern for the player than the loss of ships. Imagine, having a dozen Rapiers sitting on the deck, and only seeing about three of them in the air, all populated by the immortal "lead character" pilots . That would certainly be an interesting and fun experience - but it's not what Standoff was supposed to be about.
 
Of course in Prophecy there was also that one pilot which ship just blew up all by itself... :D (the one you could "cheer up" just prior to the mission)

Seriously, as I played it the first time and didn't fully realize it was a plotline-induced death I replayed the mission trying to save him. So I stuck really close to him and made sure nothing happened to him... Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly, just before my eyes and without any enemy firing on him, his ship just exploded. :eek: :eek:

Maybe it was sabotaged...
 
Of course in Prophecy there was also that one pilot which ship just blew up all by itself... :D (the one you could "cheer up" just prior to the mission)

Seriously, as I played it the first time and didn't fully realize it was a plotline-induced death I replayed the mission trying to save him. So I stuck really close to him and made sure nothing happened to him... Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly, just before my eyes and without any enemy firing on him, his ship just exploded. :eek: :eek:

Maybe it was sabotaged...
Your talking about Dallas. One time I killed all the aliens so fast he was still alive, and suddenly he just died.
 
"I can take you with one gun tied behind" in a thick country accent or when responding to a call for assistance, the happily yelled "This sounds like a job for....ME!"

I found most of the voices of these characters rather daft and irritating, especially the one who talked like Gomer Pyle ("Dey caaayn't stop mey!"). I doubt any fighter pilots in real life talk like this, even ones who come from the Deep South part of the USA, they're supposed to be educated officers, not redneck grunts.
 
"I can take you with one gun tied behind" in a thick country accent or when responding to a call for assistance, the happily yelled "This sounds like a job for....ME!"

I found most of the voices of these characters rather daft and irritating, especially the one who talked like Gomer Pyle ("Dey caaayn't stop mey!"). I doubt any fighter pilots in real life talk like this, even ones who come from the Deep South part of the USA, they're supposed to be educated officers, not redneck grunts.

I would suspect after 40 years of constant warfare their quiet reserved officers would be somewhat in short supply.

On that note, are there ever any Terran casualty statistics for the Kilrathi war? I've seen some discussion about the Kilrathi side of things in relation to why it was so high, but I'm not sure I recall anything about Confed casualties (I guess I shouldn't say Terran since there are other non-humans serving with Confed?).
 
You can also consider that not all Terran casualties would necessarily be from the Confederation, either.

As for the complaint against the stereotyped accents, I would say that it's a concession to real-world gameplay. Everyone having dry, military-standard lines would be a rather dull and boring atmosphere.
 
You can also consider that not all Terran casualties would necessarily be from the Confederation, either.

And not all confederation casualities would be from humans.

As for the complaint against the stereotyped accents, I would say that it's a concession to real-world gameplay. Everyone having dry, military-standard lines would be a rather dull and boring atmosphere.

It doesn't get anywhere near the californian pilots from Strike Commander.
 
It doesn't get anywhere near the californian pilots from Strike Commander.

To be fair, though, they're mercs, not currently active military. Mercs in general tend to be somewhat more forgiving of not having strict military bearing as long as it doesn't interfere with the job.
 
I thought that these pilots were from the local Military, the mercs were the player's company assisting California.
 
As for the complaint against the stereotyped accents, I would say that it's a concession to real-world gameplay. Everyone having dry, military-standard lines would be a rather dull and boring atmosphere.

I disagree, I found the chatter from the Prophecy wingmen annoying.

Personally I dislike it when games (or films, TV shows whatever) decide to stop taking themselves seriously and go the opposite route and just play everything for cheap, dumb laughs. Best example - the Command & Conquer/Red Alert series, the cutscenes became painful from Red Alert 2 onwards.
 
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