The Secrets of Wing Commander Prophecy, Part 1 - Series B

We've been working on new, more comprehensive guide pages for WIng Commander Prophecy as part of the great WCPedia project. To try and better understand how missions work, I decided to try and learn more about how the game's mission data works… and once I'd done that, I made some pretty shocking discoveries: Wing Commander Prophecy is full of undocumented nav points with hidden enemy ships!

Over the next few weeks, we're going to premiere the new guide pages one series at a time alongside a news post that points out some of the interesting discoveries. This first update covers the game's first series, the H'rekkah missions. You will play only four missions in H'rekkah but there are a total of six; Wing Commander Prophecy's mission tree is actually very complex!

You can find the individual pages for the first series missions below. Each guide now contains a complete object index, links to the relevant scripts and cutscenes and all the information in Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander Prophecy and the CIC's previous game guide… plus lots of ever-expanding extras! We're pretty happy with the current design but are also eager to add more so structural feedback is more than welcome… and of course, you can help us expand the WCPedia!

• B1: H'rekkah - Kilrathi Distress Call
• B2: H'rekkah - Black Widow Rescue
• B3a: H'rekkah - Sweep and Rendezvous
• B3b: H'rekkah - Patrol and Rendezvous
• B4a: H'rekkah - Wasp Intercept
• B4b: H'rekkah - Tactical Retreat

You can also track all the individual ship spawns with my notes using this spreadsheet.

B1: H'rekkah - Kilrathi Distress Call

The game's first mission in the game doesn't have any hidden Nephilim but it DOES have an in-flight cutscene that was dropped very late in the process… so late that the audio is still stored in the final game! This scene was cut from the game because the shader for the cloak effect wasn't working correctly at ship time.

Stiletto: Just stay cloaked until we figure out if they're friendly.
Maestro: Um... they're shooting at me. Guess they're not friendly.
Stiletto: Activate your cloaking device, Maestro!
Maestro: I am using my cloaking device!
Stiletto: Hey! They're shooting at me, too! Watch it, kids! They can see through our cloaking somehow!

There are also several unused comms referring to another wing, Charlie, which is encountering alien ships elsewhere.

B2: H'rekkah - Black Widow Rescue

This is the discovery that truly startled me: the second mission in the game has FOUR hidden NAV points which make it possible to score over 100 kills if flown in the correct order! During the briefing, the CAG notes that your nav map has been set up to limit enemy encounters… and it turns out if you try to change it you can spawn up to four additional nav points of Morays!

B3a: H'rekkah - Sweep and Rendezvous

After discovering all the hidden, undocumented encounters in B2 I was reminded that Wing Commander Prophecy producer Billy Cain once mentioned exactly this, that the game was designed to reward you for rearranging your flight path. I thought he was talking about some half forgotten idea at the time and didn't pay much attention to it… but it turns out that that is how many missions in the game work! In B3a, if you try to skip the nav points and go directly to the Midway's jump then you'll encounter an additional formation of Moray and Manta.

B3b: H'rekkah - Patrol and Rendezvous

B3b has the same hidden NAV point as B3a… with a greater number of enemies and more of the practically indistinguishable Wild Weasel variants of Mantas!