Display MoreHere's an article that many of us likely remember: PC Gamer's October 1997 preview of Wing Commander Prophecy. This was a major info dump for fans at the time… but the lack of scanned copies of PC Gamers online for many years meant that it hasn't been available for reference. So here it is for posterity! There's some interesting artwork in there, too. That Triton sketch doesn't show up very frequently.
Resolution and Hyperspace
By Todd Vaughn
SINCE THE PREMIERE of the original Wing Commander nearly seven years ago, Origin has commanded the lion's share of the space combat genre with a blend of cinematic flair and explosive gameplay — and it's safe to say things haven't been the same since. The hugely successful series has generated spin-offs (Privateer), ancillary games (Wing Commander Academy, Wing Commander Armada), and even an animated TV show, making it the jewel in Origin's crown. For some gamers, though, the sparkle has begun to fade. In recent years, the Wing Commander series has almost become a victim of its own success, with bloated budgets and overthe-top video productions threatening to overshadow the classic gameplay that made the original a hit.
Now, following the somewhat disappointing sales of Wing Commander IV and Privateer 2 and the departure of WC creator Chris Roberts (who left Origin late last year to form his own company, Digital Anvil), Origin has a new plan for its latest space combat epic. Wing Commander: Prophecy is set to bring the series full circle, with a renewed emphasis on gameplay that puts the player back where it all started, in a fast-paced dogfight against a sinister alien foe.
Origin unveiled Wing Commander: Prophecy to select members of the press at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, and nearly everyone who saw it agreed the game's designers were up to something big -- something that had nothing to do with Hollywood stars or huge budgets. This was different -- very different -- from what most had expected to see. It wasn't last year's Wing Commander with a new movie wrapped around a serivecable space-flight engine; it was an entirely new game, built with sleek new technology that promises 3D acceleration, multi-player action, interactive missions, and wicked AI.
It was this brief demo that prompted us to pay a visit to Origin's home in Austin, Texas, for a closer look at Prophecy, and as we met up with Project Leader Frank Roan and Producer David Downing, we learned that Prophecy didn't just happen overnight; it's actually been a long time coming.
Different by Design
Wing Commander: Prophecy went into development almost immediately after production ended on Wing Commander IV, but instead of tweaking and refining the previous graphics engine and reusing the series’ video-laden formula, the Prophecy team wanted to try and make a fresh start by taking a step back and examining everything that worked and didn't work in earlier Wing Commander games.
In order to achieve that goal, the team says the "script first, game second" approach used in Wing Commander Ill and IV needed to be revised to allow more flexibility in game design.
The first order of business was to create kick-ass new technology worthy of the Wing Commander name. The new engine — dubbed "Vision" — is a stand-alone code base developed independently within Origin, and comes ready-made with all the features needed to make a state-of-the-art game: hardware access, polygon handling, sound and graphic manipulation, etc. This ready-made code base lets the designers create and tinker without the technical nightmares that usually attend bleedingedge technology.
With the Vision engine, designers could develop new tools specifically for Prophecy, like an advanced mission builder that made it practical to explore a wide variety of potential gameplay scenarios. As Downing explains, the mission editor was a key component in developing good gameplay long before a script had been written.
"From a design standpoint, we wanted to make sure the missions stood on their own," he says. "For about the first six months, we didn't even worry about the story; we just concentrated on doing the missions. We designed about 100 missions for the game, and we threw out about half of those and kept the top 50 or so for the game. We wanted to make sure thatthe missions were the best around, and when we were done, we went ahead and designed a story around the missions.
“In Wing Commander games of the past, the mission design was done very arduously through scripting language," he says, "and that made it extremely difficult to go in during the later stages of the development to put elements in that would make the missions more exciting or more intense. So one of our goals was to create a mission editor that was very flexible, so we could easily go through hundreds of iterations of mission-tweaking rather than the five or six we could achieve when the game was in late beta." The mission structure for Prophecy will work much the same as earlier Wing Commander games, with separate paths for either a win or loss. But this time around, you won't have to successfully chase down every target to win — there will be varying levels of success. In a nod to TIE Fighter, each mission will have its own set of pri mary, secondary, and tertiary goals, all spelled out in the mission briefing. If you've completed a mission and feel you could do better, you can hop right back in and take another stab at it.
The player and wingman combo that worked so well in previous Wing Commander games will return with a few new twists. You and your chosen wingman are no longer the sole saviors of the galaxy; you'll be part of larg: ale bat tles, with multiple Confederation fighters and hordes of alien ships pitching and wheeling above the superstructures of massive capital ships.
Strikes against capital ships will now span multiple missions; you might fly one mission to disable the big ship; another to take out vital sys tems; and yet another to bring it down alto gether. For the moment, the Prophecy designers aren't ready to say exactly how many ships they'll be able to throw into a single battle, but they're confident it'll be a lot more than Wing Commander fans are accustomed to.
The Story
After nailing down the missions, the designers were faced with the challenge of building a story line around them, and the new plot takes the Wing Commander saga into its darkest reaches yet. The Wing Commander universe has always had elements of tension, drama, and mystery, but the setup for Prophecy delivers all of the above with a brand-new twist — sheer desperation.
Shortly before the destruction of Kilrah (homeworld of the Confederation's cat-like nemesis in the first three Wing Commander games), Kilrathi prophets predicted the destruction of the universe would be orchestrated by an unknown evil. In the new game, that ominous prediction becomes reality when a sinister alien race storms the fringes of the Confederation's galaxy, destroying everything in its wake. As the seemingly unstoppable aliens methodically work their way toward Terra's most vital star systems, you'll lead strikes against the alien shield-killers (massive ships that can destroy everything in their wake) and fight off wave after wave of stealthy fighters, all while trying to learn more about these mysterious aliens in order to find their hidden weakness.
Renowned futurist/artist Syd Mead (whose credits include design work for Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Tron<) was called on to create the deadly bio-mechanical ships of the alien race, and the results are suitably nasty. Not only do the alien ships have a sinister look, but they've got sinister moves as well. The Tri-Ray, for example, is an alien heavy assault craft comprised of three separate ships. When under attack, the Tri-Ray will separate and attack the player from all sides; once it has the upper hand, it'll recombine to focus its combined firepower on you.
On the Terran side of things, players will have the chance to fly all-new Confederation craft and find refuge aboard a massive new carrier — the TCS Midway.
The Movie Question
Only after they'd resolved the gameplay issues of mission and story line development did the Prophecy designers focus their attention on integrating cinematics into the game.
Roan says the new approach to the “interactive томе” question should strike а better balance than in previous WC games, while maintaining the quality and epic scope that WC fans crave.
“When we went forward with Prophecy, we questioned all of the assumptions we had made in those games, specifically in terms of game flow,” Roan says. “If you played the past two Wing Commanders, we would have seven or eight rooms of game flow aboard the capital ship. It was difficult, given the space limitations on the CDs and the shooting time required, to really make a capital ship come alive. We had to popu late at least half of those rooms with one person for all 50 missions. That added up to at least 200 different scenes for the characters.
“We now just have two rooms in Prophecy, just like in Wing 1 and Wing 2," he says. “This allows us to have lots of people to talk to, things to click on; the ready room is right there; you can even check your medals in the locker. If you don’t want to watch the movies or talk to people, it takes just two clicks, and you're in the mission. Another thing we reconsidered was the movies. We think the movies are impor. tant to the pacing of the story, considering the epic sweep that it's taking, but we don't want them to dominate the game. To that end, we've cut down the movies drastically; they're not overbearing, and they fit in well with the missions.”
For the filmed sequences, much of the cast from Wing Commander III and IV has returned (Mark Hamill as Blair, Tom Wilson as Maniac and Ginger Lynn Allen as your plucky mechanic), but Prophecy marks a surprising turning point for the series with the introduction of a new character to represent the player. Roan says the reason for the shift wasn’t disappointment in Hamill's rformance as old Blue-Hair (Blair), but a desire to give the player a larger stake in the game.
“We wanted to bring back some of the reward elements from Wing 1 and Wing 2, like awarding medals for mission accomplishments,” says Roan, "but we couldn't really do that with Colonel Blair anymore. What are we going to do? Make him president? Blair is still in the story to bridge the old Wing Commander with the new Wing Commander. It's kind of one foot in the past and one foot in the future.”
Another significant shift from previous games will be the interactivity of the movies. Basically, there is none. Players will no longer make important game decisions in the middle of a sentence, and instead will determine the outcome by actions in the cockpit. Thanks to the new game е "s versatility and graphic prow pre-flight briefings are now represented by the game engine instead of a vague film clip, giving the player a much clearer picture of what is actually going to happen when they head out on patrol.
“The interactivity of the story we told in Wing III or IV was pretty much a binary decision you would make while watching a movie," Roan says, "butthat's really a kind of storyteller's sleight-of-hand. You would see a difference subtly, depending on the decision you made, but it would rarely make a major impact in terms of the plot line.
"What we wanted to do is shift that paradigm so that the interactive decisions were actually made in the cockpit," he says. "Instead of watching a movie and saying yes or no, you're offered a choice in missions; which mission you choose and how well you do will have a dramatic effect on the plot."
Behind the Stick
Origin was too sheepish to provide us with screen shots of the cockpits and HUDs of the Terran Confederation's newest fighters — they felt the graphics weren't yet ready for public consumption — but our time behind the stick reveals that the Prophecy team is hard at work making the pilot's chair more intuitive and immersive than ever before.
In the early version we saw, the new Super VGA graphics are complemented by impressive new effects such as 16-bit dynamic lighting, which can illuminate ships and cast shadows in real-time. But David Downing says that these effects are only the tip of the iceberg, especially considering the benefits of 3D acceleration.
"We're going to concentrate from beta until final code on adding as many special effects to the game as we can," he says. "The big difference between hardware acceleration and software-only in the final version will be the amount of detail we put into it."
Some of that detail is already up and running in the game, such as 3D-modeled canopy struts, similar to the virtual cockpits found in some of today's high-end flight simulators. During a flight around the superstructure of a carrier, the effect worked extremely well, with shadows dancing across the struts as we passed one light source after another.
Some refinements to the controls also make the game more immersive. The default keyboard arrangement will return with some subtle changes, but players may never need to touch their keyboards again. Shield, power, and weapons systems can now be checked and adjusted in midflight with the touch of a single joystick button.
The new complement of ships, which range from sleek, stealthy designs to heavily armored interceptors, looks very promising. And when combat heats up, players will find the changes are much more than cosmetic.
“We're using physics now; in the past, we sort of fudged to get physics in there, but for Prophecy we've basically brought back the power-slide," Roan says, referring to a more real realistic ability to turn your spaceship's nose in one direction while it continues to move in another "There is acceleration in all your rotations; in previous WC games, during forward flight, you were flying a desk. You would turn at the same rate, and the turn would just stop when you let go of the joystick. Now, when you turn, it'll accelerate into the turn; when you let go, it will decelerate in the direction of the turn, forcing a power-slide."
Some of the ship designs will have articulated sections, such as the Panther's engine pod, which can vector from side to side, resulting in a yaw rate that's much faster than its pitch rate, so while the Panther might not climb at dive as fast as other fighters, it'll make quick, tight, turns when an enemy is on your six.
Capital ships like the Midway and the alien Shield-Killer will have articulated sections of their own, but won't use them for flight. Instead, they'll come loaded to the gills with rotating gun turrets.
Possibly the most notable difference between Prophecy and earlier WC games is the size and scale of the capital ships, which can only be described as enormous. During a quick flight over the superstructure of the T.C.S. Midway (the player's home carrier), Downing showed us the scale of the big behemoth in comparison to the single-seat Panther he was flying. Hugging the deck of the carrier — which, from this perspective, looked like a massive expanse of sharply defined metallic landscape stretching out to a black, star-flecked horizon Downing switched to an external view and pulled back on the zoom. Even at the widest angle, the screen could barely contain the carrier's total length, and the fighter — which seemed a virtual 30 feet long — was hardly a speck on the Midway's hull.
So what's the price for all this visual splendor? Downing says that a Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM is the minimum system requirement for Prophecy without 3D acceleration, and a 3Dfx Voodoo accelerator would be necessary to see the game at its fullest.
Multi-Player Wing Commander
Prophecy is being designed primarily as a singleplayer epic, but it'll be the first Wing Commander game to feature multi-player support, including head-to-head and co-operative missions. Unfortunately, Wing Commander fans who envision hooking up over the Internet and battling their friends across the country will be disappointed; because Prophecy is so complex, it will only support Serial, Modem, or local-area network connections.
Veteran actor Mark Hamill reprises his role as Colonel Blair in Wing Commander Prophecy.
Drinky-poo? A new cast of characters joins you on the Midway, for FMV delights.
Gorgeous animated sequences will accompany the full-motion video clips and help to round out the story with fast-paced, interesting action.
Ships like the Jaguar feature articulated segments that can move independently of the craft.
The alien ships not only look different, but they attack differently as well. This alien Tri-Ray separates to create three individual fighters.
This Panther looks tiny when compared to the huge TCS Midway capital ship.
Noted designer Syd mead was brought in to create the menacing alien ships for Wing Commander: Prophecy. These early sketches show off the designsof two of the alien capital ships.
Expect to see a few famliar faes pop up in Prophecy as well as a few new characters. Ginger Lynn Allen reprises her role as your helpful mechanic.
Tom Wilson (left) returns as Maniac, who is up to his old tricks, as usual.
Unlike previous Wing Commander games, in Prophecy, you won't actually roam the Midway. Instead, the designers allow the filmed sequences to flesh out the massive carrier.
