Wing Commander Saga

Wing Commander: Saga is another WC project that has been under development for several years now. While the first three campaigns are almost done, they are not being released until all the details are worked out. My initial feelings towards this project was that there were a few areas that had lackluster performance, such as no way to skip through mission intro chats and no remapping the keyboard, but with the promise that such things would be included later, and with the easy modification of custom missions, I've come to think much more highly of it.

The game is set around the Wing Commander III timeframe and includes many familiar ship designs, weapons, and cutscenes. Sorry though, no interactive dialogues... on the bright side though there will be winning and losing branches on the campaign mission trees.

There's a section of the solsector.net forum as well which is dedicated to the team.

A demo has been released which includes some of the game's features. It can be found for download here .

Fan-made addon missions can be found here , [URL=http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,49950.0.html]here[/URL], and via request here .

Also, if you would like to create your own, playable missions, modding applicatons exist for Prologue. They can be found here .

I've played the Prologue campaign 4 times, each of the addon missions about a dozen or so times, and I've tinkered with FRED to make my own, primitive skirmishes. I am terrible at modding so even with the FRED tutorial's help I struggle with it. Tolwyn is very good with this stuff and explaining features, but I am not. It was not my intention to misrepresent anything.

I called it a demo because that's what I view a Prologue to be, but maybe I'm wrong. You can skip the briefings yes, but not the ingame conversations that are prerequisite to be allowed to fly to a waypoint. As for the config screen, maybe mine is a bad install then because I can't change any of the keys that control various features and I cannot flip the axis on my mouse.

Just played this last night. The cutscene movies from WC4 added in were a nice touch. The zip file was still reasonably small and the campaign provides a lot of entertainment. My only regret is having to use torpedoes in the last mission - I was always one who prefered to disable the engines with Leech weps to spare the crew.

Favorite ship was the Banshee - the high refire on the lasers and the hull-smashing Stormfire seem to make for enjoyable dogfighting against any kind of fighter. Tolwyn has a nice remake of the Dragon that was in the same WC4 shippack but didn't make an appearance. Maybe at some point one of the fan-made missions will feature it. My only dissapointment with it was that for some reason the pair of Border World cruisers on one of the missions appeared in-game instead as a pair of thuds. Maybe some files got mixed up in my Saga directory.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend this campaign for anyone who enjoyed Prologue or has played The Price of Freedom.