Author Topic: Wing Commander Prophecy  (Read 4744 times)

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Wing Commander Prophecy
I have never played a Wing Commander game. I hear it was one of the most popular space games of the 90s. Generally I am a very gameplay oriented guy and I don't care for the story as long as the gameplay is solid. Seeing that the fifth WC game is the latest proper entry in the series, how does it hold up today? Is it worth playing at all?

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
The Secret Ops expansion is free, so you can try it for yourself without buying. In terms of gameplay, it's easily the best of them. I personally think it holds up well. The other entries though are much, much weaker in terms of gameplay.

 

Offline Deathsnake

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Wing Commander Prophecy is about 19 years old. A Modding Project is underway and have already some Releases of new, high poly models, Backgrounds and for Secret Ops 16:9 Formats also released.

http://www.wcnews.com/cgi-bin/searchnews.cgi?action=dosearch&body=wcso_shipupgrade
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Offline Novachen

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
The Secret Ops expansion is free, so you can try it for yourself without buying. In terms of gameplay, it's easily the best of them. I personally think it holds up well. The other entries though are much, much weaker in terms of gameplay.

Unfortunately Secret Ops focus too much on battles with masses of enemies. Prophecy was much better imo.

But if you do not want to buy a game... i think that the "Wing Commander Standoff" total conversion for Secret Ops represent Wing Commander and Wing Commander Prophecy much more than Secret Ops does.
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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
If you want a game that looks like Wing Commander, and plays like Wing Commander, except probably looks and plays better than any that have been made (officially), hey look at Wing Commander Saga which is built right here, in the FSO engine with art done by some super talented people.

You may have seen it already, but if not... then there ya go.

  

Offline Lorric

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
The Secret Ops expansion is free, so you can try it for yourself without buying. In terms of gameplay, it's easily the best of them. I personally think it holds up well. The other entries though are much, much weaker in terms of gameplay.

Unfortunately Secret Ops focus too much on battles with masses of enemies. Prophecy was much better imo.

But if you do not want to buy a game... i think that the "Wing Commander Standoff" total conversion for Secret Ops represent Wing Commander and Wing Commander Prophecy much more than Secret Ops does.
I disagree. Standoff is great, but it is far, far more difficult than Prophecy or Secret Ops. Everything's made of paper including you. In Standoff you also have to minimise ally casualties or you run out of ships (on your carrier) and lose. It's a pain. The battles are large and if your allies decide to suck there's not much you can do about it other than restart. A couple die early and that sets the snowball rolling and you're ****ed.

 

Offline Spoon

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Neither stand off or saga come with the FMV, which imo, is a big part of the charm of wing commander.
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Offline Mongoose

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
I think I picked up a copy of Prophecy ported to the GameBoy Advance, of all things.  As one would expect I played it for about 10 minutes without success.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
I think I picked up a copy of Prophecy ported to the GameBoy Advance, of all things.  As one would expect I played it for about 10 minutes without success.
I have that. Obviously it's inferior to the PC version, but on its own merits it's impressive for a GBA game. I played it a lot.

 
Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Honestly, my favorite FMV WC is IV. Felt like a decent B5 ep at some points in the game.

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
The trouble with Wing Commander is that the series is built a bit too much on its presentation, the first two are the ones that aged the worst, the third is fine but repetitive, the fourth is the best of the series being the most lavishly produced and the least repetitive (also it has more branching paths in its story, you can totally be the bad guy with the right choices) while Prophecy tends to be more on the level of 3 though it has its moments here and there.
Unfortunately the trouble is that apart from IV (and to a lesser extent Prophecy) very little of the story is told during the gameplay, almost nothing in fact, secret ops is particularly guilty of this, doubly so since it came after IV.
Also while from 3 onwards the games try to incorporate some of the innovations introduced by X-wing they tend always to be lousily implemented, for example the energy distribution controls are lousy in 3 and 4 and only get worse in prophecy for some reason compared to the ones in basically any other space sim.

Prophecy has the same problem of three with throwing wave after wave of fighters at you only worse, with the added annoyance of spongy enemies that abuse the afterburner like there is no tomorrow, I even ran out of afterburner fuel a couple of times which for me was a first in the entire series.
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Online Colonol Dekker

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Lt Sosa! !!

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
I really liked 1 and 2, but the staple of the Wing Commander series is really 3 and 4. The full on FMV of those games is top notch, and itś not really a surprise that Wing Commander saga has decided to riff on the WC3 timeline rather then any of the others. Also, it has Mark Hamill in it. You can make it trough WC3 without really having played WC2 or 1, but WC4 definitely builds upon WC3 far more.

Also, Wing Cocmmander 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all on Origin Access, whilst Prophecy doesn't appear to be!

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
GOG has them all I think. They've gone on sale before at really good value.

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
GOG has them all I think. They've gone on sale before at really good value.

Yep, I can confirm I have them all from GOG.com.
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Prophecy's ok.  It suffers from the classic WC issue of having boring mission design and a mediocre story.  The cutscenes look pretty good.

Secret Ops is just funny.  You thought you knew what bad mission design was?  lol.

It does have the best looking Terran ships of the whole series though, mainly because the designs aren't as restricted by technology.  Some of them would even look good as high-poly models (which IMO can't be said of most WC3 or 4 ships, to say nothing of earlier ones).

 

Online Colonol Dekker

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
I genuinely love all wing commander ship designs.  They all have unique silhouettes, easily identified.  Privateer 2 not so much though.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
President of the Scooby Doo Model Appreciation Society
The only good Zod is a dead Zod
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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
I love the Hornet still.

 

Online Col. Fishguts

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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Some time ago I tried getting into Prophecy. The FMV acting is cringey af, and the missions passable but quite bland.
I made it up to the mission where you get to fly a bomber for the first time (Shrike?) and you're tasked with destroying a Nephilim cruiser. But I kept failing because the game is very picky about which parts of capital ships can be damaged when by what weapon (something that also annoyed me in Starlancer).
In the end I was just not interested enough to figure out in which sequence the game wanted me to shoot turrets/subsystems for the mission script to work properly.
So I just stopped playing there with no motivation to try again.
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Re: Wing Commander Prophecy
Yeah, Prophecy's handling of bombs is rather atrocious and "cringy af" is an apt description of the FMV scenes. Mission wise, it's pretty standard WC fare, so a bit underwhelming.

Gameplay wise, it kinda feels like a proto-freespace 1, so overall it's probably the most fun WC game to dogfight in (possibly including WC Saga, which carries over some of the "sins" of WC 3 & 4), but not quite up to the likes of FS.


tldr; it's not a bad game, but it's not exactly a good one either.