Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: SamVision on September 23, 2017, 03:11:26 pm
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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?
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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.
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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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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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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 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=46.0) 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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Honestly, my favorite FMV WC is IV. Felt like a decent B5 ep at some points in the game.
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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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Lt Sosa! !!
If I was single I'd drag myself over broken glass to get a chance to roll around in her technical reports.
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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!
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GOG has them all I think. They've gone on sale before at really good value.
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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.
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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).
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I genuinely love all wing commander ship designs. They all have unique silhouettes, easily identified. Privateer 2 not so much though.
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I love the Hornet still.
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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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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.
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Anyway the answer is get Wing Commander: Privateer
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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.
I'm not sure how you managed to get stuck with that. Take out the shield generators (there may be more than one), then use your torpedoes to take out any other target that isn't a turret (bridge and engines.) Again, depending on ship, there can be more than one of each. If you're still stuck, your allies know how to take out such ships, so just keep the other bombers alive, and they'll do it for you.
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Yeah, that you were able to destruct Capital ships only if you are destroying the Bridge and Engine was a bad idea.
Wing Commander was not very consistent in this one.
In Wing Commander II for example all capital ships were SD Lucifers :D You could only damage them with Torpedos at all.
In Wing Commander III you were even able to destroy the Kilrathi Dreadnought with your lasers, even it takes ages, so this was like in the first game. Actually i always liked this principle much more.
In Wing Commander IV however you had something like the capital flag in Freespace 2, which i actually do not like also btw., so that the finishing blow have to be caused by a Torpedo, but you were able to cause 99% hulldamage with your lasers.
And now Prophecy, where you have to destroy specific subsystems to take down a capital ship. And you can damage them only with Torpedos or with the Plasma Gun from the Devastator Bomber, at the end of Prophecy and especially in Secret Ops you were able to kill capital ships without problems with your primaries if you were blessed to get the Devastator... ridiculous because you only need 6 hits to destroy the Nephilim Dreadnought in Secret Ops :D.
That is much quicker than even a whole fleet of GTVA Colossus needs to take down a single Sathanas. :D.
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Strange. I actually really like that you can't just find or make a blind spot and sit there shooting at it until it dies, and also that your little popguns aren't going to cut it, thus there is a need to have bombers to destroy them.
Devastator plasma cannon, while fun, is ridiculous. Still should have required torpedoes imo. Maybe there could have been a middle ground of it working on transports but not capships.
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I'm not sure how you managed to get stuck with that. Take out the shield generators (there may be more than one), then use your torpedoes to take out any other target that isn't a turret (bridge and engines.)
I'm not saying that it's difficult to do. It's just that the game failed to explain these rules to me. And it failed to engage me enough in the plot to care.
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Strange. I actually really like that you can't just find or make a blind spot and sit there shooting at it until it dies, and also that your little popguns aren't going to cut it, thus there is a need to have bombers to destroy them.
I know what you mean. But actually i liked the concept from WC1 and WC3 more, because every ship still had several different hull segments you have to destroy independently.
The general hull concept for the whole ship you has in Freespace was always inferior to that. You can kill a cruiser with one shot to the engine if you cause the other damage all at the front section of the ship, which did not make any sense.
In Wing Commander 1 and 3 this one was not possible, you were forced to fire on the same segment to bring a ship down. And i never understand why you need any bombs if you were able to rattle down the other 90+% percent with your lasers.
That you are able to sit in a blind spot is the problem that is caused by the bad AI of enemy fighters. Because in principle it is the same like in any submarine game. There you can also sit at a spot and can bring down a carrier with some torpedo hits at the same segment.. but you can also sink it with your Cannon on deck, even that would take much longer.
Only because of the reaction of the escort destroyers it is not soo easy like in most space games.
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In Wing Commander IV however you had something like the capital flag in Freespace 2, which i actually do not like also btw., so that the finishing blow have to be caused by a Torpedo, but you were able to cause 99% hulldamage with your lasers.
Actually I've played through IV recently, and like in III shooting down warships with your guns works just fine. In fact there's a few missions where I ditched the bombers in favor of a light fighter in order to be able to properly dogfight the more dangerous fighters. Because good gods capship AA defenses were pathetic.
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In Wing Commander IV however you had something like the capital flag in Freespace 2, which i actually do not like also btw., so that the finishing blow have to be caused by a Torpedo, but you were able to cause 99% hulldamage with your lasers.
Actually I've played through IV recently, and like in III shooting down warships with your guns works just fine. In fact there's a few missions where I ditched the bombers in favor of a light fighter in order to be able to properly dogfight the more dangerous fighters. Because good gods capship AA defenses were pathetic.
Ah i do not remember it exactly. I remember that i have always used the Flashpak to destroy the Vesuvius, because i had always the impression that it was not destroyable only with lasers... but with missiles.
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The vesuvius takes significantly more damage if you shoot at it from inside the hangarbay, torpedoes take a much larger chunk of health off of it too from inside the hangarbay.
Edit: which the game never tells you about, I remember getting stuck in the mission vs the vesuvius because I fired all of my torpedoes at it from the outside and then it wasnt even close to dying. With no way to rearm in the game. I think I reloaded a save before using the disk on the superbase because I thought I couldnt destroy the carrier without it at all.
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Anyone who's interested, you cab grab Secret Ops and Standoff here:
http://standoff.solsector.net/downloads.shtml
Windows 98 (or 95) compatibility mode is required to play.
A tip for Secret Ops, your carrier, the Cerberus, has an enormous gun that fires shots that are bigger than any fighter. If it hits a fighter, it dies. If that gun engages your target, or is firing anywhere remotely in your vicinity, get the hell out of the way. I've learned the hard way that it's all too easy to get tagged by that thing, and it's really jarring to have your mission ended in an instant like that, especially late on.
Standoff, if you start taking fire from anywhere, MOVE! Don't think you'll just land the last couple of shots to kill your target first, move or you will die.
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If you have played and survived Freespace 2's bigger battles with capship involvement, the Cerberus main cannon should not be a problem.
Another Secret Ops Mod is Unknown Enemy (http://unknownenemy.solsector.net/) which take place in the Border Worlds during the Nephilim war. Also interesting one.
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Isn't that the one that pits you against the Nephilim in WC1 era ships?
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I didn't know there were mods for secret ops, I might give them a try.