Ran a quick test run of the first mission with my Thrustmaster HOTAS stick to make sure everything was working and got completely smoked (and got Hobbes killed as well). Trying to aim those default guns is a colossal pain in the ass without any prior experience, and maybe three hits were landed by my ship in the entire engagement.
Then I noticed that there are training missions in the simulator that I’d completely neglected. Those will be played next time I boot it up. The only Wing Commander experience I have prior to this is some playtime in the GBA version of Prophecy (and was that an experience) so this’ll be educational.
I seem to recall that piloting and dogfighting seems really hard when you first try it, and then you quickly figure out the “touch” to maneuvering without oversteering and lining up on an enemy. Of course, your light-yearage may vary.
Some important things to note (because there are things simply not covered in any normal sense):
Autopilot is your friend. Just hit A to warp to the next waypoint. When you are doing escort then you need to fly within ~1000 of your escort target, when you get an autopilot linked message you can go. So no need to fly the super long distances.
C, you need to use C. This is mentioned nowhere on the little quick guide, but it is critical. To end a mission you need to request clearance, and to do so you need to request it from victory using C. Then you need to come to a stop in the hangar. To have your wingmates do more than fly in formation, C and tell them to attack. Yes it took me 3 missions to figure this out.
I’ve just gotten to the mission where they introduce skipper missiles. I can now understand why Brian had such a strong reaction… cloaking missiles, that’s just cheating. As for the story, it’s fun so far. The characters are overly arch, the camp is dripping, but the actors went for it, no ‘wizards on the moon’ here. Giving wingmates personality is a nice touch, though how you react to them does something? Maybe? One thing interesting is how it let me continue a mission after my escort died. Would the game really let me so overtly fail and continue? Huh, regardless I reloaded and tried again, mostly because the escort died because I simply didn’t know how to call orders. That said taking on a Kilrathi Corvette using an Arrow is not done lightly. I’m certain cracks in the windshield can’t be a good thing.
All things considered the mouse control is actually serviceable. Sure I’d much rather have a good flightstick, but I’ve not had much difficulty once I got adjusted. It is a bit annoying how certain keyboard shortcuts are disabled with mouse though, most notably yaw and roll controls. Not having any ways to rebind keys this is problematic. Having to hold the right mouse button to roll, and double click to afterburn means these get neglected. I’ve adjusted to maneuvers so that roll is irrelevant. Still having to enter an alternate control modifier (hold right click) that disables normal directional control makes many maneuvers impossible. I suppose I might be able to hack something using the DOSBox config file, but that’s a rather messy way, and it might not work. I would reccomend dropping the difficulty down if anyone is having trouble with controls. I’ve got it on setting #2, which seems about right for a m&k control. Perhaps with a joystick a harder setting might be better, but I tried bumping up, and it was ugly.
My father-in-law will no longer be our guest after tomorrow, so I plan to purchase the game this weekend and try to get it to work with my 360 controller using this guide. We’ll see how it goes. And then, after trying that, I’ll switch to my Sidewinder Precision Pro 2. I <3 my Sidewinder joystick. But I am curious as to how this plays with the gamepad, because a joystick is way too conspicuous sitting near the front of the desk. My wife will know something is up.
My Sidewinder is fully deployed, and I don’t care what my wife thinks about it!
I played up until that Skipper missile mission myself, lost the mission and decided to restart. I’m fumbling around with the hotkeys, since I haven’t printed out the reference sheet yet. I remember just enough to not die horribly.
Having a good time, but I don’t feel nearly as competent as I used to be, in the old days. Also really annoyed that the targeting system that shows you where to lead your targets when shooting turns off when the enemy leaves my narrow little viewscreen. Why can’t it stay active? When fighting faster ships, you go to line up with the largeting indicator and then it disappears because the ship has left view!
CraigM – If it’s like the other Wing Commanders, the missions are branching and you can lose missions and keep carrying on. There’s at least a few endings, based on how you do. I know I always retried missions until I succeeded (probably most of us did), so it almost feels like a lot of wasted content, but pretty cool nonetheless. Now, could WC3 afford to do this, given the much higher expense of making cinematics? Dunno. Someone must know.
Also, you can lose wingmen and then they never show up again. I’m sure it protects certain key characters who need to be around for the plot, but folks like Vagabond and Vaquero and Flint, etc… pretty sure they are expendable.
There are a number of shortcuts for wingman commands. For example, Ctrl-B (or maybe it’s Alt-B) is Break and Attack, and A is “attack my target.” In addition, once you request clearance to land, you can hit “A” to autopilot in. No need to land manually.
I’ve just gotten to the mission where they introduce skipper missiles. I can now understand why Brian had such a strong reaction… cloaking missiles, that’s just cheating. As for the story, it’s fun so far. The characters are overly arch, the camp is dripping, but the actors went for it, no ‘wizards on the moon’ here. Giving wingmates personality is a nice touch, though how you react to them does something? Maybe? One thing interesting is how it let me continue a mission after my escort died. Would the game really let me so overtly fail and continue? Huh, regardless I reloaded and tried again, mostly because the escort died because I simply didn’t know how to call orders. That said taking on a Kilrathi Corvette using an Arrow is not done lightly. I’m certain cracks in the windshield can’t be a good thing.
Wingmen’s attitude toward you mostly has to do with the conversations between missions. It’s also interesting to note that a lot of them you can lose permanently on missions. Speaking of conversations, make sure you do the rounds and talk to everyone between missions. (WC4 added a map showing you available conversations that was awfully handy).
I wan’t sure if that was the case. The second mission, the first where you choose your wingmate, Hobbes crashed at takeoff. At the end there was a cutscene about how he was going to be ok. Now that I know they can be killed that means Hobbes is somehow important.
If that works you are my hero Rock. That’s a lot of futzing around though, but it might be worth it.
Wow, whoever wrote that reference card did a major fail. In most games so far we’ve played that has been indespensable. For Wing Commander it’s missing half the important keys. I’m sorry, but I could do with a bit less detail on how to go left and right, more on how to do important things like use wingmates! But thank you, shortcuts are good.
Picked this and IV up a little while ago. I also had a hard time setting up a control scheme that worked. Gamepad was, like you guys said, unuseable. My x-45 also sent the config to pot… I think the preset switches on the throttle read like they’re always pressing a button to some older programs, since I’ve had it happen a couple of times in different games, but that basically gave me the mouse or keyboard to play with. Not great at all. In any case, this is the first time I’ve played a space sim after about eight or nine years of real world plane sims, and the simplicity of just turning and shooting… well… it’s kind of boring. I remember I used to spend entire afternoons just replaying favorite dogfight missions, just as I do in quick skirmishes in RoF, but I couldn’t do that here. We’ll see if I’ll feel the same way trying one of the new space sims like Elite:Dangerous.
The FMV portion of this just doesn’t do it for me… I’ll echo you guys above, playing second fiddle to Mark hamill just doesn’t do the immersion justice, and the painful dawdling conversations with the loadout girl etc just eat up your day. The more abstract art of WC1+2 did a much better job of letting your imagination fill in the war, and the more paced klaxon runs to your ship were much more invigorating.
That said, I’ll need to figure out the controls to play into the story and see if I get pulled in regardless of my critiques. I have a soft spot for this franchise, but WC2, Priv1 and Xwing were my high points, and my next favorites a few years later were IW2 and FS2, both not as hot on story but bigger on immersion.
There are definitely some choices that change mission paths/plot points.
One of my favorite games of all time. I actually really loved the FMV and storyline, certainly far more than the actual Wing Commander movie. But the engine, for its time, was also really impressive – evolving the genre from the very cartoonish, mock-3D graphics of the previous games into true 3D with more realistic textures. Although the X-wing games introduced true 3D to the genre earlier, X-Wing and TIE fighter had polygonal shapes but lacked the textures of the ships in WC3. I particularly liked the capital ship vs capital ship fights in WC3 – although there are only a few of them and they are nowhere near as prolific or exciting as in Freespace 2, for their time, they were exciting to see. There’s a mission near the end of the game where you are traveling with an allied capital ship - just a destroyer-type - and it is one of the easier missions in the game because it just shreds through the enemy capital ships it encounters – just seeing “actual turrets” on the ship, which turned and targeted enemies, and seeing the cannon shots travel through to their target in waves of firepower – all that seems rote now, but at the time it was incredible to see.
I do have a lot of affection for the cast – Mark Hamill, during a time when I wish we got the Star Wars sequels so we could see a still very active but mature Luke Skywalker; Malcolm McDowell at the beginning of his career renaissance; Tom Wilson who was fantastic as Maniac; Josh Lucas in an early role before he’d go on to a decent movie career; John Rhys-Davies, somewhat miscast as Paladin, but his final radio message in the last mission offers one of my favorite gaming moments “Now blow them all to Hell”; and Ginger Lynn Allen just for the amusement of her presence.
While the production values, at least for the FMV, are much improved in WC4; and the engine in Prophecy is far superior; it’s Wing Commander 3 that offers the best overall experience, and it was truly bleeding edge game for its time. Still in my top 10 of all time.
I gave this a shot last night and ended up spending more time with it than I’d planned so that’s a good sign. One of my happiest moments was realizing I could press escape to skip some of the FMV stuff. For a moment I was worried I’d be playing “Mark Hamill Walks Through Doors: the Game.” I basically hopped in the simulator and pressed every button on the keyboard to see what it would do before doing the missions. It’s not as daunting as I was afraid it would be. I am an absolutely terrible shot though. Before I figured out the wingman commands, fights took ages with me going in endless circles constantly missing the enemy. Now my wingman kills everyone and I get the credit for success. I also crashed into the Victory a few times trying to figure out the whole clearance thing. The story such that is so far (2 missions in) isn’t doing much for me, but I am looking forward to playing some more tonight. Maybe I’ll actually hit something.
Yes. They were both mentioned in Deadlock’s post earlier in this thread.
I had the special edition of the game. It was awesome. The box was a big metal cinema reel. There was a vhs tape inside with the making of. The game, soundtrack, a t shirt, … Plain awesome.
So having written dialogue for video games (not performed by any stars (movie or porn)), I have to say that while there’s nothing terribly deep going on in the story or the scenes, the dialogue is incredibly snappy. Sure, the characters are archetypes that slide into stereotypes (sometimes of the racial/gender variety)*. But if your job is to write dialogue that communicates a cardboard stand-up of a character–and, critically in games, does it very briefly–these folks really earned their pay. Fun stuff. And helped by the acting, which is not wooden like a lot of FMVs, nor melodramatic.
This isn’t meant to be as critical as it sounds. We’re talking about a video game that’s mostly about flying and shooting here. If you want to express character and make these all these guys memorable, it’s going to have to be in broad brushstrokes. When it comes to what the player can absorb and what’s meaningful for them, often “guy with a guitar” is exactly how you want your players thinking about a character. Now, “Hispanic guy with a guitar”? Ice gets a little thinner out there…
