Is there any information available on how WC1 & 2 in space gameplay/graphics were created?

There is, unfortunately, a very good reason why people at EA seem to continually toy with the idea of bringing back Wing Commander, but never end up actually doing it. That reason is that Wing Commander is, sadly, not a gold mine. From the mass market perspective, WC is basically a dead franchise, which would require substantial costs and risks to resurrect, with no guarantee of success.

There would be substantial costs and risks associated with relaunching Wing Commander as a flagship AAA game, but nobody expects that would happen first. There are also, however, lots of creative ways that low cost, low risk potential ideas for Wing Commander could be deployed. And Wing Commander could be just the right franchise for something like that where they might not be comfortable taking their other big name sci-fi licenses like Mass Effect or Star Wars.

Both Wing Commander Arena and Armada are prime examples of this. They clearly weren't for everyone, but lots of us had a blast playing them both. Other proposed ideas would take the game in other directions or do other focused takes on what makes a WC game. The gaming market has changed enormously every five years or so for the past three decades, and it's entirely possible some future shift could improve the fortunes for a new Wing Commander.
 
I don't know if this has ever been done, but if EA truly never intends to return to WC themselves, could they semi-open source it?

My thought was that they would get a cut of any sales made from a retail WC game made. I'm sure the reason this hasn't been done is because a bad game will damage the IP, but if they really consider it dead and buried would they care if their name wasn't on the title?
 
Ah, if only that were true!

There is, unfortunately, a very good reason why people at EA seem to continually toy with the idea of bringing back Wing Commander, but never end up actually doing it. That reason is that Wing Commander is, sadly, not a gold mine. From the mass market perspective, WC is basically a dead franchise, which would require substantial costs and risks to resurrect, with no guarantee of success.
Indeed.

What's left of the WC series of games for the mass market?

First of all the game genre, 3D fighter simulation. The genre isn't exactly mainstream these days, and the previous Star Wars titles didn't spark a genre boom similar to GTA and BotW.

The art style? I still think the pixel art of WC1 and WC2 is outstanding, but it's not uncommon in the genre today.

Backstory? The WC series has been wobbly on story and hasn't established a very solid universe building. That's a far cry from old school IPs like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Gundam UC.

As for the leading graphics technology of the day it is now something that couldn't be an advantage.
 
Indeed.

What's left of the WC series of games for the mass market?

First of all the game genre, 3D fighter simulation. The genre isn't exactly mainstream these days, and the previous Star Wars titles didn't spark a genre boom similar to GTA and BotW.

The art style? I still think the pixel art of WC1 and WC2 is outstanding, but it's not uncommon in the genre today.

Backstory? The WC series has been wobbly on story and hasn't established a very solid universe building. That's a far cry from old school IPs like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Gundam UC.

As for the leading graphics technology of the day it is now something that couldn't be an advantage.
Add to that point that most of the biggest fans of the Wing Commander IP may have "aged out" of a lot of PC gaming. Take me for example - I'm 34. I turned *one year old* a day before WC1 released in 1990. I joined this forum in 2003 when I was 14 and at that point, every official WC title except for Arena had already been released. The best WC mod (IMO), Standoff, finished releasing in 2009 (I think - it has been a while). If there was ever a time for EA to recapture the magic and bring back a lot of existing fans into the fold, it was the early 2010s, not the mid-to-late 2020s. The collective memory isn't there anymore. Other series that are based on bigger IPs (like Star Trek and Star Wars) have a big outside universe to keep fans interested between games, and even Star Trek, big as it is, has continually had trouble in the game market.

About the only small-scale, PC-specific IPs I can think of that were successfully rebooted in the last few years were X-COM (1999 to 2012) and Deus Ex (2003 to 2012). And in both of those cases, you have genres (Turn-based and FPS) that are significantly more popular than a space-based flight sim. On top of that, Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous have mostly filled in the void left by WC and Freespace, and one of those games is still in development after 12 years.
 
Both Wing Commander Arena and Armada are prime examples of this. They clearly weren't for everyone, but lots of us had a blast playing them both. Other proposed ideas would take the game in other directions or do other focused takes on what makes a WC game. The gaming market has changed enormously every five years or so for the past three decades, and it's entirely possible some future shift could improve the fortunes for a new Wing Commander.
Well, the way I see it, Arena is precisely the problem. Yes, lots of us had a blast playing it - but there isn't actually a lot of us. Arena was clearly intended as a gentler way of rebuilding the franchise, and, while I have no idea about its sales data, the results were clearly not satisfactory.

Now that I think about it, I would disagree that the Arena approach could work at all, ever. Yes, there are genres where a small game can become a big enough hit to justify building a whole franchise. Wing Commander is not this kind of game. Over time, it came to be identified with a strong narrative - and a strong narrative demands a big game. You will recall, this was in fact one of the points that often came up in Arena's reviews, not to mention discussions among the fans here - that yeah, it's kinda fun, but there's no story. Some people even said outright that it's just not Wing Commander without a story (admittedly, many others, as I recall, didn't mind the lack of story, just the third-person top-down gameplay, and that could be remedied).

A different approach to Wing Commander would be a kind of mid-tier game. You know, a Star Wars Squadrons, where you don't have a huge budget, but there is a nice, compact single player campaign, plus a reasonable multiplayer mode, and some fancy (but not especially costly) bells-and-whistles like VR support. Two years ago, when I finally got around to playing Squadrons, I played it on VR, and I was hugely, hugely excited by it - sure, the story was awful, the characters were lame, but the gameplay was fun, and it really seemed to be a great "little" product. The only trouble is, by that time the game wasn't even being supported by EA any more, because its sales were underwhelming. And this was a Star Wars product! Could a Wing Commander Squadrons have been made within the same budget, and could it have been a good game? Yes! Could it have been successful enough to revive the franchise? Well... maybe? But it's a big risk.

I do agree with Pedro - releasing a bunch of remasters would be a great option. Wing Commander is definitely ripe for that. But even there, it's an open question as to whether this could justify the costs - after all, it's much easier to sell remasters for Tomb Raider, which is a live franchise.

The other big shadow over Wing Commander is Chris Roberts and Star Citizen. When Star Citizen was announced, after so much buzz that maybe, just maybe he'd be announcing a new WC game (and as LOAF likes to point out, the negotiations came down to the wire), I remember thinking: "well, good bye Wing Commander". I just can't see why EA would want to bother reviving WC at a time when Star Citizen is continually discussed as the spiritual sequel for WC, and made by the creator of WC. It's just another big hurdle to overcome.

Sorry to be so negative about all this, it's just how I see the situation. I would dearly love for EA will do something to prove you right, and me totally wrong.
 
Hopefully, the massive resurgence of Fallout will make studios look at old 90s era IP and realize they have huge potential. It doesn't take a massive investment all at once to resurrect an IP - even just a wider release of Arena could have helped. Interest can snowball, but not if they actively suppress it from going anywhere.

To get an idea of audience base there is a whole lot more Wing Commander universe than there ever was for Fallout - books, a movie, et cetera. Bethesda nurtured that purchased IP and the fans that came with it, EA buried it and and fans. They don't have to keep burying it forever though, they can go the other way some day. At one point Bethesda even had the original creators of Fallout make a game for them, and New Vegas is still considered one of the best of the series. It not only made them plenty of money, it grew the fanbase, and they did it by actively growing the universe and involving the old games in their revived universe.

I have no doubt a great many of the old Origin crew would jump at a similar opportunity, if EA was willing to admit it lacks the skill or desire to make games themselves.

You're probably right. Everything I know about EA makes it seem like the company is actively biased towards alienating fans and eventual bankruptcy because of its unbuyable reputation. But I choose to be hopelessly optimistic... so I hope. And, to loop that hope all teh way back to negativity: EA's troubles may eventually place Origin's intellectual property in the hands of a more competent, more creative, and more interested in making Wing Commander game studio. So if you're feeling negative, remember that EA's failure is only a positive right now. It's long term financial decline might just put Wing Commander in a different studio's pocket, whether that be in forced liquidation or simply through sale to try ans stay afloat, EA's attitude towards teh Wing Commander property is just a symptom of the company's overall problems that will either be solved by reversing them, or perhaps solved by selling off the things it isn't using.
 
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Now that I think about it, I would disagree that the Arena approach could work at all, ever. Yes, there are genres where a small game can become a big enough hit to justify building a whole franchise. Wing Commander is not this kind of game. Over time, it came to be identified with a strong narrative - and a strong narrative demands a big game. You will recall, this was in fact one of the points that often came up in Arena's reviews, not to mention discussions among the fans here - that yeah, it's kinda fun, but there's no story. Some people even said outright that it's just not Wing Commander without a story (admittedly, many others, as I recall, didn't mind the lack of story, just the third-person top-down gameplay, and that could be remedied).

A different approach to Wing Commander would be a kind of mid-tier game. You know, a Star Wars Squadrons, where you don't have a huge budget, but there is a nice, compact single player campaign, plus a reasonable multiplayer mode, and some fancy (but not especially costly) bells-and-whistles like VR support. Two years ago, when I finally got around to playing Squadrons, I played it on VR, and I was hugely, hugely excited by it - sure, the story was awful, the characters were lame, but the gameplay was fun, and it really seemed to be a great "little" product. The only trouble is, by that time the game wasn't even being supported by EA any more, because its sales were underwhelming. And this was a Star Wars product! Could a Wing Commander Squadrons have been made within the same budget, and could it have been a good game? Yes! Could it have been successful enough to revive the franchise? Well... maybe? But it's a big risk.
So.. two interesting things here.

First off.. I actually was considering trying to boot up my old 360 to get a copy of Arena before it poofs.. but I hadn't actually heard it was top-down, or just forgot about it. And that kind of killed that idea for me in advance. So.. effort saved, I guess?

Second.. Squadrons is a hot mess that I actually think suffered due to its licensing. Maybe a hot take, but I think it would have done much better if it wasn't a Star Wars game. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the fact that it exists, and I got to fly around in VR in some classic Star Wars ships.. but the ships and music were the only things about that game that were even remotely "Star Wars."

It was kind of a victim of its own design, which tried to mash up too many concepts. They tried to make a Star Wars flight simulation MOBA. I joked from the start, it should have been called "League of Squadrons." They tried to pull off a chocolate and peanut butter combination, but it was more like mixing steak and gummi worms; the concepts are so different that nothing worked as it should have.

When I say it wasn't a Star Wars game, it's because nothing in it felt like anything out of Star Wars. The nature of the game required balanced team combat.. and Star Wars, at its core, is completely unbalanced by design. You don't match up 5-on-5 battles with Rebel and Imperial craft. You match up 5-on-50, because that was the how the universe worked. The compromises they made for a balanced game made made everything feel wrong, and it was simultaneously too sim-like and too arcade-like to really feel good at all. And that's not even touching the bizarre AI, and insane mechanics of the single-player bits.

I think it would have made a better Wing Commander game from the get-go. If we ever get the capability to mod it, I would love to see someone build it into something like that, because I think it would just feel like a much better fit. The game looks fantastic, and the gameplay isn't anything bad.. it just isn't Star Wars, and never should have tried to be.
 
I still think they should do what the Tomb Raider I-III remaster did.
Get a dedicated fan with their own in progress remake and let them put together a team to remaster the titles ;)
(I've not played it to know if it's any good, just jealous of the opportunity :))


From what I've heard it's pretty solid but still needs a bit of post launch love. IIRC they added an optional modernised control scheme that more of less breaks the camera if you use it.

As for Wing Commander I'm gonna assume if EA didn't do anything with it back when more than three people cared about Star Citizen they definitely aren't going to now. The best hope for a Wing Commander 'revival' is probably a group of enthusiastic indie devs making their own game about a group of quirky international space heroes fighting imperial Japanese space furries and it somehow being good.
 
I think it would have made a better Wing Commander game from the get-go. If we ever get the capability to mod it, I would love to see someone build it into something like that, because I think it would just feel like a much better fit. The game looks fantastic, and the gameplay isn't anything bad.. it just isn't Star Wars, and never should have tried to be.
Here's a problem.

Squadrons does look like a Star Wars game at first glance, and the problems you mention are only apparent once you get deeper into the game. However, if it is a WC game, then it is a question of how to make a first impression on the players, like:

1. What do Confederation ships look like and how should they be painted? And what about the uniforms?

2. The Kilrathi side has the same problems and even more - How should they look like? Like bobcats? Lions and tigers? Or gorillas? Do they have the cultural appearance of a feudal empire or primitive tribes?

3. How many species are there in the Confederation fleet?

Such questions would come before the team in the early stage of the development. Even if they were able to address these issues well - wouldn't it be nice to release it as a new IP?
 
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First off.. I actually was considering trying to boot up my old 360 to get a copy of Arena before it poofs.. but I hadn't actually heard it was top-down, or just forgot about it. And that kind of killed that idea for me in advance. So.. effort saved, I guess?

Second.. Squadrons is a hot mess that I actually think suffered due to its licensing. Maybe a hot take, but I think it would have done much better if it wasn't a Star Wars game. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the fact that it exists, and I got to fly around in VR in some classic Star Wars ships.. but the ships and music were the only things about that game that were even remotely "Star Wars."

It was kind of a victim of its own design, which tried to mash up too many concepts. They tried to make a Star Wars flight simulation MOBA. I joked from the start, it should have been called "League of Squadrons." They tried to pull off a chocolate and peanut butter combination, but it was more like mixing steak and gummi worms; the concepts are so different that nothing worked as it should have.
To be fair, Arena doesn't actually *look* top-down :). The camera is positioned behind and a bit above your ship, so it looks really nice and 3D, it's just that you only fly on a flat plane - hence I say it's top-down.

As for Squadrons, your comments are interesting in that your experience is the exact opposite of mine - not in terms of what we think of the game, but apparently, in terms of what we did with it. I played through the single player and never, not even once, touched the multiplayer. You talk extensively about multiplayer and don't mention the single player, so I'm guessing that while you probably did play through the single player, it wasn't something you paid much attention to, concentrating on the multiplayer.

So, I'm happy to concede everything you say about the multiplayer - I haven't experienced it, but certainly the ship designs indicate clearly that everything is designed for a balanced experience, and it's not a good look for Star Wars. I will say, though, the single-player campaign really didn't feel like that to me. I hated the "modern" characters, who for the most part had no place in the Star Wars universe, and the story was... well, the story I guess was all right, as long as the characters weren't talking, which is a bit of a problem. But the missions did really well in bringing out the uniqueness of different ship designs. The game really felt a lot, lot like the good old X-Wing series to me.

Regardless, I don't think I agree that the game suffered from being a Star Wars game, and that it could have done better as a Wing Commander game. Quality-wise - who knows, maybe? But since we're talking about the economy of a revival, I'm really just looking at the most basic indicator, i.e. the chance of generating good sales. And it's clear to me that a reasonably well-reviewed space combat game with Star Wars slapped on it would, in 2020, generate better sales than a Wing Commander game. Even so, whatever the sales were for Squadrons (and really - they can't have been that bad! SteamDB has four estimates listed, ranging between 760K and 1.86M, and that's just Steam), evidently they were not considered good enough for EA to continue supporting the game. Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way - maybe it is a matter of gameplay. Maybe the game's sales weren't the problem, but rather the problem was the way the active player base dropped off (apparently, in the space of a single month). Maybe with better multiplayer gameplay, Squadrons would have soldiered on, generating more revenue, and therefore justifying further development. If yes, then maybe this could all have been done with Wing Commander. *But* - a Wing Commander game would have had far lower sales at the outset... and a Wing Commander game in 2020 would have been designed exactly the same as Squadrons, because it would have been done by the exact same people, with the exact same guidelines. I just don't see how this could have been a viable approach, given that we see what the outcome was.

Here's a problem.

Squadrons does look like a Star Wars game at first glance, and the problems you mention are only apparent once you get deeper into the game. However, if it is a WC game, then it is a question of how to make a first impression on the players, like:

1. What do Confederation ships look like and how should they be painted? And what about the uniforms?

2. The Kilrathi side has the same problems and even more - How should they look like? Like bobcats? Lions and tigers? Or gorillas? Do they have the cultural appearance of a feudal empire or primitive tribes?

3. How many species are there in the Confederation fleet?

Such questions would come before the team in the early stage of the development. Even if they were able to address these issues well - wouldn't it be nice to release it as a new IP?
Hmm... honestly, these are rather fannish questions :) . That is to say, I don't think any of these are the be-all-end-all issues. For each of them, you can have a variety of different answers, each reasonably satisfactory. The core issue is simply finding the appropriate formula in terms of game type, scope and budget. What the spaceships look like, what the Kilrathi look like - that's not a problem, given that preceding Wing Commander games provide with three-four significantly different answers to both questions. And as for species in the Confederation fleet, if you mean alien species - literally no one cares :) . If you mean spaceship types, well, heck, you can have as many and as few as you need.
 
Hmm... honestly, these are rather fannish questions :) . That is to say, I don't think any of these are the be-all-end-all issues. For each of them, you can have a variety of different answers, each reasonably satisfactory. The core issue is simply finding the appropriate formula in terms of game type, scope and budget. What the spaceships look like, what the Kilrathi look like - that's not a problem, given that preceding Wing Commander games provide with three-four significantly different answers to both questions. And as for species in the Confederation fleet, if you mean alien species - literally no one cares :) . If you mean spaceship types, well, heck, you can have as many and as few as you need.
Of course fannish issues, why else would they resurrect an "ancient" IP.

... preceding Wing Commander games provide with three-four significantly different answers to both questions -- That IS the problem. If you choose one answer, are you ignoring the market behind the other answers?

As for alien species, this is of course very important. If today’s plot-oriented game is not strictly designed here, it will not be recognized by players.

If there's a commercial team that's got all the problems worked out, then why let them use the IP that has a derivative development rights matter? It's better to get rid of the baggage and develop a brand new one, isn't it?
 
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As for Squadrons, your comments are interesting in that your experience is the exact opposite of mine - not in terms of what we think of the game, but apparently, in terms of what we did with it. I played through the single player and never, not even once, touched the multiplayer. You talk extensively about multiplayer and don't mention the single player, so I'm guessing that while you probably did play through the single player, it wasn't something you paid much attention to, concentrating on the multiplayer.

So, I'm happy to concede everything you say about the multiplayer - I haven't experienced it, but certainly the ship designs indicate clearly that everything is designed for a balanced experience, and it's not a good look for Star Wars. I will say, though, the single-player campaign really didn't feel like that to me. I hated the "modern" characters, who for the most part had no place in the Star Wars universe, and the story was... well, the story I guess was all right, as long as the characters weren't talking, which is a bit of a problem. But the missions did really well in bringing out the uniqueness of different ship designs. The game really felt a lot, lot like the good old X-Wing series to me.

Regardless, I don't think I agree that the game suffered from being a Star Wars game, and that it could have done better as a Wing Commander game. Quality-wise - who knows, maybe? But since we're talking about the economy of a revival, I'm really just looking at the most basic indicator, i.e. the chance of generating good sales. And it's clear to me that a reasonably well-reviewed space combat game with Star Wars slapped on it would, in 2020, generate better sales than a Wing Commander game. Even so, whatever the sales were for Squadrons (and really - they can't have been that bad! SteamDB has four estimates listed, ranging between 760K and 1.86M, and that's just Steam), evidently they were not considered good enough for EA to continue supporting the game. Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way - maybe it is a matter of gameplay. Maybe the game's sales weren't the problem, but rather the problem was the way the active player base dropped off (apparently, in the space of a single month). Maybe with better multiplayer gameplay, Squadrons would have soldiered on, generating more revenue, and therefore justifying further development. If yes, then maybe this could all have been done with Wing Commander. *But* - a Wing Commander game would have had far lower sales at the outset... and a Wing Commander game in 2020 would have been designed exactly the same as Squadrons, because it would have been done by the exact same people, with the exact same guidelines. I just don't see how this could have been a viable approach, given that we see what the outcome was.

So, funny enough, no, I didn't touch multiplayer at all either (mainly for the aforementioned reasons), and only really played through the single player missions... until I realized exactly how terrible the gameplay design is, and how many insane shortcuts they took to making the game. A few of the missions were fine, and it wasn't exactly a bad experience, but I fell off the campaign when I got to the Star Destroyer mission, and did a little research about the flight mechanics behind the "AI" designed for the single player missions.

What I actually discovered is that the AI ships do not conform to the same flight mechanics as the player ship, and it is physically impossible to outrun the enemies, because they are literally tethered to you, and will follow the player at any speed they try to fly at. The AI is designed with the exclusive goal of making sure you die as quickly as possible, and completely ignore any other target unless it's one you have to protect to succeed. They just didn't put the work in to program functional mission logic for the enemies, and it makes the mission mechanics not so much about tactics, but just learning how to break the AI so it can't slaughter you indiscriminately while you go about doing whatever the mission asks you.

The other thing that killed it for me was stuff like the auto-aiming aspect. Just drove me bats that they traded "nimble, hard-to-hit glass cannon" enemies for "bullet sponge barn door" enemies. You barely have to aim at anything, and the lasers just track to what they think you want to hit, which actually made me shoot a different thing than what I actually was aiming for more than once. The boost/drift mechanic also just always felt incredibly gimmicky.

Anyhow, back to the actual topic. XD Yeah, the idea of Arena being basically a 3D version of Asteroids seems like it would be just disappointing, even if the game itself was kind of fun.

I don't know if there's much chance of any official WC games coming back at this point. Considering the ability of fans to make their own projects and adaptations, I'm starting to think the property would be better off if EA just abandoned it. I actually wonder if Arena was just an obligatory "we've used the property in the past X years" move to hold onto it.
 
So, funny enough, no, I didn't touch multiplayer at all either (mainly for the aforementioned reasons), and only really played through the single player missions... until I realized exactly how terrible the gameplay design is, and how many insane shortcuts they took to making the game. A few of the missions were fine, and it wasn't exactly a bad experience, but I fell off the campaign when I got to the Star Destroyer mission, and did a little research about the flight mechanics behind the "AI" designed for the single player missions.

What I actually discovered is that the AI ships do not conform to the same flight mechanics as the player ship, and it is physically impossible to outrun the enemies, because they are literally tethered to you, and will follow the player at any speed they try to fly at. The AI is designed with the exclusive goal of making sure you die as quickly as possible, and completely ignore any other target unless it's one you have to protect to succeed. They just didn't put the work in to program functional mission logic for the enemies, and it makes the mission mechanics not so much about tactics, but just learning how to break the AI so it can't slaughter you indiscriminately while you go about doing whatever the mission asks you.

The other thing that killed it for me was stuff like the auto-aiming aspect. Just drove me bats that they traded "nimble, hard-to-hit glass cannon" enemies for "bullet sponge barn door" enemies. You barely have to aim at anything, and the lasers just track to what they think you want to hit, which actually made me shoot a different thing than what I actually was aiming for more than once. The boost/drift mechanic also just always felt incredibly gimmicky.
That is actually very interesting - as I said, I rather enjoyed the gameplay, but it may well be that I simply didn't have much to compare it to, since it was basically the first space sim I'd played in about a decade. So, I guess I just didn't notice any of the AI shenanigans you mention. I will say, though, that sometimes the game felt a little bit closer to Wing Commander than to X-Wing (even though I also felt it was much more like X-Wing than I ever expected).

I would definitely be interested in knowing more about the game's innards - when you mention your discoveries, is this something you actually found by looking through the game files etc. (and if yes - how? :) ), or did you find other texts/videos about the game? Tell me more, if you can!
 
Oh, it was just some research I did when I got frustrated with that particular mission in the single player campaign. I watched all of the friendly and enemy behaviors, and they just don't make a lick of sense. No amount of dodging or weaving or boosting would ever let me actually evade enemy fire, and I watched the assorted wingmen just casually floating around taking no damage.. because they can't die anyway, and I was the only person any enemy tried to attack. Unless you get a scripted event where you have to "save" a wingman, you are the only target they aim for.

The thing about the speeds came from a Reddit thread made when someone did a bunch of observation of the AI in different scenarios, and basically determined that it was blatantly cheating across the board. I found it while looking for an explanation of the weird behavior.

It always irritated me that there wasn't any external view to see the ship exteriors, and I wonder if that was specifically because they wanted to hide the fact that you just drag around a trail of enemy fighters completely ignoring their craft stats to keep up constant pressure on you. The stats only apply to player ships.

It's just.. It's such a good engine, and full of so much potential, but it was wasted on a space moba. I do enjoy booting it up to go shoot up some ships in the practice modes, but I would have much rather played it as a co-op game against AI enemies, specifically because of my earlier balance issues.

The absolute killing blow in my opinion though? They made the first ever VR X-Wing simulator, and they didn't give us a Trench Run. The one thing everyone would want to do, and they just didn't even bother.

Anyhow, I don't want to derail this topic further, but, I'll at least attempt to wrap it up in game development in general. ^_^ I think it's a really good example of why you shouldn't cut corners with developing the AI and unit balance for your game.

I've actually noticed some of this kind of thing flying in DCS World as well, but for different reasons. In that sim, there really is no attempt to balance anything, because each aircraft is an individual module designed to replicate the actual performance of the real aircraft. Fun fact, real life isn't actually balanced. 🤣

Problem is, that means you're relying on each individual aircraft package developer to do a proper job of making their aircraft fly correctly.. and it doesn't always happen that way. While newer full-fidelity packages like the F-14 and F-18 will be tuned to give accurate airframe performance to the best of the developer's ability, some older aircraft modules were only quick and dirty adaptations of aircraft from older simulator modules, or only tuned to be "fun to fly." Sometimes, matching up aircraft developed to different levels of realism becomes an exercise in frustration, when your modern stealth fighter is getting run circles around by an over-tuned Korean War-era MiG with seemingly endless fuel and thrust.

I really would like to find a way to mod everything in Squadrons to give it some new life. The modding community for the classic X-Wing games is honestly pushing the envelope to where they may surpass Squadrons soon anyhow though. The most recent X-Wing Alliance Upgrade modules enable full VR in that game, on top of the massive graphical upgrades they've built over the years since the game released, and there's a similar project in the works for the original X-Wing and Tie Fighter.

In terms of Wing Commander though, there are already working examples of VR mods for Freespace 2, so it's only a matter of time before we get full VR support in some of the best modern Wing Commander fan projects you can play.
 
It's just.. It's such a good engine, and full of so much potential, but it was wasted on a space moba. I do enjoy booting it up to go shoot up some ships in the practice modes, but I would have much rather played it as a co-op game against AI enemies, specifically because of my earlier balance issues.
Thanks! Yeah, this is something I've come across in my own gamedev career as well - in so many cases, it's easier for programmers to cheat with AI pilots than to have them follow the same rules. In fact, as I look back, in every single game I worked on where this topic came up, I never stood a chance in that battle. It was always a matter of "well, what do you expect us to do with the time and resources we are given?". What you describe sounds very much like one of these cases, where the AI programmers basically were unable to deliver on time, and were instead asked to deliver the illusion rather than the real thing. And heck, you know, from their perspective, this was (probably - since I'm only guessing what happened) the best possible option - they delivered the best they could given their limitations. It's actually something I tell my students - the best AI for your game is the simplest possible AI that does the job, so if an illusion is all you need, then that's what you should do. The only trouble is, if you're cutting corners, you run the risk of creating this exact situation: you've got an illusion where you need a simulation. You thought it would be enough for your players, but they saw right through it.

Oh, thanks also for mentioning the X-Wing Alliance VR mod! I haven't heard about that before, I'll have to look into it. Too bad that these days I have so little time for games, that I'll probably forget about this before I even get around to trying it (I mean, it did take me two years from the moment of purchase to actually play Squadrons...).
 
Thanks! Yeah, this is something I've come across in my own gamedev career as well - in so many cases, it's easier for programmers to cheat with AI pilots than to have them follow the same rules. In fact, as I look back, in every single game I worked on where this topic came up, I never stood a chance in that battle. It was always a matter of "well, what do you expect us to do with the time and resources we are given?". What you describe sounds very much like one of these cases, where the AI programmers basically were unable to deliver on time, and were instead asked to deliver the illusion rather than the real thing. And heck, you know, from their perspective, this was (probably - since I'm only guessing what happened) the best possible option - they delivered the best they could given their limitations. It's actually something I tell my students - the best AI for your game is the simplest possible AI that does the job, so if an illusion is all you need, then that's what you should do. The only trouble is, if you're cutting corners, you run the risk of creating this exact situation: you've got an illusion where you need a simulation. You thought it would be enough for your players, but they saw right through it.


It might be easier for AI programmers but it's worse for every other programmer and I often have to push back against our AI programmer doing that as he creates a mess all around the code base. Clearly it was the norm at his last job so it does happen (and it's impossible to miss in games), but it's my first experience with it in the industry - every other game I've worked on had a paradigm of a controller writing to the same inputs and it was a matter of professional pride that it wasn't a cheat. For example jumping, it's all special case with a target destination for the AI because it was too much work to figure out the speed they need to run up to - but then the jump looks awful, they go from a standing position to doing a long jump. So far my experience with it has me convinced it's always a mistake. There's still time to do it the right way fortunately.
The WCIV Remake works like this - player and AI write to the same set of bools and floats and that's it. Obviously the AI still has a long way to go but I can't see a world in which I would ever change that.

As a gamer it's always massively irritating to spot the AI doing something you can't do; the most obvious example is rubber banding in racing games. By all means give them a better car and have them take their foot off the gas if you're falling too far behind, but don't suddenly allow them to take corners faster than you could without coming off road.
 
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I'll get to the rest of this thread at some point but I get the impression that good programmers are becoming rare and so such cheats are becoming the norm, not just for AI but at all levels of design. You want the simulation but it's too expensive both in effort and processing, so you end up scaling back more and more and then the end result doesn't have any depth.
 
It might be easier for AI programmers but it's worse for every other programmer and I often have to push back against our AI programmer doing that as he creates a mess all around the code base. Clearly it was the norm at his last job so it does happen (and it's impossible to miss in games), but it's my first experience with it in the industry - every other game I've worked on had a paradigm of a controller writing to the same inputs and it was a matter of professional pride that it wasn't a cheat. For example jumping, it's all special case with a target destination for the AI because it was too much work to figure out the speed they need to run up to - but then the jump looks awful, they go from a standing position to doing a long jump. So far my experience with it has me convinced it's always a mistake. There's still time to do it the right way fortunately.
Absolutely. The result is always an inconsistent experience from the perspective of the end user, which is bad enough. From the perspective of the rest of the team, though, it can be even worse, since the game becomes to some extent inexplicable. A tester reports a bug with the flight model, submits a recording of an AI-driven aircraft doing something weird, and then the newly-hired physics programmer who wasn't around for the earlier discussion spends a week trying to figure out what is wrong with the simulation, before someone finally explains to him that actually, it's an AI problem which we can't fix, because the guy who hacked together the AI no longer works here, and his code is filled with comments along the lines of "this shouldn't work, but it does, leaving it as is for now, must change when time permits".

Also, just in case you got the wrong impression, when I say I tell my students they should always use the simplest AI possible, I don't mean that they should cheat this way (heck, they're designers, so hopefully they'll never code any AI - it's mainly about knowing how to communicate your needs to the programmers, and understanding the basic constraints). Rather, I point out to them that while there are situations where you need that really sophisticated AI based on behaviour trees, goal-oriented action planning, or whatever else is the current fashion, there are also situations where all you need is a simpler AI script written into the AI controller blueprint (this being Unreal), and then there are situations where actually all you need is a daft little script that tells the background NPC to move between nav points and occasionally enact a specific animation.
 
That actually reminds me of the wacky work-around I used to make a very challenging version of the ESB asteroid chase in X-wing v Tie Fighter.

Programming a complex pattern of asteroids to fly specific paths, and give you an obstacle course? Nuts to that, I made the asteroids into ships, gave them a simple "ram the nearest craft" order, then tweaked their stats to give them randomized speeds, and almost no maneuverability. All you had to do was enter the mission zone, and the AI built you a unique obstacle course on every run.

It looked ridiculous when you actually watched it from a distance, but that's the beauty of it. The background of static rocks was enough to give you a good backdrop, and survival meant dodging too fast to notice how goofy it actually behaved. You just had to dodge.
 
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