I'm Soliloquis. Been a fan of space games since I saw the art on the box of Freespace in the bargain bin at Odd Lots when I was a kid which is funny because I remember picking it up many years later and wondering why it was ever in the bargain bin to begin with. I've never played any of the Wing Commander games but I did play Freelancer and was blown away by it. I don't even know how many hours I've sunken into that game and every now and again I've installed it to play it again.
To be upfront I am a game developer currently working on a game similar to Wing Commander and Freespace. Heavy on the story side with something akin to a retro-futurism look and feel. Definitely different from the usual scifi artwork that can be seen in these types of games. Being as I've never played WC (save for dabbling in Darkest Dawn a bit) and only ever watched longplay videos on YouTube I'd really appreciate any feedback or tips about what the community loved about the games.
If you're interested I can drop a trailer but mostly I'm looking to get feedback and ideas right now and less about trying to pitch/sell the game at this moment.
Pacing
I agree with all of MannerOfLoaf's comments above, especially the first one. In a more general sense, you want to think about
pacing, especially if you have a design where the game is divided into missions and you can only save while in between them.
The scale of missions in WC1 was excellent for pacing, forced upon it because the engine only supported about 32 ships per mission. It conflicted with the lore; the "Claw Marks" manual that accompanied the game said your carrier, the
Tiger's Claw, could carry 104 fighters. But sometimes you and one wingmen were the sole defenders of the carrier. Were they busy replacing the windscreen wiper fluid on the other 102?
Later games
could increase the number of both friends and foes, so did, even though this didn't automatically make the games any more fun. I would far rather see fewer missions, and where the fiction is written to say that yes, your carrier only carries a dozen fighters and the enemy has similar limitations.
AI
The AI in WC1 and WC2 is intentionally incompetent. Page 248 of the book "
Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide" says they specifically made the ships do rolls and other flashy manoeuvres while in your line of sight, and then just aid towards their target when you're not watching. The recently released "Through the Moongate" has an
even more revealing paragraph that anyone making a flight sim should read. I'm not sure that this is the
only way to write the AI, but I think it's important to pay attention to.
I would specifically say that your game should be
fun when it's 2 versus 2 (player and wingmen against 2 enemies). If it's not, no variety in your ships or in-mission events will fix this.
Capital Ships
Capital ships in WC1 are easy but tedious destroy. Just finish off their escorts and then shoot them continuously. If their own guns bring down your shields, move out of range to regenerate. It's not very exciting.
WC2 tried to fix this with "phase shields" that are invulnerable to everything but "
torpedoes" that are only carried by the heavier ships, and to "
antimatter guns" that only the capital ships carry. This made some sense, except your wingmen (thanks to those bad AI routines) made no attempt to evade the antimatter guns, meaning that missions that were supposed to end in a coordinated torpedo run instead had the player flying past the ejected capsules of their entire wing to finish of the enemy capital ships by themselves.
The WC2 expansion Special Operations 2 added the
Mace Tactical Nuclear Missile, but it is so destructive that your wingman is programmed to never use his, despite having the callsign "
Maniac". This is once again good design, but inconsistent with the fiction.
Starlancer refined the torpedo model, making them unguided and only carried by specific torpedo bombers. Defending these was annoying at times, but it generally felt fair: your bombers and the enemy's played by the same rules. But you also spent a lot of time chasing down torpedoes before they could impact, and one of my most causes of late-game mission death was chasing a little too close and ramming one of them. And Starlancer had some annoyingly long missions; see the point above about pacing.
While it's not a space sim, I really like the capital ship warfare in Crimson Skies (the 2000 PC game, not the 2003 High Road to Revenge for XBox). Because the capital ships are airships, damage is illustrated by how many gas cells they've lost, without having to target them and read their damage status. Gas cells can be damaged by aerial torpedoes, much like the Starlancer implementation, or by well-aimed shot at their cannons while the hatches are open.
So what's the point here? There's still a lot of scope for experimenting with your capital ship mechanics. Or you could make a game
without them, either because they're part of a steady progression in size from the fighters, or because they're so huge that they're indestructible background scenery to the fighter combat. But whatever form of capital ship destruction you choose, make sure:
- It's not just a matter of tediously whittling a number down to zero.
- It doesn't rely on escorting allied bombers unless you've given them a decently competent AI
- It feels fair when the enemy does it to you.
- You don't have to give ships scripted invulnerability to avoid 2 or 3.
Good luck with your own game development, and I hope to play it someday.