Incidentally, I too had spent an extraordinarily long time playing the original Pirates! before I experienced Privateer - I take it you're talking about the 1987 version, which for its time was an outstanding demonstration of how an 'open ender' should be, but in itself became one dimensional once you had rescued your sister, found the treasure and conquered the Carribean on behalf of one country.
I feel if Privateer had somehow given you the chance to participate in a broader cause than just the plot missions, say, taking sides in warring factions and making progress in wiping each other out mission-by-mission, the game wouldn't have ended so bleakly and abruptly after the plot missions have ended.
Yes, I am talking about the 1987 version. The 2004 remake is a lot of fun, but inferior in some ways (...and better in others).
If you think about what made Pirates! so great, though, you will understand how difficult to translate into a WC context this would have been. Very few games ever use this mechanic, because it's so tough to combine with storytelling. I am, of course, talking about aging.
In Pirates!, you really couldn't expect to play for longer than about twenty years, and even that was stretching it. Most of the time, you were forced to retire earlier than that, because of old wounds and the like. Better still, Pirates! had a reverse skill improvement mechanic - as you got older, your character got slower, and it became harder to retain fame (which in turn was needed to recruit crew). An old pirate needed to really do spectacular things in order to get people's attention. You were old, and therefore you had to be awesome, or no one would want to sign up with you. These age and health-related factors meant that it wasn't until you'd played the game through several times, spending tens and tens of hours on it, that you were able to really do everything the game had offered. Most players, most of the time, were making hard choices: if you concentrated on building a big force, you couldn't go off and search for your family. On the other hand, searching for your family got in the way of acquiring fame, making recruitment harder and limiting your military options.
One other consequence is that the game was designed to allow you to pick up any of the various story threads any time - the story, as symbollic as it was, had been designed to tolerate gaps. You could find your lost family all in the space of one year, but since they were living in relative safety, it didn't matter if it took you fifteen years instead. The only story element that didn't make sense in this regard (and actually, this is something that never occured to me back then: only now) was the quest for marriage. I understand that history has known some pretty long engagements - but it is downright remarkable that all those governor's daughters you met would last for years without getting married. Given the degree of control parents had over marriage back then, it just seems crazy that all those girls were willing to remain unmarried potentially into their forties. But even this was limited to a significant degree by the periodic change of governors - as new governors arrived, their predecessor's unmarried daughter vanished from our view.
Anyway, how would a game like this work in the WC universe? The kind of stories Wing Commander tells just wouldn't work. It doesn't make sense, for instance, for Palan to remain blocked for a decade or something, or for the Exploratory Corps to wait five years for their explorer to return without trying to figure out where he'd gone off to. Besides - as the story begins in 2669, the end of the war would have to be dealt with..
Of course, some elements could work rather amusingly - just imagine the stories they'd tell throughout Gemini, about the pilot who for years has been followed by the Steltek drone wherever he went
.
Thinking about it, I wish someone
would make a game like that. You know, a Privateer game that perhaps starts around 2640 and lasts until the player is too old to fly any more (or too old to get his flying license renewed?
). Instead of the kind of specific story Privateer had, have generic story elements like in Pirates! - women you can romance, nemeses you can challenge and beat or be beaten by, and all against a backdrop of a
growing sector, with planets being colonised, mining bases being established (...and shut down as the ore runs out, or outright destroyed by some Retro or pirate attack), with the strength of the Confed presence changing over time, new ships being introduced, old ships being phased out, and so on. Oh, and instead of being killed when your ship is blown up - you always safely eject, but sometimes you lose an arm, a leg, an eye, whatever - and end up replacing them with inferior bionic equivalents.
Such a game would be sheer and utter awesomeness...