Remember, what EA (or whoever ends up doing this) wants is a firm base from which to (re)build a modern franchise for a current audience. It's not a matter of deciding what hardcore fans want and giving it to them--it's a matter of distilling what the million people who played the first game in 1990 loved and figuring out how to sell that again to ten million people in 2012.
You may be right, but I am surprised by it, because everyone I have talked to about Wing Commander (who is not a major fan of the series) always remembers not the original, but Wing Commander III and IV. And Privateer, now that I think about it.
Why recast Kirk and Spock and friends for the new Star Trek film instead of creating new characters or using those from one of the more recent spinoffs? Simple numbers--some huge percent of the potential audience knows the original Star Trek compared to a tiny slice of the pie who know or care about 'Deep Space Nine'.
That's different, though. In a movie or TV series, the characters are a much larger part of the whole than in a game, where the gameplay is the largest factor. If the gameplay is familiar, that matters more than the characters or the enemy. Though I will grant you that it is hard to use the style of gameplay in a marketing campaign, and easy to use familiar characters, ships, enemies, etc. and so it would clearly be advantageous in a relaunch to use these familiar elements in some way.
television in 1996 and the film in 1999. Each and every time the developers went back to the same basic parts of the IP--Tiger's Claw, Blair and Maniac, Kilrathi.
What else could you really do for a TV series or a movie? You're transferring the story to a different medium, and it makes sense to begin at the beginning of the story, leaving room for further seasons or sequels. It wouldn't even really make sense to make a movie out of Wing Commander III or IV, since those were pretty much
already movies.
And even though the movie took some of the names of the things in the original game, it treated them in entirely different ways. Some of the ships were called the same thing, but they looked totally different. Many of the characters had the same names, but they didn't particularly resemble the characters from the game, and sometimes didn't even play the same role. If you took the names out of the movie, I honestly would have had no clue that it was a even a Wing Commander movie. And that's fine - you obviously have to do those things when translating a concept to a film. I just don't really see that the things they had to do to make a TV show or a movie are the same things they need to do to relaunch the franchise as a game.
I absolutely agree there need to be recognizable elements, I'm just not sure the Tiger's Claw or fighting in the Kilrathi War are those elements. But I really think that for people who are not big fans of the series, but remember having fun with some of the games, it's the gameplay that contains those familiar elements.
Wing Commander Area. I'm a big a Wing Commander fan. Bigger than most people who played the games, but not as big as most of you all here. I didn't really play the games not in the main series, I never read the novels, etc. Now, when Wing Commander Arena was announced, I was excited at first, because it was a new Wing Commander product. But as I learned what kind of game it was, I cared less and less. It had some familiar names and designs in it, but that wasn't what made me love Wing Commander, and that was not enough to get me to want to buy the game. What I loved was the experience of playing the original games. And while I'm glad the Wing Commander name was used in some way, it just wasn't a product that appealed to me in the end, because it was completely missing the elements that attracted me to it in the first place. And the same was true for all the people I know who were more casual fans of Wing Commander than I was.
We looked at social media trends for Wing Commander in preparation for something a while back. You know what most people 'talked about', by some incredible margin? The Wing Commander movie--because even though it was a box office failure, the difference between the sales base of PC games and movies meant that ten times as many people saw the thing as ever bought a Wing Commander game (it's also the one part of the franchise that stays in the public eye, thanks to regular airings on television). That's the kind of data point anyone who's going to spend eight or nine figures on a Wing Commander relaunch is looking at rather than what existing fans are chatting about.
Granted, but I don't think anyone really
loved the Wing Commander movie who didn't already like the games, and no one is going to play a new game because of the movie who wasn't already going to play it anyway because of playing the previous games.
Personally, as a fairly large fan of the series, I don't want to see a game set during the Kilrathi War. I have already been there and done that, I know that story, and I know how it ends. But give me classic Wing Commander gameplay, and it doesn't really matter - I'd be sold. I think delivering the gameplay experience is far more important than anything else in the success of the game, and a lot of that really depends on whether or not people care to play that kind of game anymore. I can't believe that whether or not the Tiger's Claw is involved will affect anything.
But let's say they do decide to take this approach, and make a game set during the Kilrathi War, with Chris Blair flying off the Tiger's Claw. And let's say it's a big enough success to merit a sequel. Where do you see them going with the sequel? Would they then move on to new stories, or would they be stuck retelling the same story as the previous games all over again? Or would they pull a Star Trek and go with a kind of "alternate universe"?