Deep Dive the Famous WC3 “Heart of the Tiger” Thrakhath Scene (September 18, 2024)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
I needed a distraction tonight so I took apart the Wing Commander III scene where Thrakhath hacks the Victory's comms. WC3 is actually a lot more dynamic than just 'play good scene/play bad scene'. Here four different scenes come from one video...

Scenes 7, 12 and 15 are determined by whether or not Flash has joined the crew (and is still alive). Instead of closeups of Thrakhath you get funny reaction shots of Maniac and Flash goofing around, and then the last scenes are determined by whether or not you won the previous series (Ariel). If you didn't, the Kilrathi are approaching and Rollins gets in an I-told-you-so! So the Xanmovie file contains 41 shots but only 35 of them will play in any given game run. I decided to organize them into camera angles and found there are 14 distinct ones which means they did 14 different rendered background animation cycles for this scene!









Next I decided to track where all the actors were and especially figure out the extras. This is one of the busiest scenes in WC3! Here are the first and last wide shots labeled:





And I tracked all the extras, too. Several aren't visible at all but others are familiar. #5 is the woman Maniac was harassing in his intro and #6 appears in funerals. #7 seems to take the conn when Eisen leaves; maybe the XO?




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Original update published on September 18, 2024
 
Never picked up on that! Me I always played to make sure I did get Flash on the roster. For better or worse.

Though I think the big question here is what exactly was Thrakhath's plan with him letting Hobbes defect to Confed with a fake identity in place, which inevitably allowed Hobbes to kill many other Kilrathi for more than a decade?

And if the Kilrathi had succeeded in destroying the Victory at Ariel, that means Hobbes would've been dead before Thrakhath could make any use of this ploy and essentially lucked out that Blair just happened to be on the same ship, which he was lucky did end up surviving.

It's one thing to have double agents, but it seems like Thrakhath didn't have a clear endgame in mind with Hobbes for the better part of over ten years. And that's not even considering that the trigger, "Heart of the Tiger", may not have even been bestowed upon Blair all the way back in 2655, so how then did Thrakhath intend to trigger Hobbes' true personality?

Just seemed like something to bring up since we are talking about this particular scene.
 
That's a very good question!

I think there's a built-in fannish desire to come up with a story that doesn't involve Blair at all; to say that Ralgha's defection was some larger act of statecraft and that Blair just happened to be there. It's our nature to push against that small universe interpretation and say oh, it must be some larger thing we don't understand…

… but I'll argue that it's actually the opposite case: the Ralgha personality overlay scheme was probably intended as a short term project to target Blair specifically rather than what it became. First let's talk about what's going on with Prince Thrakhath in 2655. Until this point, the war has been run by his father, Lord Gilkarg. With the loss of the Sivar and its fleet, the Emperor has finally had enough: he executes his son and declares Thrakhath the new heir.

Before this, Thrakhath was a very successful fighter pilot and an effective fleet commander whose tactical skills were recognized by the Confederation. While he was not responsible for the loss at Vega or the Sivar debacle, he also wasn't in a flawless position when he was named heir: he'd been roundly defeated at Dolos the previous year, losing his own dreadnought and a significant force of Drakhai in the process. (The loss of the Sivar fleet was particularly egregious because it was a blow specifically to these forces, the ones the Emperor keeps in reserve to consolidate his power).

So what's one of the very first things Thrakhath does when he takes power? The day after the Sivar is destroyed he breaks with the twenty plus year long Kilrathi tradition of not (diplomatically) recognizing the Confederation and issues a public vow that he will be seeking revenge for the death of his father and that he intends to battle Blair in single combat.

From the Kilrathi Saga manual:

<blockquote>
Thrakhath's Vow

In my homeland, the weaker warrior-clan have christened you as the Heart of the Tiger, but to me the human “tiger” must be a beast of small measure. You have not the courage to face a true warrior of Kilrah alone in battle.

I know only hate for you when I hear your name spat from the mouths of my pilots. But rest assured that we will soon meet. My father was Admiral Gilkarg, son of the Emperor. Your death is the price I require for his shame, for it was he who paid for your cowardly attack on Kilrah’s royal fleet. He did not receive a rightful burial, only a dishonorable execution by a lowborn Kilra’hra.

And for that, my enemy, you will suffer greatly. In the eights of moons to come, I too will strip from you something you hold dear.

On my blood and name,
Prince Thrakhath

TRANSLATED BY TCN INTELL: 2655.200
</blockquote>

Again, .200 is THE DAY AFTER the Sivar was destroyed. This all happened very quickly and it's pretty clear that Blair is his specific target. Is he furiously angry at Blair personally? Maybe, or maybe that's statecraft: as he says, the lower clans have recognized Blair's hero status and it may have become something that he needs to deal with.

Consider also the Wing Commander II intro, where the Emperor and Thrakhath specifically discuss "the human pilot who has caused us so much trouble". It's important to them that the Confederation NOT have such a figure. The Emperor is trying to consolidate his power over the clans, a massive reform that he views as much more important than the sideshow of a human war… and he's particularly concerned with movements like the rebellion on Ghorah Khar. So yes they are intentionally sitting around cackling about you and coming up with schemes to end Blair specifically. (I would also argue that this is not paranoia; Kilrathi sociology about such figures is such that they DO eventually end up working Blair into their religion…)

So Thrakhath takes over as heir, issues that vow within a day and Ralgha defects 71 days later. (With Thrakhath specifically traveling to Ghorah Khar to free him after he's fingered by local security!).

What WAS the plan? Almost certainly for all of this to happen much, much sooner. Note that the vow specifies that Blair will suffer "in the eight moons to come". Thrakhath has a plan in mind that's going to take months, not 14 years. So what happened was that as far as Thrakhath and the Emperor was concerned, another one of their counterintelligence projects, Jazz Colson, managed to disgrace Blair and knock him out of the war (the literal thing they're talking about in the intro!). Ralgha wasn't needed and so he was left in place for some future adaptation. What we see in Wing Commander III is picking up an old toy and adapting it for the current situation, not the result of years and years of planning to get to that point.

A couple of other notes:

The Heart of the Tiger name. Thrakhath notes in his vow that it's something that the commoners have already come up with in his 2655 vow, presumably following his celebrity after the Vega Campaign. It's casually mentioned in the Armada manual, too, by the POV Kilrathi who recognizes that the Heart of the Tiger is 'the only human worth fighting Prince Thrakhath one on one'. We also learn in the WC3 novelization that it's called a 'vengeance name' and that while it's very uncommon it's not a case of Blair being the only one to have one; that it signifies a public challenge from a Kilrathi noble (especially unique because Kilrathi rarely recognize humans as their equal). But we also see in the WC3 book that Thrakhath considers "Heart of the Tiger" to refer to the Hobbes option rather than that he's spitting angry about Blair… he treats it as a tool he has to use to deal with Behemoth (and refers to the activation, not the human as "the Heart of the Tiger").

What about killing so many Kilrathi? There's two answers for that, the first is that the Kilrathi aren't especially concerned with death the way humans are. Kilrathi tactics are such that it was not considered a terrible thing that their casualties were three times those of the Confederation. It wasn't until the late 40s that they moved away from trying to overpower the line with suicidal attacks. But the second part is: "... did he?" Both when we meet Hobbes in WC2 and when we see him in WC3 he has contrived some reason to NOT be an active combat pilot. In WC2, he claims Tolwyn doesn't want him doing anything 'important' and then in WC3 he has specifically requested not to be a pilot. It may well be that his overlay is set up in such a way that he tries to avoid combat as much as possible… and instead provides human intelligence with a skewed view of Kilrathi culture/intelligence (noted by Tolwyn later!).

(And then, you mentioned Ariel, we see in the novel that there's actually a pretty complex set of combat rules from Thrakhath for the Kilrathi dealing with Ralgha and Blair specifically… that there are various times where they've specifically been ordered NOT to kill them in combat.)
 
I needed a distraction tonight so I took apart the Wing Commander III scene where Thrakhath hacks the Victory's comms. WC3 is actually a lot more dynamic than just 'play good scene/play bad scene'. Here four different scenes come from one video...

Original update published on September 18, 2024
This is remarkable indeed - it's so rare after all these years to learn something genuinely new about these games! I never, ever realised that WC3 has this kind of dynamic changes in cutscenes, I was under the impression that the game usually just chooses between scenes wholesale. Do you know of any other examples of this - and whether this is also done in WC4? I'm very, very much interested, because in my university work, I'm slowly putting all the pieces into place to start working on a book about the history and form of FMV games with a colleague. It goes without saying that Wing Commander will feature rather prominently. If there are any other unique features of this kind in WC's FMV layer, please, please do more news posts about them!
 
This is remarkable indeed - it's so rare after all these years to learn something genuinely new about these games! I never, ever realised that WC3 has this kind of dynamic changes in cutscenes, I was under the impression that the game usually just chooses between scenes wholesale. Do you know of any other examples of this - and whether this is also done in WC4? I'm very, very much interested, because in my university work, I'm slowly putting all the pieces into place to start working on a book about the history and form of FMV games with a colleague. It goes without saying that Wing Commander will feature rather prominently. If there are any other unique features of this kind in WC's FMV layer, please, please do more news posts about them!
The biggest other example would probably be the Funeral cutscenes that shuffle a number of reaction shot options around depending on who died, and who is left alive.
 
The funeral is a big one but it actually happens throughout the game; there are a bunch of briefings and other cutscenes that have morale options... and a bunch of others that are stored this way to save space (takeoffs, landings and so on).

Wing Commander IV doesn't do this at all; in fact I'm pretty sure it doubles up on footage a few times rather than bother with this.
 
The funeral is a big one but it actually happens throughout the game; there are a bunch of briefings and other cutscenes that have morale options... and a bunch of others that are stored this way to save space (takeoffs, landings and so on).

Wing Commander IV doesn't do this at all; in fact I'm pretty sure it doubles up on footage a few times rather than bother with this.
Ah, of course - the funerals would be a very natural place for this.

It's interesting they dropped it for WC4 - care to hazard a guess as to why? Would it be just because of the stricter timeline (and therefore, the risk of adding unnecessary complexities that require testing), or is it that they simply didn't have any need for it given the game's 6 CDs provided more space?

Little details like this are always so remarkable. I remember the first time I played Prophecy, I failed the Dallas-dies mission, and because I had to stop playing, I didn't simply click "restart". Then, the next time, since I had already seen the convo with Dallas, I didn't bother clicking on him and went straight into the mission - only to find that the pre-mission cutscene has changed. I was really blown away by this, both positively and negatively - positively, because it was an impressive bit of attention to detail, and negatively, because it seemed like a really obtuse way of offering the player a choice (I suspect that to this day, most people who played WCP do not know there is an alternate scene there at all). Also, it was a little disappointing, because as far as I could tell, this was literally the only time in the game that not activating a conversation made any difference.
 
It's interesting they dropped it for WC4 - care to hazard a guess as to why? Would it be just because of the stricter timeline (and therefore, the risk of adding unnecessary complexities that require testing), or is it that they simply didn't have any need for it given the game's 6 CDs provided more space?

I suspect that it ended up along the lines of Wing Commander I's deep branching mission tree: even though it works great and is very impressive it's effectively a lot more work on several levels than it offers you a reward. As far as I can tell they never designed anything so subtle for WC4 going in... but it also would've been rendered less necessary with the larger CD-ROMs, better compression and the reletively high amount of material that was planned but ended up totally cut for production reasons (like takeoff scenes!).

Little details like this are always so remarkable. I remember the first time I played Prophecy, I failed the Dallas-dies mission, and because I had to stop playing, I didn't simply click "restart". Then, the next time, since I had already seen the convo with Dallas, I didn't bother clicking on him and went straight into the mission - only to find that the pre-mission cutscene has changed. I was really blown away by this, both positively and negatively - positively, because it was an impressive bit of attention to detail, and negatively, because it seemed like a really obtuse way of offering the player a choice (I suspect that to this day, most people who played WCP do not know there is an alternate scene there at all). Also, it was a little disappointing, because as far as I could tell, this was literally the only time in the game that not activating a conversation made any difference.

This is really a throwback to WC3, mechanically. If you skip the conversations with Vagabond, Vaquero, Flint, etc. in the first series you'll get an alternate intro to Orsini 3 where Eisen yells at you before the mission.
 
WC3 does that here and there. You can skip the kissing scenes in the bar entirely and neither Rachel nor Flint gets mad at you, and then you get the no-girlfriend ending to boot.
 
This is really a throwback to WC3, mechanically. If you skip the conversations with Vagabond, Vaquero, Flint, etc. in the first series you'll get an alternate intro to Orsini 3 where Eisen yells at you before the mission.
Ah, yes - I do remember somehow accidentally doing that.
WC3 does that here and there. You can skip the kissing scenes in the bar entirely and neither Rachel nor Flint gets mad at you, and then you get the no-girlfriend ending to boot.
Now that I remember doing quite intentionally! I think that's probably the single best use of this mechanic, because the way the situation was set up, you not only immediately knew that you were facing a choice, but also, for some players at least, the idea of not making that choice so soon after Angel seemed reasonable and logical. Either that, or - once you knew what the tradeoffs were, you might reasonably decide that you don't want to do your own loadouts, but you also don't want to lose the option of flying with Flint.
 
Another one are the two groundings, Flint and Vagabond... if you just ignore the conversations you get a clip slipped into a briefing where Eisen tells you he did it.

I happened across a quote from CR yesterday from the WC4 junket where he talks about how he wasn't happy with the morale system in WC3 and so moved away from that in WC4. He didn't like that the players never had a great idea of what the morale level of the ship and characters was and so they weren't tempted to seek out alternate scenes and scenarios.
 
Another one are the two groundings, Flint and Vagabond... if you just ignore the conversations you get a clip slipped into a briefing where Eisen tells you he did it.

I happened across a quote from CR yesterday from the WC4 junket where he talks about how he wasn't happy with the morale system in WC3 and so moved away from that in WC4. He didn't like that the players never had a great idea of what the morale level of the ship and characters was and so they weren't tempted to seek out alternate scenes and scenarios.
I was trying to think of other games that do similar things and mostly you see these kinds of systems in RPGs, but even then they mostly focus on player reputation than necessarily an overall morale idea among the principle cast.

Looking at it now I'm not entirely sure how I would make it clearer to the player without outright having a stat screen show you each person's morale. The closest I-universe thing I can think of is having a WCA-TV style psychologist on board that you can chat to about updates (but even then I feel that if he's talking to everyone else about his patients he's probably not a very good doctor)
 
I think the comms are actually a pretty good way to do it without breaking immersion... but they're missing the initial big neon arrow that points you to them as meaning something to the player in the first place. If you don't know there's a morale system in the first place are you even thinking about it.

I think I'd solve it by engineering a scenario in the first missions where you have have a cinematic choice that will obviously anger one of two wingmen... and then follow it with a mission where you fly with both and it's obvious their comm attitudes are the result of the choice (probably script it with special comms for each that you know will play and stick in the player's mind).
 
I'd think the most obvious way would be something similar to Mass Effect's Squad Selection Screen. Instead of different outfits and highlights, the character's poses and reactions would show their morale: Low, Neutral, High. For Example, Maniac:
Low Morale: Stand with his arms crossed barely looking at Blair, Reacts with a sneer and a derisive comment.
Neutral Morale: Bored, scratching himself stance, Reacts with a mock salute
High Morale: Actually shows interest, Reacts with a thumbs up and a smile.
 
That's a really smart solution!
And it is one that could have been implemented at the time without much more space (which was a major constraint, I know).
The other, lower memory solution, would be Wing Commander reports on the crew that update after every mission describing Blair's and Eisen's regular crew assessments. It would not be as "visual" but the notes would be dynamic and describe crew interactions that reflect their morale. For example, are they being more social, drinking more, sullen, jovial, acting out of charater, etc...
 
Can we talk about the encounter between Thrakhath, Ralgha and Blair in Wing Commander 2: Special Operations 1? The writers presumably didn't have the personality overlay story, so they had the Bonnie Heather suffer a random power outage so Thrakhath can escape. But given the events in Wing Commander 3, it seems odd that Thrakhath was so confident of some random failure would let him escape with no great effort. Why didn't he guarantee his escape by saying "Heart of the Tiger" to Ralgha? It would expose a valuable sleeper agent, but would allow Thrakhath to escape sooner ahead of Khasra.

Or do we see events in WC2SO1 from any perspective other than Blair's? Can Ralgha's personality overlay be activated multiple times? Would it be consistent with the events observed if:
1. Thrakhath indeed said "Heart of the Tiger" to Ralgha,
2. Ralgha simply unlocked Thrakhath's cell and let him aboard the second Crossbow, then
3. Thrakhath then reset Ralgha to the Hobbes personality to continue acting as a sleeper agent?

Hobbes was probably a bit dazed after having his personality rebooted twice in 15 minutes, but Taggart and Blair would have assumed that was just effects of concussion.
 
Can we talk about the encounter between Thrakhath, Ralgha and Blair in Wing Commander 2: Special Operations 1? The writers presumably didn't have the personality overlay story, so they had the Bonnie Heather suffer a random power outage so Thrakhath can escape. But given the events in Wing Commander 3, it seems odd that Thrakhath was so confident of some random failure would let him escape with no great effort. Why didn't he guarantee his escape by saying "Heart of the Tiger" to Ralgha? It would expose a valuable sleeper agent, but would allow Thrakhath to escape sooner ahead of Khasra.

Or do we see events in WC2SO1 from any perspective other than Blair's? Can Ralgha's personality overlay be activated multiple times? Would it be consistent with the events observed if:
1. Thrakhath indeed said "Heart of the Tiger" to Ralgha,
2. Ralgha simply unlocked Thrakhath's cell and let him aboard the second Crossbow, then
3. Thrakhath then reset Ralgha to the Hobbes personality to continue acting as a sleeper agent?

Hobbes was probably a bit dazed after having his personality rebooted twice in 15 minutes, but Taggart and Blair would have assumed that was just effects of concussion.
I doubt it would have been something so complex. More likely that the overlay had an additional keyphrase for temporary pauses to the overlay or simply to make him temporarily susceptible to outside influence, almost like hypnosis. Once the pause is over it would probably leave him groggy, or knowing Thrakhath, he would have still knocked him out to concuss Hobbes.
 
It's a very good retcon and frankly makes the Special Operations encounter a little less ridiculous in both directions--even before Wing Commander III, it seemed pretty silly both that there was a random power problem AND that he simply knocked him out like he was Fred Flinstone. In fact, even if Blair's perspective were 100% true it's still pretty suspicious that Thrakhath didn't murder Ralgha right then and there. (And it's not even Blair's perspective... it's what Blair's mortal enemy happens to tell him happened!)

It pairs well with another suspicious moment in Thrakhath and Ralgha's relationship that was written without knowledge over the overlay: the scene in Freedom Flight where Ralgha has (rightly) been accused of treason on Ghorah Khar... and Thrakhath shows up to free him. Was that a case of Thrakhath really being fooled by Ralgha or was it a case of the local cops picking up the sting operation and accidentally almost ruining it?

It's likely that the overlay is more than just 'you are programmed to do this this one time'. They do note in the novels that intelligence can no longer trust what they've learned abut the Kilrathi from him because he may have been set up to misinform about all of that. Along the same lines, the Hobbes personality may be set up so that it's unable to disobey Thrakhath in general!
 
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