WC2 Bonus Chapter Released from 'Moongate' History Book (February 25, 2021)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator



Andrea Contato has a great surprise for everyone today. He's allowed us to share the Wing Commander 2 bonus chapter from his new book Through the Moongate, from Wing Commander and Ultima VII to Portalarium. It includes discussion about some of Chris Roberts' initial expectations for the game and draws heavily on extensive interviews with WC2 director Siobhan Beeman. The chapter provides some really helpful insight into how Origin and the game industry worked in the early '90s. You can grab it in PDF format and read for yourself here (350 k). And if you'd like to check out the rest of the book (or part 1 covering the pre-WC days), check out Andrea's shop here.


The Wing Commander II team was not satisfied, however, to simply improve on what they already had. Despite the limited timeline, there was also the intention to add features and expand the gameplay. Siobhan explains:






“We knew we wanted to add gunnery positions to the game, a la the famous scenes from Star Wars IV. What was necessary was an in-fiction rationale for why those positions would exist. Modern jet fighters after all don’t have turret gunners, because that weight is far better spent on additional speed and maneuverability. So we created bombers, a ship type that would be forced to fly slowly in a straight line and thus needed gunners if it was to have any defense at all. To give bombers an excuse to exist, we introduced torpedoes, a weapon that would be devastating against capital ships but required a period of slow, straight flight to ‘lock on’ and fire. This was of course another example of basing Wing Commander combat on World War II fighter combat, in this case torpedo bombers like USN Avengers and IJN Kates. I’d say that Star Wars and "WWII air combat" were the two cornerstones of Wing Commander, but Star Wars itself was also based on WWII dogfights, so really that’s what all of this comes back to.”

--
Original update published on February 25, 2021
 
Actually remembered the colour of the 'dark blue' of WC1/2's space background...

Interesting anecdote about Angel and Bluehair's coupling coming from the fans. I played WC2 before WC1 - at the start Angel almost seems like she's lecturing Bluehair (and Maniac as fellow rookie pilot couldn't stand that), but I think the closest connection they had was when Bluehair was consoling Angel after Bossman sacrificed himself to let her retreat to safety. Maybe that wasn't intended as a 'romantic' moment, but I coming from WC2 to WC1 I could see that as perhaps the start of a connection between them as more than just friends/comrades.

I also remember the time before sound cards for PCs. In fact, my copy of WC2 came along with the SoundBlaster package that my dad had bought. Interesting how the SoundBlaster played a role in driving WC2's speech pack. Despite not being professional voice actors, I thought it came out quite well. And then WC2 is credited with driving SB sales.

Fun story of how Broadsword bombers came to be. I can understand why not everyone enjoys torpedo runs, but I certainly did in WC2.

Shame how Origin struggled to get paid - and even effectively had copies stolen from them by smaller shops! I suppose this ties in with the cash flow problems that led Origin to ultimately agree to be bought by EA. A far cry from today's largely digital distribution.
 
A lot less air combat in WWI, wasn't there? I'm no historian but I thought the original shots of the X-Wings breaking off one-by-one to attack the Death Star was supposed to evoke imagery of WWII aircraft making their attack runs.
 
Yeah, both WW1 and WW2 bombers actually had gun turrets to defend from enemy fighters. While WW1 saw an increasing action by bombers, torpedo bombers saw little action even if the technology was still available since the beginning of the conflict. On the other hand, WW2 air war was heavily influenced by the presence of embarked torpedo bombers (like Japanese Kate and US Devastator vehicles) and, more than anything, heavily defended long-range bombers like B-17, B-24, and Lancaster that had multiple turrets armed with heavy machine guns.
During the second part of the war, the Luftwaffe developed new tactics for their fighters when engaging bombers formations: german fighters were to exploit superior speed and cut a diagonal trajectory firing at close range with their weapons and disengaging immediately to avoid being shot down. You can see something similar to this strategy when Tie Fighters engage the Millennium Falcon in the scene described by Beeman.
Moreover, MIllennium falcon turrets are very similar in design to Liberator nose turret, while WW1 gun turrets were open (no high level fly, so no need to preserve the crew from air pressure)
 
Here's a paragraph that I wish every developer of flight sims would read, right up to today. For starters, it would be nice if someone had told the programmers working on Wing Commander Armada:

I think there was a desire among almost everybody at Origin to make the AI ‘better,’ which is to say ‘more capable of evaluating the situation and choosing a tactically sound maneuver.’ However, I know that such an effort would have been fruitless–not only did we not have the spare CPU cycles nor the expertise to make ‘smart’ AI, a ‘smart’ system wouldn't even be desirable. We knew exactly how to make an unbeatable AI: pick a point about five ship lengths behindthe player, and fly to that spot as directly and single-mindedly as possible. This AI existed for testing purposes, but was too boring to use in the game, even for a ‘hard’ boss fight. That’s the smartest AI possible, and doesn’t take complicated algorithms at all. Any effort to create a ‘smart’ AI would either be flawed, or would succeed and arrive at that same unbeatable AI through a more time-consuming and expensive coding path. The role of the AI in computer games is to make the player feel accomplished, and I think the WC1 AI did that very well. AI programming should focus on making the AI do interesting things that look smart, to make the player feel smart. So I’d like to believe that people generally said ‘let’s improve the AI,’ and I at the time said ‘nah, that's not how this works’ and we spent our efforts making the AI look flashier and more fun.

A lot less air combat in WWI, wasn't there? I'm no historian but I thought the original shots of the X-Wings breaking off one-by-one to attack the Death Star was supposed to evoke imagery of WWII aircraft making their attack runs.
The Death Star sequence in A New Hope draws a lot from a specific Second World War movie, 633 Squadron. The movie "stars" de Havilland Mosquitos making precise but very risky attacks, including flying down a fjord. Neither the movie nor the real world missions that inspired it were typical of aircraft operations in the Second World War, or any other war.

You can find several edited clips with highlights of the aerial sequences in the movie, like this one. Or see audio from A New Hope with scenes from 633 Squadron mixed and matched to fit. Strike Commander's Grand Canyon missions pretty much complete a circle here.

The Wing Commander developers quite sensibly borrowed from whichever wars and war movies inspired them. As xEnd3r notes, the turrets in the Broadsword owe a lot to the B-17 and B-24 and their use in the WW2 European theatre. The torpedoes themselves are WW2 Pacific, air-launched torpedoes not seeing much use before or sense. But some pieces do come from the First World War, like the colourful enemy aces with their custom fighters evoking the Red Baron.

Interesting anecdote about Angel and Bluehair's coupling coming from the fans. I played WC2 before WC1 - at the start Angel almost seems like she's lecturing Bluehair (and Maniac as fellow rookie pilot couldn't stand that), but I think the closest connection they had was when Bluehair was consoling Angel after Bossman sacrificed himself to let her retreat to safety. Maybe that wasn't intended as a 'romantic' moment, but I coming from WC2 to WC1 I could see that as perhaps the start of a connection between them as more than just friends/comrades.
Both Angel and Bluehair speak quite differently in WC1:SM2, where Bossman dies. According to the book "Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide," they were already planning WC2 while writing that second expansion, so introduced a lot of characters and plot points they planned to use in the sequel. Most obviously, they brought in Jazz and his questions about Goddard. I found it quite jarring when Bluehair became talkative in bar conversations and displayed a character of his own. In WC1 and WC1:SM1, he only speaks up in debriefings. But it did help ease the progression into WC2.
 
Both Angel and Bluehair speak quite differently in WC1:SM2, where Bossman dies. According to the book "Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide," they were already planning WC2 while writing that second expansion, so introduced a lot of characters and plot points they planned to use in the sequel. Most obviously, they brought in Jazz and his questions about Goddard. I found it quite jarring when Bluehair became talkative in bar conversations and displayed a character of his own. In WC1 and WC1:SM1, he only speaks up in debriefings. But it did help ease the progression into WC2.

That can be explained this way: Ellen Beeman was the writer of both WC1 SM and director of SM2. WC2 preproduction started when SM was completed and SM2 was in development. When Siobhan started to write the first page of WC2, Ellen started surfing the forums to check players feelings about WC and discovered the hypothesis many fans made about a romance with Bluehair. So they decided to put that in WC2 story and Ellen was able to fit some reference in SM2 to pave the way for the second episode of the upcoming game.
I think I'll write Ellen a mail to ask for more information :)
 
I think I'll write Ellen a mail to ask for more information :)
I don't think there's any more information to ask for. The two books ("Through the Moongate" and "Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide") show that the sequence of events was exactly as you suggest.

I am concerned about this paragraph from "Through the Moongate":
"In terms of technology, the WC1 graphics engine had a feature we hadn't taken advantage of, the ability to ramp the brightness of a sprite up to white or down to black. We didn't have alpha blending or transparency, but against the backdrop of space, a fully-blacked-out ship sprite looked like it was cloaked. Furthermore, since the background color of space in Wing Commander is dark blue (pretty sure it was R0G0B3), a pure-black sprite actually stands out just slightly, making it extremely difficult but not completely impossible to see. This was clearly something worth exploring as a new game mechanic. Stealth fighter technology was bleeding-edge in the late ‘80s–the stuff of credible rumors but shrouded in secrecy and conjecture. That, plus the fact that I was a hard-core Trekkie, made for a short leap to giving the Kilrathi stealth fighters."
I think someone on this site would have noticed stealth fighter silhouettes if these really happened. But they don't. I captured video of a Strakha cloaking and decloaking.
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Let's enhance that just to be sure.
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decloak-brightened-2.png


Strakhas do appear dimmed before the fade into view during the WC2 opening cinematic. But this is pre-rendered, and definitely not what Siobhan is talking about when she discussed the capabilities of the WC1 graphics engine. But 1992 was a long time ago, and there's still a lot of interesting material in the book.
wc2-cinematic-decloak-1.png
wc2-cinematic-decloak-2.png
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But the cinematic was powered by the same engine (so we are sure it was capable of doing it).
Maybe somewhere in development, they decided for some reason to avoid ramping up and down the brightness of the sprite and simply unload and load it (maybe framerate issues?)
 
Both Angel and Bluehair speak quite differently in WC1:SM2, where Bossman dies. According to the book "Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide," they were already planning WC2 while writing that second expansion, so introduced a lot of characters and plot points they planned to use in the sequel. Most obviously, they brought in Jazz and his questions about Goddard. I found it quite jarring when Bluehair became talkative in bar conversations and displayed a character of his own. In WC1 and WC1:SM1, he only speaks up in debriefings. But it did help ease the progression into WC2.
I forgot that SM2 was written basically around the same time as WC2. So yes, that scene together with Jazz and Doomsday's appearances obviously tied in with WC2 in mind.

And yes, Bluehair was very much the silent protagonist early on but even in the original Vega campaign he does say a few words. Among the memorable scenes is when Bluehair asks Halcyon about what to do with Maniac should he disobey orders. (Guns. Save missiles for important targets...)
 
Ellen answer:

"We were still in very early planning stages on Wing Commander II when I was writing SM1. At that point we all knew WC was going to be a hit, though I don't think anyone predicted just how well it would sell. I was working on WC: SM1 when I first discovered in the online forums just how much the players had "filled in the gaps" in the WC storyline, imagining relationships between the characters that didn't actually exist in the storyline, such as Angel's romantic interest in the player character. So when I started writing SM2, yes, we had already decided to include that romance as part of the storyline of WC2. Overall, there was a lot of groundwork for WC2 that I set up in SM2, most notably the Jazz storyline, which retrofit pretty well with the backstory of SM1, the Kilrathi destruction of Goddard.

With regard to Bluehair speaking more in SM2... yes, that was by design. I had explained to Chris that the player character had to have a speaking role, if we were really going to fulfill upon the potential of the storytelling in the game. SM2 was a lot of me experimenting with what the current engine could handle in terms of combat missions and storytelling, and determining what engine changes we needed for WC2. SM2 was my first project that I directed for Origin, so I had a lot of freedom to explore more with the storyline. In retrospect, that was a rather funny moment of my life... I was hired at Origin purely as a writer, based on my television experience, but after I'd only been there for six weeks, Dallas and the other executives apparently realized that I also was a veteran software project manager. And they assigned me to manage to the mission disk projects on an ongoing basis.

SO1 and SO2 were especially fun to work on. For Secret Missions 1 and 2, I was only allowed a tiny amount of additional artist time. In retrospect, it was kind of fortunate that the executives told us that WC2 had to ship on no more than eight 3.5" disks, because that meant there was so much terrific art and code that we could then ship with the Special Operations mission packs. "
 
Purely from a story and character perspective (and even perhaps even generally) WC2 is probably my favourite - sounds like Ellen is largely to thank for that.

If I had played WC1 first and then WC2 I suppose I might have found Bluehair's character in the latter quite a change even with the build-up in SM2. In WC1 he didn't seem to have any strong opinions but that befitted a new pilot on his first tour of duty. In WC2 he was a lot more head-strong and conflicted with characters such as Tolwyn and Stingray. Of course, a ten-year stint in a backwater assignment as unjust punishment is probably enough to wind up anyone in wanting to seek redemption and prove him/herself.
 
Hey, great read in the chapter and this thead! It's very cool to read such indepth stories about WC2. It really shows again what a great game it is. So many so fond memories. I'm getting all nostalgic - they don't make gams like that anymore ;-).

Edit: And I agree with Wedge: for me, the bombing runs paid out well enough their investment. I did not like flying the Broadsword but I like the torpedo runs. And it sure gave a very particular feeling. But to use the turrets effectively, torpedo lock would have had to be maintained while switching to the turret. But normally, you just destroyed all fighters before going after the cap ship anyway.
 
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