New Gamefaqs Poll feat. WC

[Bandit LOAF]

Who would have thought that Slashdot would cover a story about a giant company trademarking something. I'm sure their posters will be busy all night coming up with clever new comments about this topic.

 

[Falcon988]

Going off what LOAF said, realistically speaking I honest to god don't know if there's sufficient interest in the space sim genre right now for EA to do a serious relaunch of Wing Commander. My intuition says no.

I really do believe there's people at EA who would love to bring back Wing Commander but that's an expensive endeavor to do it well. Lots of financial risk and it seems, to me, like the market of the 'mainstream gamer' is today focused on MMOs, first/third person shooters, etc. And Tolkien inspired fantasy seems to be the fad right now instead of 'Star Warsy' sci-fi.

I'm pretty confident that we will see a full scale WC relaunch one day. There's just too many people who grew up with it and have lots of fond memories, and a lot of those people work in the VG industry. It's practically inevitable that a developer will say "Hey, I loved Wing Commander when I was little, wouldn't it be sweet to bring it back?" and start making it.

Space sims are a great genre. Lots of fun, lots of untapped potential. They'll make a comeback at some point and the moment they do we'll be seeing some fresh Wing Commander.

 

[Bar-None]

As sad as this is to say, I agree with Falcon. There isn't enough interest in the younger generations because they're just playing whatever gets shoved down their throats nowadays. I wonder when the last time someone under the age of 20 bought a joystick was.

God I feel old...

 

[Natreg]

Ummm... well, actually...

Seriously, I agree with your points, Crusader as an IP doesn't exist. It's in an even worse situation that WC - for several years after its release, until Dosbox became popular, it was just too much of a pain to get it running.

...But, what Crusader had (and I am fully aware that this is not in the least bit noteworthy to the general public, and for that reason, neither to the people making these decisions), is a really, really deep storyline. It was fantastic in that regard, just like every other Origin game of the time. This wasn't, strcitly speaking, something built into the game. In the mid-1990s, Origin could have made Space Invaders, and their writing department would throw in a manual that would make everyone think this Space Invaders had more depth than every other game in the universe (other Origin titles excepted). That's how it was with Crusader - it was a game about blowing stuff up, advertised as having nine different ways to kill people, but the people who wrote the manual turned it into a really great piece of (political) science fiction.

Exactly my thoughts. I really miss Origin game manuals (& cluebooks).

The ultima ones are among my favourites, but they did a lot of good ones. The wing commanders, the Knights of Legend. They knew how to add depth to their games.


About sequels, well Ultima's storyline did end, so if they relaunch it, it would be a new one.

Wing Commander, Crussader and System Shock storylines did not end, so those ones do deserve a sequel.

Of course the problerm with those is that a new game where you start in the middle of an already established storyline could be a bit more difficult to market than a completely new one.

The problem with Ultima is that the IP is inexorably linked to its figurehead, who is a crazy person. It's sort of an odd rock and a hard place situation - no one wants to see an Ultima X that *isn't* from Richard Garriott... and no one wants to play whatever Richard Garriott thinks is a good idea for Ultima X.

Well... not really. Have you played Lazarus? It's the remake of Ultima V, and it really has the Ultima feel there. If EA wanted to relaunch the Ultima series they should really look at how that game did things. Same for Wing Commander. I consider Standoff the game to follow in this case.

 

[Death]

Umm, if it's a remake of an old Ultima, then by design it's linked to RG, unless they're going the Privateer Remake route and slapping on a bunch of "wouldn't it be great if..." fanwanks that ignore what made the original great in the first place.

(I dunno either way. Ultima never really interested me, so remakes thereof get similarly limited interest.)

 

[Tarquinn]

I'm rather surprised that Road Rash has won that poll. (Not Ultima.) Never really paid much attention to the Road Rash series.

 

[Kaunisto]

I liked Road Rash on Sega Master System back when and that's surely not the best version there is.
Then again judging the PC version by demo, the 5 years more modern game had weaker playability.