Privateer SVGA

Yes, these are early mock up promo shots--Origin continued to use them in catalogs for years. The original hope was to use Strike Commander's 3D engine for Privateer, which is why the early concept stuff looks like this.
 
Great!

I had exactly this Magazine lying around for years.... that is until I threw out all my old magazines. (Mostly Powerplay as I recall).
We got pretty exited over these screenshots, but we could never believe the game would look THAT good! (But we hoped :) )

On a side note: "Erotik Report was not a game, but an actual 5 pages report about erotic in computer games - great for the kids we were ;)
 
On a side note: "Erotik Report was not a game, but an actual 5 pages report about erotic in computer games - great for the kids we were

Hah hah--in the United States we had the same thing with the advertisements for the erotic games in the back of the computer gaming magazines... :)
 
Yes, I remember that issue very well - both for the Priv and the "Erotik Report". I especially remember asking my older brother what "Harder, I'm coming softer" meant and how I surprised I was that he immediately knew what article I was reading... :eek:
 
I'm re-playing Privateer at the moment. Oh how I wish I had THIS game instead! How strange that they had the Strike commander engine lying around (or in development anyway) but went ahead and used the old 'sprite-on-a-box' engine instead...

I guess we make do with the Privateer remake huh. Ah well. Until Privateer 3/Online comes out. It's rumoured to be released along with Fast & The Furious XIII: Retirement Village Drift.
 
I both drooled and cried at the same time! Heh seriously though that looks AMAZING. I wish EA would revisit Privateer and make that a reality. Even now the screens look pretty decent.
 
I'm re-playing Privateer at the moment. Oh how I wish I had THIS game instead! How strange that they had the Strike commander engine lying around (or in development anyway) but went ahead and used the old 'sprite-on-a-box' engine instead...

It wasn't ready yet!

Strike Commander was a *very* expensive project and part of the reasoning for putting so much money into it was that the engine would immediately be available for several other games. The idea was that these games would start their production a few months later and pick up the engine when it was then scheduled to be finished. These games would have a much smaller price tag and Origin would have a steady revenue stream from them to make up for Strike Commander's massive budget (and they'd still be releasing top of the line games, since they'd be released a few months after Strike Commander using the same high tech engine)

Development of Privateer and another game, Phoenix Force, started in late 1991 with the expectation that RealSpace would be ready in a few months... but by the time they were supposed to get the engine it was clear that Strike Commander was nowhere near finished. Privateer was able to go back to engine used for the early Wing Commanders... but Phoenix Force, which was another airplane game in the same vein as Strike, couldn't and was cancelled.

(If you look at the 3D work done early on Privateer you'll see that it's all done with the Strike engine in mind--especially the cockpits, which were fully 3D to support Strike's 'moving head' mode.)

Amortizing the cost of Strike Commander is part of the reason Origin greenlit games like Pacific Strike, Wings of Glory and even Armada (and of course that's why it's the engine in Wing Commander III and IV, although that was part of the plan from the start...).

I guess we make do with the Privateer remake huh. Ah well. Until Privateer 3/Online comes out. It's rumoured to be released along with Fast & The Furious XIII: Retirement Village Drift.

Actually, some sort of funny old people driving game isn't the worst idea in history... :)
 
(If you look at the 3D work done early on Privateer you'll see that it's all done with the Strike engine in mind--especially the cockpits, which were fully 3D to support Strike's 'moving head' mode.)
...And that's the one thing I still don't understand - why didn't any subsequent WC games that used this engine incorporate head movement? It doesn't seem like it would have been a budget consideration (or would it?), so - a creative choice?[/QUOTE]
 
...And that's the one thing I still don't understand - why didn't any subsequent WC games that used this engine incorporate head movement? It doesn't seem like it would have been a budget consideration (or would it?), so - a creative choice?

I think that three things in particular killed the feature in the Wing games:

- The belief that the feature was a well meaning failure in Strike Commander. The common criticism (internally--and especially on the part of Chris Roberts) of Strike Commander was that it wasted a lot of effort on graphics when the end product simulated fast, ranged and mostly missile-based dogfights that didn't actually let you admire enemy planes. The idea that the slower and much more colorful World War I combat would take advantage of these features was a big part of the pitch for Wings of Glory. (I think they were looking for a much bigger reaction to features like this in Strike's reviews and when it was missing quantified the reaction this way.)

- The Wing Commander team falling out of love with cockpits. It was watching testers turn off cockpits as a matter of routine during the Armada testing process that convinced them that cockpit graphics would be a thing of the past... and you can tell that as early as Wing Commander III they were already rationalizing their reduction-and-eventual-removal.

- Just simple resource management. Wing Commander 3 was already a memory heavy game that needed to appeal to a very large audience to make back its budget... and it has to be one of those features that while *cool* was also a pretty easy cut to make to free up a load of memory.

All of this lead to an unfortunate belief I've seen among all the developers of those games--that people playing a Wing Commander game didn't care about the interface the same way serious 'sim fans did, they just wanted to blast aliens. In my mind it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that forgets the series' own roots. It's this situation where the need to build a less memory heavy game and the bad sample audience of Origin's own QA people's response to playing the game for the 100th time leads to a design choice that ended up sticking with the genre all the way to its grave.
 
Hmm, makes sense - however unfortunate it is that things went in that direction.

I remember personally I didn't much like the 3d cockpits, because the jump from the 2d art to 3d model was jarring - you had this great-looking 2d cockpit with readable instruments in front of you, and as soon as you turned your view, it turned ugly and unreadable. Still, that only made the feature a little less awesome.

I wish, I wish they had taken the effort to incorporate this feature into WCP. What with the game using 3d cockpits in any case, it would have been a relatively small feature to implement.
 
Yeah - though they're more really like struts (the Devastator is an exception).

Starlancer improved on it a little (the ships actually have yokes! - no VDUs, though)... and that's about it. Everyone since then has been moving sideways - Freelancer regressed back to the cockpit strut style of Prophecy and Mechwarrior 2, while Mechwarrior 3 and 4 essentially fiddled with the Starlancer-style. All of them paint the HUD information as an overlay, though, which is kind of a shame; Interstate '76 had a great full driver's seat view where you could look at your speedometer and weapons indicator and they'd jostle around in true virtual-cockpit fashion.

(Honorable mention goes to Crimson Skies, which had excellent and readable virtual cockpits which I only discovered halfway through the game).

Still, if you look at the fan work being done (from Standoff to Hostile Frontier to Freeworlds: Tides of War for Freelancer or Mechwarrior Living Legends), everyone seems to want to bring back cockpits, and it seems like the older the game the more impressive work is put into it. Some of the Freelancer stuff is really good, and while I don't think Hostile Frontier matches up to Standoff's cockpits, that's still a gigantic leap over a game that had *no cockpits at all*. Mechwarrior is actually one of the bigger offenders here - I feel like they should be doing something amazing in that regard considering that they have the most modern game engine to work with.

The promo for the new official Mechwarrior game had some nice cockpits - but publishers squabbling over ports means that it'll probably never be released.
 
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