Wing Commander Successor
- Thread starter Dahan
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Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I'd probably have liked Secret Weapons Over Normandy if it weren't for the name. SWotL was one of the single greatest games ever made -- SWON is the game you hide behind your copy of the Mary Kate & Ashley driving game because you're too embarassed to admit to anyone that you enjoy it. That disconnect was extremely disappointing
Actually, I find the fact that there's a whole genre of FPS' and flight non-sims that are Fantastic World War II Tales without consciously being based on old pulp magazine stories very unfortunate.
Yours Truly,
LOAF, who has single handedly stormed far, far too many U-Boats to make the concept probable.
And why the heck is every 'historic' FPS based on World War II or Vietnam? Somebody needs to make crazy improbable Civil War and Great War games.
Actually, I find the fact that there's a whole genre of FPS' and flight non-sims that are Fantastic World War II Tales without consciously being based on old pulp magazine stories very unfortunate.
Yours Truly,
LOAF, who has single handedly stormed far, far too many U-Boats to make the concept probable.
And why the heck is every 'historic' FPS based on World War II or Vietnam? Somebody needs to make crazy improbable Civil War and Great War games.
Nomad Terror
Rear Admiral
I really enjoyed Red Baron back in the day.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Yeah, there's far too many of them. I'm waiting impatiently for the market to reach saturation point - because surely, no matter how much the graphics and AI improve between one WWII FPS and the next, sooner or later people are gonna get tired of having to play the same damn scenarios over and over again.Bandit LOAF said:
...I hope.
Because all the kids can remember going to see saving private ryan and platoon. Theres a few mods for the original HL that use the concepts you just suggested. The Trenches is good when your playing f*cking huge 16-16 or 32-32 langames but most small net games just gets sucky. Theres a revolutionary mod too - Insurection 1776 or some such. Havent played it but looks awesome.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
No, because I got the constant feeling that SWON was taking itself seriously, and was simply so ridiculous that it seemed to the player (viewer? reader?) like a pulp magazine. I felt like the game itself wasnt in on the joke - SWoN seemed to be doing its dardnest to figure out a legitimate reason why your character would fight in every battle of World War II and also fly all kinds of secret planes
There was no actual dashing romantic aspect to the game... it somehow managed to imply that it was taking its history seriously. Even SWoTL, which name aside really was a serious game, managed to have a beautiful parody of a 1940s magazine for its cover art -- a sky full of Nazi flying wings! SWON, on the other hand had... what, a high resolution 3D rendering of a P-38?
Delance
Victory, you say?
Bandit LOAF said:
Crazy and improbable they can. A "historic" FPS will be much harder, due to the way both wars were fought. There's some room to free-form combat on WWII and Vietnam. A Great War FPS would be sitting on a trench all day being bombed at, running like crazy against a wall of machine-guns, being left wounded at the no-man's land. A Civil War FPS would require the player to walk in formation, what would be really, really hard to accomplish, unless it's some for of rail shooter.
LeHah
212 Squadron - "The Old Man's Eyes And Ears"
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't know - the 'nose art' and the 'journal entries' were pretty pulp in their construction. I'm not saying that the game is amazingly great - its a fun rental - but perhaps I knew enough not to take it seriously, considering a lot of the crew was from the first two Medal Of Honor games from EA.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
I don't think a Civil War FPS would require the player to walk in formation at all. Consider that just about every FPS today tries to find an excuse to have multiple gameplay types - you know, the way Call of Duty kept coming up with crazier and crazier reasons to put you in a car, and finally just gave up on any kind of reason and transferred you from the infantry to... a tank batallion. Under these circumstances, I very much doubt that anybody would even consider making a Civil War FPS that doesn't involve horses, carriages, and top secret missions to steal a Confederate submarine from dockDelance said:
.The same goes for WWI. Trench warfare a problem? Well, send the player off on some special mission to start a native uprising against the British (hey, why not? It's not taboo to play Germans in WWI) in the middle of Africa. Failing that, there's also numerous theatres of operations in the middle east and on the eastern front, all involving precious little trench warfare, but plenty of horses, camels, and other assorted craziness.
Besides, even trench warfare could be done - just make sure the player is trying to storm a portion of the trench where the enemy machine guns had been taken out by artillery or something along those lines.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I have not, as of yet, played a World War II game that's realistic, though.
Many start of well, with impressive re-enactments of battles (if I had a dollar for every game in the last five years that had me storm the beaches at Normandy, I would be a wealthy man.)
Invariably, however, it falls back to an ordinary FPS -- you have to sneak into the German base single handedly to capture the secret airplane, you have to capture a U-Boat by yourself, you have to drive an abandoned tank up to the front line and then single handedly man an AA-gun to shoot down all the bombers attacking before you hop into a convenient P-51 and shoot down a hundred Messerschmitts, etc.
There've been some fantastic mass combat scenarios in recent games. There's an awesome 'holding the line' mission in Ghost Recon 2 (an otherwise unremarkable game) where the X-Box!Live gang can all man gun positions and hold off waves of enemy troops.
If you mate that with the DooM III concept (the ostensible 'psychological' shooter) you could make a pretty great World War I trench warfare game.
It'd be this neat mix of building up tension and then going fast into a the combat environment. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting EVERYBODY OVER THE HILL GO GO GO. No time to sit there and pick out targets like an ordinary FPS, you have to keep moving forward if you're dead. There's all kinds of concepts to mate with that -- parts where you'd have to hit your gas mask key really fast, and that'd obscure your view for the next battle... there'd be missions where you had to stop enemy tanks and take artillery positions against airplanes and such.
I don't think a Civil War game would involve marching information at all -- that's earlier stuff. It'd be a lot of running charges, and lots of excuses for the kind of now-improbable close fighting that FPS designers love. There'd be cavalry battles and missions where you're acting more independantly as a skirmisher or a scout or a spy... lots of great stuff that fits right into the average FPS mold -- but also you get to have some color instead of lots and lots of green tanks and men.
powell99
Aviation Junkie
This is why I love Operation Flashpoint. They have some awsome mods. They have the War for Independence, Civil War, WWI (one of my favorites). I also like the fact that when you play the game you dont run at the enemy and take tons of shots from an MG-42 and you are okay.Bandit LOAF said:
On an another note SWON was a dissapointment. I was looking for a real flight sim. Not an arcade game. I agree it does take its self to seriously as well.
Death
gh0d (Administrator)
Speaking of WW2-based FPSes, am I just missing something (entirely possible), or do they all seem to focus on the European front? I mean, yeah, it's much easier to sell blowing up Nazis than such destruction done to any particular ethnic group (which may at least partly explain why the Arabs involved with the nuke plot in the book Sum of All Fears were changed to the Nazis of the movie version), but there was more to WW2 than just Europe.
powell99
Aviation Junkie
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault takes place in the PTO. The game also is tons of fun and is more realistic and other series, well of course untill you, a marine, winds up flying an SBD and you destroy an Airbase, what seems like shotting down 100 Zeroes and you sink an Aircraft Carrier. I also forgot when you shootdown +80 planes at Pearl Harbor. Tarawa was pretty bad as well. Well Makin and Guadalcanal are all pretty good. Most of Guadalcanal seems like a never ending patrol. But it shows the less glamourous parts of WWII. However, not all WWII FPS are devoid of realism, though most are. I played version of the Batle of Caen and Market Garden for Operation Flashpoint. They were pretty fun. It took me a good couple of days to do Caen and a month or two to complete Market Garden (I was the British).
WWII Online (Now called Battleground Europe) is amazing. I find flying to be the games highlight. (Shooting down 110s and 109s in a Hurricane is the most fun possible). However, tank combat and fighting as an infantryman are both very fun. Everyonce and a while people take advantage of an exploit but for the most part it stays very realistic.
WWII Online (Now called Battleground Europe) is amazing. I find flying to be the games highlight. (Shooting down 110s and 109s in a Hurricane is the most fun possible). However, tank combat and fighting as an infantryman are both very fun. Everyonce and a while people take advantage of an exploit but for the most part it stays very realistic.
Bandit LOAF said:
You should try out Brother in Arms and it's sequel. They're probably the most realistic WWII FPSs ever made. You've got squads and overhead maps, the whole sha-bang. Heck, I didn't like it because it was so realistic.
WWII Online still exists? I thought it went under after a few months.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Yeah, it looks like fun. I'm sans X-Box right now, but it would be a good game to play over Christmas break.
Well, if there's a bright center to what I meant, that would be the point farthest from it.
You are missing some, but moreover you're onto something. Japan is a huge giant market for video games... so developers shy away from having the Japanese as the enemies. Heh, and look at StarLancer -- it's supposed to be World War II in space... but conveniently the video gaming loving Japanese have been replaced by the Russians, where there's practically no legitimate market for games.
It's certainly not an absolute - there's plenty of Pacific War games... but I'd wager it's also the reason there's so *many* European games.
Mjr. Whoopass
<FONT color=lightblue><B>I was going to say someth
I agree with all the points you made about Starlancer in your post- more and better character interaction, etc., etc.. Starlancer on the Sega Dreamcast is the best space fighter combat game I've played as far as the responsiveness of the controls and the fluidity of the graphics during combat. The rumble and shaking of the ship as you hit afterburners made you feel like you were hauling. They did a good job with the capship battles too. You could get chewed up by the Kurgens and some of the other capship guns if you didn't watch it. Crashing into the capships at great enough speed would destroy you, which I thought was a bit more realistic and challenging. The Torp chasing was really tedius.Maj.Striker said:
Absolutely, that game rocked! That was the first flight game that I was ever hooked on. I spent complete days on that game and must have completed several complete campaigns (from 1914 (or was it 15?)-1918). That's a game that didn't have any character dialogue but that was still alot of fun and that I remember with fond feelings similar to the WC games. Being able to request transfers to different aerodromes once you have enough kills and a high enough rank. Flying missions with famous aces, randomly running into a brightly colored plane with a talented enemy pilot and finding out what ace it was. Getting challenged by famous aces to meet in certain locations- Immelman was honorable and met you there alone, but I remember accepting a different ace's challenge and having a TON of enemy fighters try to jump me. Getting medals, personalizing your plane when you become a top ace, etc. etc... GREAT game! If a flight sim could combine those aspects with the things that made Wing Commander great, that game could rule as a worthy successor to the WC series.Nomad Terror said: