GOG Talks Space Sims Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

centaurianmudpig spotted a new PlaySF interview with the folks at GOG.com. They discuss the state of the space combat genre and the possibility of releasing expansion packs for Wing Commander games. The GOG spokesperson cites ongoing licensing negotiations as a possible reason for their continued delay, but we can't wait!

PSF: GOG.com has a number of classic space and sci-fi games available, but do you think that the reason games such as FreeSpace are successful on GOG is because almost no big studios are making those kinds of games anymore? Why do you think that is?

Trevor Longino: There are a few reasons why I think these games don’t get made anymore; market pressure and homogenization, how gamers play games, and how we get news about games.

This takes us to our next point: how gamers play games. The people who want to play games with fantastically complex control schemes (I recall games like TIE Fighter or MechWarrior 2, where I believe I used 20 keys on the keyboard, plus my joystick, to control the game) aren’t nearly as numerous as the people who want to sit on their couch, kick back, and play a game whose controls you can master in five minutes. Take a quick poll of your friends who call themselves gamers: how many own a joystick? The answer will very likely be “not many”. At some point we left behind the joystick for the dual thumbsticks, and it’s hard to make a game for a controlling device that even people who call themselves gamers don’t have any more.

PSF: The release of some old EA games has been particularly exciting, especially seeing Wing Commander and Syndicate again? But why no expansions or speech packs?

Trevor Longino: We’re working on the expansions and speech packs, but the rights are apparently very difficult to secure; progress is going very slowly, so while I won’t say “give up hope”, it won’t happen next week either.

Note that the GOG releases of Privateer and Wing Commander 2 do already include the speech packs. You can read the full interview here.

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