Chris Roberts Wants To Do Another Wing Commander
Naturally, the Wing Commander CIC was all over this news, and I’m sure most of you have heard it by now as well. For those that haven’t, here’s the skinny: G4TV recently interviewed former Origin Systems producer Chris Roberts (the man behind the Wing Commander games). In the course of that interview, he expressed his desire not only to return to the world of game development…but to the Wing Commander series as well:
“I definitely want to do another Wing Commander, and I have a very specific vision for it,” Roberts said. “I’m looking at the games being made now and I go ‘Yeah, they’re really cool, and there’s some really great stuff,’ but I think I could come back and push the boundaries of cinematic storytelling again. I’m looking at some of the stuff that’s been done and it’s sort of, in my eyes anyway, falling short, and it’s not because of the technology. It’s falling short because of how it’s been done.”
“I made Wing Commander because it was the game I wanted to play,” Roberts told me. “I didn’t make Wing Commander because I said ‘Oh, this is something that’s going to sell a lot of units,’ or ‘there’s a gap in the marketplace,’ it was just ‘I want this experience.’ The time where I could feel like I’m ready to engage in something is always when I have a personal feeling that ‘Okay, I want to go and make a game that gives me this experience.’ I feel re-energized, and I think I can come back… and push forward parts of the industry in terms of narrative and cinematic storytelling.”
The full interview is available here.
What do you think, Dragons and Dragonettes? Do you think Chris Roberts can come surging back into the wide open world of cinematic game design and wow us all with another amazing title…maybe even something that continues the Wing Commander story?
Wing Commander Online.
Do it….
Please don’t.
I’d take a single player Wing Commander game with the same kind of cinematic storytelling the series was known for over any form of online Wing Commander.
I’d actually take a spiritual successor as well as long as it offers the same strong gameplay and storytelling.
Still it seems pretty clear Chris Roberts wants to get back into videogames with a vengeance… and that’s awesome news for the industry.
Would a big company make a single-player Wing Commander-like game with cinematic storytelling like Roberts would want to do these days? There are plenty of space games still being made or that were made in the past 5 years, but few of them remind people of Wing Commander.
There are plenty of space games (mostly Europeans even)… but none that are AAA games, and the norm seems to go more into the niche simulation gameplay like the X series, than the action packed (and clearly more mass market) Wing Commander kind of gameplay.
*If* Roberts could get an AAA budget for his game though, I see no reason why it couldn’t use the kind of cinematic storytelling Wing Commander was used too. Of course it wouldn’t use live action scenes, and most likely real time custscenes like Freelancer did, but that would work and cost less. And trully most AAA games nowadays offer cinematic storytelling of some sort, so there is no reason why a new Wing Commander game couldn’t be able to do so… if indeed he had the team and budget to do so.
Though arguably this could probably be done even on a smaller scale/budget – since Roberts mention the UE engine in this interview, image he does a space flight game with the UE3 engine: he could use the same engine for say allowing the player to move arround the ship and talk with the others pilots like you’d do in a RPG game without neceserrilly having every dialogue feels like a full blown movie scene.
That would work and would be very WC-ish.
I’ll hope!
If Chris Roberts wasn’t such a pussy he’d quit talking about it and just make it so. Is he living in his parent’s basement and forgot how to program? Shit…