Last Friday, I finished the last mission in the original Wing Commander campaign. (You can watch/read about that here.) Before I jump into the Secret Missions expansions this Friday, I want to do a little wrap-up of the original game, plus a few notes about what’s coming.
First, for a game that’s going to celebrate it’s 30th anniversary next year, Wing Commander holds up surprisingly well. A lot of that can be attributed to the branching campaign structure which provides a lot more flexibility and replay value than might otherwise be in a game like this. There were a few losing path missions which I don’t know that I ever saw prior to this playthrough.
I’d love to see EA do something to recognize the game’s milestone anniversary next year. A high res re-release would be amazing, but I’m not going to hold my breath. EA doesn’t seem to care about this IP anymore, beyond having the games all available on Origin and GOG.com. Which is something, at least.
One place where the game definitely shows its age is when there’s a lot of action happening on the screen. The way the game engine dealt with rendering too many things at a time was to cut out “unneccessary” objects. Usually this includes some asteroids/mines, but also often it includes player-fired projectiles. Not being able to fire your guns because the game engine can’t render any more mass driver projectiles is not fun, especially since it usually happens at a critical moment.
Obviously, back in the ‘90s, no one had ever heard of the term “DLC”. How would you download a multi-megabyte game like Wing Commander over the 300 baud modems of the day? But expansion packs, now those were a thing. Thanks to the financial success of Wing Commander, players would get a chance to fly off the T.C.S. Tiger’s Claw once again in Wing Commander: The Secret Missions (WC: TSM). That’s what I’ll be starting on Friday.
WC:TSM departs from Wing Commander’s branching campaign system in favor of a linear campaign. Losing a system will lead to a two mission retreat campaign. It also adds a number of new capital ship types for both Confederation and Kilrathi forces. We’ll show those off as we get there.
Another interesting quirk of the Secret Missions packs was that they included a character transfer application for players to keep playing their same pilot from the main campaign. This doesn’t change anything about the campaign as a whole, but does make it possible to mostly keep all of your ranks, medals, and kill counts between missions. Since there’s no way to save after the last mission, the ported pilot files are live as of the penultimate mission of each campaign.
Despite the technical challenges, I feel that the game is still very much worth playing. For me, personally, I played through the original campaign numerous times growing up. That contributed to my general confidence when playing these missions. However, my brothers and I never had the Secret Missions expansions, so these missions I’ve only played through once or twice once I acquired a copy of The Kilrathi Saga to play on my own PC in the late ‘90s. From here on out, things get a lot more challenging.