Wing Commander: Darkest Dawn — Fan-Made Goodness Reborn 83
MojoKid writes "Last week marked the launch of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn, a fan-built companion to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that's been in the making for the past ten years. It's a real labor of love. Now that the game is available, the question is, how good is it? "The game dropped on Thursday, I started playing Friday, and as of this writing (Sunday afternoon), my weekend chore list is gathering dust on the fridge. I've been too busy cursing my decision to chuck my Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 to notice. 'If I'd kept it just one more year I wouldn't have this problem,' I mutter, fingers splayed over the keyboard in a vain attempt to convince my Hellcat to bank like something other than a Centaurian Mud Pig. Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made game that's good enough to be worth paying for. Not only is it better than a lot of schlock companies expect you to pay for, it pays homage to its source material while improving on Wing Commander's classic gameplay and graphics."
Re:You got permission from EA? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they didn't. EA has been generally permissive (as in, not pursuing the small but extremely active community) for WC fan games throughout the years, but a Slashdot feature may change that. :\
Re:You got permission from EA? (Score:5, Interesting)
I also installed on Friday night, but have not done the literary "whatever" as seen in the article (I still shower on a regular basis, etc). Its a pretty good game.
They do not have permission from EA. They're kind of ignoring each other. Kind of like my relationship with Canada... They're a lot bigger than I am, but we don't talk much. That is why I hurried up and downloaded last week, "just in case"
Speaking of downloads, life sucks if you run windows. You cannot get this game by running "apt-get install wc-darkest-dawn". You have to visit all these slimy download sites where you have to wait and watch ads until you can download and unblock all scripting and flash so you can get infected. Supposedly there is a torrent... cool I'll go there and left click save and ... Oh noes... graphics art explosion fest... I can't get the blasted torrent file to torrent the darn game. And at least as of Friday there was no way to get to the torrent site and the goofy link wouldn't work with firefox. As I recall I got stuck at "push button to download torrent" or something like that. Lovely. I'm sure that after posting this tale of woe someone will provide a TPB link to it that "just works". That's the suffering of an early adopter... You get used to the idea that something "open" or "free" in the real computing world probably has easy to use mirrors instead of cruddy download sites but in the windows world its all about ad ladden ugly download sites. Ugh.
One thing I noticed was they have a non-traditionally large amount of text compared to recent games. The tutorial is probably the equivalent of a traditional sci fi short story. Nice. Enjoying it. The tutorial is well made and non-traditionally its complete and actually works, at least so far. Most commercial games seem to have a release goal to make the tutorial suck.
The voice acting is excellent. No obvious big names, they don't have the Rock or Lenord Nimoy. The gameplay is hacked up freespace, near as I can see. Since freespace was excellent, that means its very good. The graphics are fine. Nobody plays a game for more than 5 minutes because of the graphics anyway. I think it was optimized for a lower resolution than 1600x1200, but it still looks OK at my normal rez.
Re:You got permission from EA? (Score:5, Interesting)
They've also allowed Ultima remakes and such to use the Ultima trademark with permission if the remake doesn't look like it will compete with EA.
There was one project that was going to use a brand-new 3D engine that looked a little too impressive at the time (Ultima I Reborn or something like that) which EA squashed.
http://www.ultimaaiera.com/orphanage/ultima-1-a-legend-is-rebornera/ [ultimaaiera.com]
Re:Space combat games (Score:4, Interesting)
The best place they could have done this was in SWTOR for their space combat.
+1
I was very disappointed when space combat in SWTOR was not like X-wing or Tie Fighter. I figured that would be a gimme. They already own all of the IP and have developed the code. They could have just refreshed the graphics and called it a day. It would be ground breaking to have a "real" flight simulator / space combat game built into an MMO. It would be a nice distraction from questing / raiding.