Digital Nightfall on 19/8/2010 at 19:22

---

Ultima isn't the only Origin property to get some fan-made gaming attention. A game called Wing Commander: Darkest Dawn just got a cinematic/gameplay trailer.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyVPcHerREw)
(http://www.wcsaga.com/)

Unlike last year's Wing Commander Standoff, a Mod for the Prophecy engine'd title "Secret Ops," this game is built on Freespace 2's source code. So while it may not have that authentic, retro "wc" feel, the devs probably had alot more design freedom. As cool as Standoff was, the game was probably geared toward folks who have been playing Wing Commander non-stop for the past twenty years. The extreme difficulty combined with plenty of crash errors meant I didn't play it for more than a few missions. Hopefully Darkest Dawn won't have those issues!

Considering that EA seems cool with these Ultima and Wing Commander remakes and mods for other games... I wonder why a System Shock remake or fan-game using Source of the UDK is considered out of the question. Is the permission of Garriott or Roberts really that powerful?

icemann on 20/8/2010 at 04:32

---

Absolutely loved the wing commander games back in the day. Hope this turns out to be good.

demagogue on 8/4/2012 at 17:19

---

I'm resurrecting this thread to point out that WC: DD has been released!
(http://wcsaga.com/downloads/files/download/releases-darkest-dawn-setup-zip.html) download page (3GB)

Built on the open source Freespace 2 engine, it's cheap as free to download and play. It advertises itself as one of the most ambitious and largest fan-made games, and looking at it I wouldn't doubt it. I love this genre and loved the original Wing Commander series, so this will be going into my queue of games to play.

Tomi on 24/3/2013 at 16:49

---

So, has anyone else played this?

I just finished the Wing Commander Saga campaign the other weekend, and I got to say that it turned out to be quite a positive surprise after a not so promising beginning. The short prologue campaign, which was more like a tutorial, had all those really long readable mission briefings and intervals (and it didn't help that they used some horrible font that was hard to read), and the missions themselves weren't anything that special either... I was ready to give up at that point already, but luckily the main campaign is a lot better.

The ultra long readables are gone and replaced by simple briefing videos in the main campaign. The briefing videos are very simple indeed, but they deliver the story well enough and you get at least a vague idea of what's going on and what you should be doing in the following mission. I found the game really pretty, but since this is the first space sim that I've played for more than ten years, it might look crap in someone else's opinion. :p Some of the voice actors aren't that great, but all in all it's pretty impressive for a fan-made campaign.

I played the game on my gamepad and I thought it worked quite well. Don't let the amount of all the key bindings and different controls put you off, you're only gonna need a very small part of those, and I was able to bind all the important ones on my gamepad. There are a lot of keys for radio communication for example, but you're only really going to need those in precisely one mission (out of ~50 missions in the game)... the only mission in the game where you're the wing leader, as far as I know! And those who are expecting a realistic space sim might want to skip this game altogether, because the controls (and the physics) are very arcade in general... maybe a bit too arcade at times.

Anyway, my biggest complaint about the game is the difficulty level... I played the game in normal difficulty because I kept reading that the two harder levels are insanely hard, but for the most part of the game I had no trouble at all. The Kilrathi light fighters didn't pose any threat at all, their laser cannons (or whatever) seemed to be so weak that they could have kept shooting at me all day long and my ship would be just fine. There were missions where I destroyed more than 50 enemy fighters with barely getting a scratch on mine, and I found that a little annoying. It was only the bigger fighters that carried missiles that were able to cause some trouble, and even then there had to be like a dozen of them attacking me at the same time. Now, I know that this probably sounds like I'm pretending to be some veteran space ace here, but I can assure you that I'm not. :p

But then there were those escort missions... Actually, most of them were pretty good, but as always with Wing Commander games, the escort missions provided some of the most frustrating moments in this game. For example there was this one mission where at first you have to destroy a wave after wave of enemy fighters, and that goes on for like fifteen minutes or so... Then, out of the blue, someone on the radio says something about torpedoes... If you're not paying attention in the middle of the combat, well, tough luck - the torpedoes hit your capital ship and it's game over. Fair enough. But even if you are paying attention, it's worth mentioning that those torpedoes are some invisible stealth torpedoes, and they only appear on your radar for a few seconds, so it's very unlikely that you are able to intercept those unless you know exactly what to do and where you're supposed to be. It took me a few tries to get it right, but I don't really enjoy that sort of a challenge. :sweat:

However, there were a few really great challenges too, and some of the huge space battles are pretty cool looking too. The final mission of the campaign provided one of the most epic moments of my gaming history. After half an hour of intense fighting my hull damage was at 99% so that the next hit would have been the end of me, but I somehow managed to survive until the end, and the final plot twist (that I'm not going to spoil here) made it all even more exciting. Too bad that the damage modeling isn't as good as in the old Wing Commander games where panels in your cockpit were blown up and there were wires hanging out, your radar or weapons stopped functioning, and there were those sirens blaring when you were taking intense fire... In this game your ship functions pretty much perfectly and you won't notice a thing until the hull damage reaches 100% and you blow up.

There are a few quite memorable plot twists, but apart from that there's not much of a story. The game doesn't really reward you either, no matter how well you play. Even if you shoot down 100 Kilrathi fighters in a mission, you just get a pat on your back and a "well done boys!" in the mission debriefing, but I don't think it even matters how well you play as long as the mission objectives are done.


TLDR; a pretty decent arcade space sim with an occasionally frustrating difficulty level.