🚀 go-pugleaf

>Do you know "most professionals in the game industry"?  Can you read
>minds?

Well, I know a lot of professionals in the game industry and have a good idea
of what many of them think.  I think I'm quite competent to estimate what a
professional designer would think and have worked as one myself.

I'll bet I'm the only person on the board who was cold called by Origin and
offered a job.  On the other hand, when I interviewed at Ensemble, I ended up
not being hired, so I'm obviously not as wired in as I might think.

>what anyone other than Origin/EA treats it as is, to put it
>bluntly, irrelevant.

I think you are rather wrong there.  What you have proposed is a non-objective
theory of language nomination that is neither an accepted norm or a good
working model.

On the other hand, if you wish to say "Origin's last official statement can be
read to indicate that Secret Ops is a totally new game rather than an add-on
that creates Prophecy Gold (and completes the Prophecy product and project to
the end of the current plan)" I don't think there is too much disagreement.

Anyway, the entire area of space sims appears moribund and the Wing Commander
plot lines appear doomed to being left incomplete.  The last copy of the
complete plot for Prophecy that I was able to run down got deleted rather than
shared (by the time I ran it down it was already gone) and the designers
obviously had different ideas of where to go afterwards, from Blair showing up
in a "starwars" type bar to other approaches.

Freelancer was interesting, but had some serious design flaws -- though you can
play it without freeflight and see what the original designers intended.  But
it takes too much "real time" for simple tasks (such as flying between
systems), intentionally prevents players from loading up missions, has fewer
mission types than Privateer had (Privateer remains one of the great games in
the genre), and had half of the plot cut out of the game (only about half of
the scenarios made it to the final release -- in order to be released at all it
had to be a one CD project).

The "real" HUD, radar, etc. all ended up being scrapped (and the code tags are
gone -- unlike other disabled features -- it was one of the things pruned in
the quest for size control).

On the other hand, it does have a devoted mod community, the graphics are
pretty (though they take way too much in the way of resources to render when
you compare them to Wing Commander), and the multitude of factions is kind of
fun, though perhaps a little too overworked.

The whole "levels" concept for characters was really unnecessary, but I guess
made the game designers happy.

Anyway, have you seen Battlestar Galactica?  In many ways it makes me think
"This is what the Wing Commander Movie should have been like!"

The original was so horrid, I skipped the SciFi channel remake until some
friends really recommended it.  The twenty minutes I saw were really good.

Anyway....


Stephen
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