GamesMaster Feature: Wing Commander IV - The Price of Freedom
5S05E10
Dominik interviews Tom Wilson & Mark Hamill
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is the fourth main game in the Wing Commander science fiction space combat simulator video game series, produced by Origin Systems and released by Electronic Arts for the PC in 1996 and the Sony PlayStation in 1997 (the game was also released on the North American PlayStation Network Store in 2009).
The first game set after the end of the Terran-Kilrathi War, Wing Commander IV depicts a galaxy in the midst of a chaotic transition, with human civilians, Kilrathi survivors and former soldiers on both sides attempting to restabilize their lives. A novelization, by William R. Forstchen and Ben Ohlander, was published on October 1, 1996.
Initially targeted for a December 1995 release (thus giving the game an aggressive 12-month development schedule), the game was ultimately released on February 12, 1996 for MS-DOS PCs. WCIV was produced on the then-unheard-of-for-a-video-game budget of US$12 million.[1] The majority of this budget went into the production of the game's full motion video scenes, which were shot on actual sets instead of a greenscreen and using 35mm film instead of digital capture.[2] The original MS-DOS edition shipped on six CD-ROMs.
Origin later released a native-client for Windows 95. The Windows client added a deinterlace-option to improve the appearance of the cutscenes, but was identical to the original MS-DOS game in all other respects. In 1997, a special DVD-ROM edition of the game was released. In this edition, the cutscene video was upgraded to full DVD quality (made possible due to the fact that the scenes were originally shot on film). As most PCs of the time were insufficiently powerful to play the MPEG2 DVD video, the game client relied on Windows 95's multimedia player to stream the video from DVD to a hardware decoder. This dependency on external hardware rendered the game unplayable outside Windows PCs equipped with the correct decoder board. Hence, the game was strategically bundled with DVD-ROM kits that included the necessary decoder hardware. Later, the gaming community developed fan-made patches to allow this version to play on more modern hardware where no hardware-based MPEG2 decoding was available (or necessary).[3] There was also a separate DVD release which lacked the enhanced video, and was hence playable on all PCs capable of playing the original CD-ROM release.
Unlike Wing Commander III, the PlayStation version of Wing Commander IV was not a direct port; much of the graphics were redone, the collision detection was modified, and the controls were simplified by making certain actions automated,[2] though a control scheme similar to that of the PC version is also an option.[4] In addition, in order to fit the game on four CDs (as compared to the six CDs of the PC version), some of the transitional FMVs were cut.[2] A 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version was announced to be in development but it was never released.[5][6] Likewise, a port for the Panasonic M2 was in the works by Origin Systems and slated to be one of the console's launch titles but never happened due to its eventual cancellation.[7][8]
On April 3, 2012, the DVD quality version of the game was made available as a digital download at Good Old Games.[9]
First lines of the WC4 source code as it became available to the WC community in 2012.[10][11]
Also in April 2012, the source code was handed to the game community by a former developer for the purpose of long-time preservation.[10]