The Many Ship Selection Screens of Wing Commander 3 (April 27, 2024)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Let's compare the Wing Commander 3 ship selection screen across ports! Here's the PC/Mac, 3DO (two screens instead of one) and PlayStation versions of the Arrow...





Three Hellcats V, primed, prepped, etc.





Thunderbolt!





The Longbow is largely cut from the 3DO version; it only appears as an option very rarely! (I found it in Delius 3, will have to chart it all out someday soon.)





And the mighty Excalibur:





There's an Easter egg in the PC version: if you hit ALT-S at this screen then it'll display specifications over the ships. None of the lore mentioned here matches anything else!





One discovery from the 3DO version is that the Hellcat, Thunderbolt and the Excalibur get six mines per hardpoint! But the mostly absent Longbow doesn't. The Thunderbolt mine loadout is the default for the Torgo 2 minelaying mission even though you don't actually use them.





The PC version assigns you a custom Longbow loadout for Torgo 2 and you DO need the mines. (It oddly also gives you the option of using a Thunderbolt that can't carry enough mines to win the mission.)





And custom Excalibur loadouts for the T-bomb runs at Hyperion and Kilrah, respectively! I need to play through the PSX version with an emulator to grab those versions, but they're very similar to the PC.





All the weapons options, minus the cloak and t-bomb on the PSX (they're not visible in the 3DO). Interesting that the 3DO changes the Leech into the Dumb Fire and the Dumb Fire into the Vampire.





And we can't forget the card game! Weapons from the CTCG as adapted by artist and swordfighter Nicole Harsch! The Friend or Foe missile here is the Heat Seeker in the games (insert the 'hope someone got fired for that one' screenshot here).





More systems from the card game.





It's interesting that each version uses the weapons selection to sneak in little bits of lore (and a Star Trek joke in one of the cards).




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Original update published on April 27, 2024
 
Those service dates displayed there are one of the things that convinces me that the game was supposed to have another multi-year time jump like between WC1 and WC2 instead of the one year difference that the eventual game had.
 
Those service dates displayed there are one of the things that convinces me that the game was supposed to have another multi-year time jump like between WC1 and WC2 instead of the one year difference that the eventual game had.

Yeah, that's absolutely what happened. So much of the 'lore' aspect we pour over didn't really matter to the actual game... there are no dates or hard references... by the time you got to the FMV games it was rare for the scripts to even have in-universe terms like the names of enemy ships. It got added at the end of the process by the publications group.

So the folks that actually produced the game certainly had this 'about ten years later' time jump in mind but since that didn't show up anywhere in the narrative it never got picked up. (The timeline gets further squashed by the similar post facto decision to have Wing Commander II go until 2667 instead of 2665 which pushes a bunch of things in odd directions and ends up popping the sausage casing a little at the edges.)
 
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