Wing Commander and Ultima are making comebacks in surprise Origin revival

EA has not only greenlit a full remaster of retro space sim Wing Commander 3, but it’s also returning the Ultima series of role-playing games to its original creator.

Nowadays, video game director Chris Roberts is most associated with Star Citizen, which is famous for being the most expensive video game ever made, as well as alleged mismanagement at studio Cloud Imperium Games and a cringe inducing gameplay livestream that went viral in August.

It’s a shame, as before that Roberts was best known for creating the highly influential Wing Commander series of space combat simulators, which Star Citizen is technically a spiritual successor to.

The series has long since faded from the public eye, especially now that it’s under the control of EA, but in an unexpected turn of events, Wing Commander is set to make something of a comeback via a remaster of the third entry.

Over the weekend, EA producer Jim Vessella attended the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, where he ran a panel detailing his game preservation efforts within the company.

These efforts include a newly announced remaster of 1994’s Wing Commander 3: Heart Of The Tiger, which was the first entry in the series to include full motion video (FMV) cut scenes, making it almost more of an interactive movie at times.

It starred several big name movie actors, including Malcom McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson, and, most significantly, Luke Skywalker himself Mark Hamill, as the lead protagonist.

Since Vessella was able to locate the source tapes, containing these FMV scenes, the remaster will not only include the original versions but also upscaled video, allowing them to be viewed in much higher quality.

Gameplay will also run at 60 frames per second, and controller support will be included. So far, it sounds like the remaster will only be available on PC, although back in the day the only console versions were on the 3DO and, two years after launch, a port on the original PlayStation.

The remaster will also feature ‘Kilrathi Saga Integration’, which makes it sound like it will include the first two Wing Commander games. The Kilrathi Saga was a trilogy of games, detailing a war between Earth and the cat-like Kilrathi aliens.

There’s no mention of a release date, but while the remaster is labelled as the 30th Anniversary Edition, that’s already inaccurate as the game is 32 years old right now.

Coincidentally, the announcement comes shortly after news that the Ultima series of role-playing games could be making a return too. We say coincidentally because Wing Commander and Ultima were the biggest releases of Texas publisher and developer Origin Systems.

Origin was acquired by EA in 1992, and although it was shut down in 2004, Wing Commander and Ultima have remained EA properties, although they’ve seen only a very few new releases in the last couple of decades.

The last Wing Commander game was in 2007 and technically there was a new Ultima as recently as 2018. The latter wasn’t published by EA though, who has never made any big-budget entries for either franchise, making the purchase of Origin completely pointless.

Now that EA has new owners eager to capitalise on its most lucrative franchises though, it may have caused them to think again. Although the recent buyout has saddled EA with so much debt that, according to The Wall Street Journal, it’s hurting the company’s credit profile.

However, the push for a new Ultima is not being led by EA but by creator Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott, who founded Origin with his father and brother. He revealed in a recent YouTube interview that because of US copyright law, he is legally allowed to reclaim the rights to Ultima 35 years after he sold them to EA.

If all goes as planned, Garriott will get full control of Ultima again in 2027, which means potential re-releases of the older games or even an entirely new one. He’s even said he’ll ask EA if they want to be involved.

‘I’ve got most of a year to figure out what that means. But at the very least, it means I could re-release the earlier Ultimas, but it also means I could sequel them. And the point is I’m going to have control again of the future of my seminal product line,’ explained Garriott.

Ultima was one of the very first commercially released computer role-playing games and not only hugely influential in the West but, along with Wizardry, the foundation for modern Japanese role-players as well.

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