CGR: Was it hard to decide to get rid of the Kilrathi? This is a war that a lot of us have been fighting for a lot of years.

Chris Roberts: I made a conscious decision with III to let you win the war. I would've felt rather silly saying, "Oh, well, just kidding. We'll bring 'em back in the fourth one." It wasn't a difficult decision for me. We blew their home planet up and everything. There wasn't much going back on that.

CGR: With the Kilrathi and Kilrah gone, was this a harder game to script? You didn't have the war to fall back on.

CR: I think the story's a little less black-and-white than the past Wing Commanders. In some ways that's kind of interesting and fun. A lot of stuff is a little more grey. Creatively, it's a little more fun to push the boundaries. I think there's some stuff in Wing IV that will hopefully make the player[s] think about what they're doing. Before there wasn't much - it was like, "Okay, I know what I'm doing, this is the right thing." It should be more involving that way.

CGR: Wing I, II and III make a nice trilogy. Is Wing IV the start of a new trilogy?

CR: It hasn't started out to be that way. Wing IV in itself is a pretty contained story line. There is no conscious effort to start a trilogy. I think you only end up thinking [something is] a trilogy by the time you get to the second or third of the games and you realize that you're going to do another one. Who knows? You could be asking me in two or three years and I could say, "Yeah, we're finishing up the second of two trilogies." Currently, we're not particularly planning on that.

CGR: But are you thinking about a Wing Commander V?

CR: To a certain extent. The next iteration of Wing Commander we are talking about [is] filming a movie at the same time as the footage for the game. Part of that involves the story line. One of the things we're going to do with the movie of Wing Commander is go back to the beginning of the war right when you come out of the academy. It's almost like Wing Commander I again with a lot more production value and a lot more interest. The technology is a lot different that it was five years ago and a couple years down the road it will be even more so. It'll be kind of fun to go back and tell it the way I could have told it if I'd had all the money and cool technology that we have now.

Of course, for a movie it's unfair for the audience - most people who will see the movie won't have played the game - it would be unfair to start them five episodes in.

CGR: Why the decision to go to the live sets this time?

CR: Several things. First off, there's a certain amount of depth of field and realism that you get with real sets. Also, moving the camera is just something you can't do with virtual sets very easily at all. When you've got a real set the actors can be in it, you can have lots of extras filling out the background. You can put the camera wherever you want. You don't have to have it preplanned. The actors have a set to interact with - it's much easier for them to get in the [proper] frame of mind. You can use the camera in cinematic ways to enhance the storytelling. You can't do this with virtual sets.

CGR: I would assume this also makes creating the actual cinematics easier since you don't have to composite.

CR: Yeah, it makes that a hell of a lot easier. You put a lot of work into building the sets, but once you've shot it, you've got it. You don't have to go back in and match up CG [computer graphics]. That's always a nightmare. We have quite a few shots like that in Wing IV, and those are always the shots that are a pain in the butt. The other thing is that if you've looked at the trailer, when people are in the Senate or in the canteen, there are a lot of people in there. There's depth. When you try and get that feeling with a CG virtual set, really it's just two guys against a greenscreen. Even though the virtual CG set gives the illusion of this huge room, it's very empty. If you look at virtual sets in computer games, even when they have big sets, it's one or two people in it. It feels empty, it doesn't feel lived in. That's something you can get on a real set.

The key is using the best tools for what you're trying to do. CG sets are useful in places like where you have a set you couldn't possibly build. In most cases, just for the general stuff, I'd rather use a real set because it gives you more flexibility.

CGR: Is this, after three or four games in this genre, still fun?

CR: For me, definitely. Mainly because I'm not going to be doing something unless it's new and different. I know when I'm working on one of these things, I'm looking to do things that I haven't done before and push the envelope, or else I wouldn't bother doing it because it would bore me. I'm not doing this really as a job, I'm doing this because I love to do it and make the games that I want to play.

This time around we had a lot of cool technology that we put together. It was the first time we'd integrated live action, in III. With IV, we had a bigger budget, knew the technology, knew what bits worked from III and what bits didn't work from III. This is really about crafting a better game and telling a better story. We really went to town to make sure the missions were more fun, there was a lot more strategy and thought to the missions. On top of that, the storytelling was a lot more integrated for the game play. There's a lot of stuff that's happening in the story that has a direct effect on missions. The story is a lot more ambitious, it's got a lot more depth.

The production value is equivalent to a feature film. The Wing III, I was very proud of [it] when we did it, and I thought it was the best interactive stuff I'd seen, but I couldn't hold it up next to a TV show or a feature. The stuff we've done for IV, I have no problem saying this looks as good as you're going to get visually.

CGR: Ive been told by some of the other people on the project that III was more of a technical breakthrough whereas IV is more an artistic breakthrough.

CR: That's totally it. We had a couple of technological [improvements]. We made the engine a little faster, we do digital music all the way through. The mission system is more complex, more stuff can happen and you have a lot more command and control over what your wingmen are doing. On the cinematic side we play back movies in 16-bit color Super-VGA in 16-bit stereo and Dolby surround. The visual quality is much higher and the textures are a lot better on the ships. So there are technological improvements, but it's not night and day. It's sort of tweaking and upgrading it. What everyone set out to do with this was sort of flex their creative chops a little more and hopefully do something that will involve and engross people more so than III did and more so than I and II did. I'm quite happy with what we've got together right now. I think it's going to be pretty damn impressive.

CGR: Will this series continue? Will there be a Wing Commander V?

CR: It depends on whether or not we're going to call the game we do with the movie Wing Commander V or not. We'll find out. There will be definitely another Wing Commander and we're working on the next installment of the Privateer series. It's not something that we're going to walk away from.

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