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WC3 featured an entirely new line of ships and fighters, abandoning the technology of Wing Commander and Wing Commander II. Terran craft were redesigned from "airplanes in space", while Kilrathi craft were totally redesigned into asymmetrical ships with prongs, barbs and fang-like surfaces. The new, blockier forms were made necessary by the then-primitive state of polygon graphics, as WC3 was released a few years before the first true 3D video cards and all 3D effects had to be calculated by the CPU.
The game made the transition from animated cut-scenes to full motion video, one of the first computer games to do so; it was frequently marketed as the world's first interactive movie. It pioneered the use of CGI backgrounds and greenscreen work; all sets were added digitally during post-production, nearly a decade before George Lucas would use the same tactic in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. A large number of branching ("interactive") conversations allow the player to choose what response his character will give; the choice may affect the other person's attitude towards your character, or even the morale of the entire crew. To act in these live action sequences, director Chris Roberts hired a formidable amount of talent, most notably Mark Hamill for the player character; the game's budget was the then unheard-of sum of USD $4 million, making it the most expensive game produced at the time. As such movie content consumes a large amount of data storage, the game was packaged on four CD-ROMs instead of floppy disks, another emerging technology at that point.
The protagonist of the previous two games was officially assigned a name in WC3, Colonel Christopher Blair (played by Hamill). As the man giving the orders, Blair often gets to choose what ship he will fly, what missiles it will carry, and what wingman (wingmen) he will take with him. As in WC1, some wingmen can be killed permanently in combat. Blair's call sign remained customizable until the future Wing Commander title Wing Commander: Prophecy, where he ceased being a player-character and was canonically nicknamed "Maverick."
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