Unfortunately, it looks like the next Crusader will be quite a ways away, to be brutally honest. But anything I hear will be posted here.
Date posted: December 11, 1999.
I received this the other day from a special someone. It's a screenshot of Crusader: No Mercy in development before it got postponed. As you can see, the multiplayer development is going to be made....I can't wait! Feast your eyes on THIS.....
Date posted: March 22, 1999.
Unfortunately, the state of the next Crusader (single, multiplayer, or online) is still somewhere in the distant murky future. Due to the success of Ultima Online, Origin has begun to look towards Online as the future of the company. Because of the huge amount of resources it takes to run an online game (servers and maintenance crews, UNIX and network programmers, 24-7 customer support) they have had little budget for any thing else. Just to let you know where Crusader sits on the totem pole, Wing Commander Online has be postponed indefinitely due to the push for UO and future Ultima Online products support. (And the Wing Commander movie is coming out next week!) I fear that it may be many years before another Crusader hits the shelves.
It's always welcome to have players send ideas, suggestions, plot and weapons ideas. But for right now we don't have the budget or the manpower to even start looking at creating the next in the series. I've got the design for the Cru2 over on my bookshelf gathering dust, but by the time it comes to making it I'm sure there'll be many more ideas to put into it. (Cru2 started with the WEC launching an attack on the Darkside base forcing the rebels to flee back to earth, but not before setting demolitions to destroy the moonbase -- with the WEC troops...)
Oh, well. I hope that hasn't depressed you too much, but that's how life is when you work for a corporation, (mmmmmm, where did we get the idea from the WEC for?) But, I've also heard distant rumors that a Crusader Online could still be in the works, though if it were to happen it would be next year, which means it would be on the market sometime in the year 2003. So my best advice is; don't hold your breath....