[5] The game's more than two hours of video featured a number of prominent movie stars including Mark Hamill as Colonel Christopher "Maverick" Blair, Malcolm McDowell as Admiral Tolwyn, John Rhys-Davies as James "Paladin" Taggart and Thrakhath nar Kiranka, and Tom Wilson as Todd "Maniac" Marshall.

Wing Commander III dispensed with the issuing of medals after such missions and relied more on cutscenes to drive the story along, making much more use of CD technology.

Thrakhath nar Kiranka, Crown Prince of the hostile Kilrathi Empire, presides over the execution by disintegration of a group of Terran Confederation prisoners of war.

One, however, is left alive: Blair's lover Colonel Jeannette "Angel" Devereaux, due to her status among the Kilrathi as a respected warrior.

On the planet Vespus, Blair and Brigadier General James "Paladin" Taggart inspect the downed wreckage of the TCS Concordia.

There are a few old faces—Colonel Ralgha nar "Hobbes" Hhallas, and Major Todd "Maniac" Marshall, but all the other pilots and staff are people Blair has never met.

Thrakhath appears with a squadron of Pakthan bombers and taunts the Victory over subspace radio, calling Blair "the heart of the tiger"; the Confed pilots gather the Kilrathi have bestowed this name on him as a sign of respect.

Tolwyn is responsible for the escort and defense of the TCS Behemoth, an extremely large vessel (essentially a titanic particle accelerator with engines) capable of destroying a planet.

Before they can complete the bomb, Hobbes kills one of the Victory's pilots, Lt. Laurel "Cobra" Buckley, steals her fighter and makes for Kilrathi space with news of the planned T-Bomb attack.

This attack comes just as the Kilrathi prepare for a massive and devastating strike against Earth, intending to finally force humanity into submission with the loss of their home planet.

After successfully downing Prince Thrakhath above Kilrah (and Hobbes, if he was not killed earlier), Blair descends to the surface and delivers the bomb.

Morally devastated by the destruction of their home planet, the Kilrathi, commanded now by Thrakhath's retainer Melek nar Kiranka, surrender to Tolwyn.

Wing Commander III made the move from the sprite-based graphics used in previous titles to software-driven texture-mapped polygonal 3D, and used FMV for cutscenes.

The new, blockier forms were made necessary by the then-primitive state of polygon graphics, as WCIII was released a few years before the first true 3D video cards and all 3D effects had to be calculated by the CPU.

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.

A collectible card game adaptation was published in the same year by Mag Force 7 Productions, under the helm of noted science-fiction authors Margaret Weis and Don Perrin.

[15][16] In September 2011, the source code of Wing Commander III was handed to the fan community by a former developer for the purpose of digital long-time preservation.

[31] A critic for Next Generation gave the 3DO version five out of five stars, chiefly praising the usage of big-name actors in the video cutscenes, which he argued makes the game more realistic and suspenseful and gives a sense that the FMV is enhancing gameplay rather than substituting for a lack thereof.

[32] The editors of PC Gamer US nominated Wing Commander III for their 1994 "Best Action Game" award, although it lost to TIE Fighter.