I would not be a bit surprised to learn, that plan's and work on an WW II era had began already. If so, the competition between these two Russian firms, will be a win win for all of us. That era of flight I think, represent's a larger piece of the possible sales pie to both.

Funny there is like 3 major Sim Developers still out there Neoqb , Maddox and Eagle Dynamics and the war is raging about which one sucks the most... TBH it's only a good thing that we get more games and competition between sim games so we can see the genre expand into more quality.

RoF vs Initial IL2 release, say what you want but my opinion is that RoF takes the gold medal here, it even has inbuilt server browser something that IL2 lacked and kept a lot of "non bothering" online players out of the buisniss, i mean things improve and it's all for the good, sadly thats the case with real life as well... i.e deaths and disasters helps improve the future and safety.

Be joyful instead, it definantly doesn't hurt the sim community to have more games ffs.

I have been flying R0F for a bit now, and I would not go so far as to say that it is better out of the box than the original IL2.

R0F suffers from lack of content, both in terms of aircraft and online capabilities, and an overly complex and totally undocumented mission builder.

If neoqb can deliver on some high content patch work, then it will become a classic of the genre. If not, well, I have other $40 coasters around the house that it can join.

I hope they pull it off. I really enjoy this type of flying. It is very much more difficult than WW2 flying, by a huge margin. Bearcat alludes to this in his post. A lot of players simply will not "get" what it is about no matter how polished it becomes, because they can't go 450mph and tote around a brace of 30mm cannon.

But for the virtual flyer that appreciates the subtlety of sticking a .303" machine gun right in the enemy's face and pulling the trigger, it will be an answered prayer.

Well, nice to see that three huge developers (each one having a distiguished game, and in different areas) in Russia (and even better for me, as I'm moving there tomorrow).

Rise of Flight in WWI, IL-2 in WWII and Lock On in the modern combat area (well, as I started playing Lock On after IL-2, I use some of my IL-2 knowledge in Lock On. Remember those turn fights between Spit and 109 that we all love in IL-2? It's the same thing, but with a three times greater speed, missiles and everything.)

Sad thing we lost the guys from Microsoft in the civilian aviation field. Hope their staff and all that third party industry that orbitated around it start to coop with these three developers to improve their products and make flight simulation more realistic than it is.

About this Rise of Flight world-war 2 project, I think they're rushing the stuff. I would try to consagrate RoF as the top name in World War I simulation, as Maddox Games did with IL-2 series, and Eagle Dynamics did with Lock On. I had Flanker 2.0 installed on my computer a long time ago, and you can see they did a marvelous effort to improve it until the level Lock On reached nowdays. I also bought, at about the same time, the original IL-2, and again, we can see how did Maddox Games to turn it on what most of the virtual and real pilots consider the best when talking world war 2 simulation. If they do a similar effort like Maddox and Eagle did, or even like Aces Studio did to bring Flight Simulator since the early 90's editions to the X version 'til they were kicked from Microsoft, Rise of Flight series might became the classic in it's category as Lock On and IL-2 became in theirs.

So how is the general feedback from Neoqb, do they seem interested to correct the short coming's soon. Or are they mute on peoples concern's, and reluctant to promise anything forthcoming fairly soon.:confused:

Apparently the ROF developers are too busy fixing bugs and adding content to comment, but people close to the developer say they are hard at work.

The initial IL-2 release was immensely more polished than the initial ROF release, with far few buggers, and far more content.

Neoqb aint building a ww2 sim anytime soon.
Anyway chivas i can't say i've found many bugs in Rof most of them consist of the GUI interface or some AI, besides that i had far more trouble with IL2 but everyone has a different experience from another perspective.

Couple of weeks ago I've got email from Microsoft with survey about future flight sim.
It took me quite of time to answer all the questions and my impression was that they are thinking about some enormous 24/7 VATSIM like environment with missions , buying and selling paint skins , dropping "things" and the likes. Half of the questions was about flight model which of course I answered "hard core".Something is up.Warcraft is coming to the virtual sky ?! The only problem is that in order to go "for the masses" you have to "relax"
something - 12 years old and CEM ? I don't think so.

I'm one of the people that decided to wait. The reasons are many and i don't expect everything to be the way i like it, but through a strange twist of fate every single one of RoF's design and marketing decisions are the exact opposite of what i'm expecting from a modern flight sim.

If the online requirement was dropped i would probably order my copy today.

If there was more AI aircraft to accurately represent the 1917 theater of war, plus a properly done dynamic campaign to fly with and against them, i would probably order it as well. Look at Black Shark for example. It's only one flyable, but there's an entire war around you with dozens of AI units. It evens out pretty well.

If there were more flyable aircraft i would probably order today as well. Mind you i'm not talking about 30 extra aircraft. Between 4-6 flyables would be both good and reasonable. I know these next-gen models take time to develop and Oleg said himself on an interview that it might take a single person as much as 6 months to do a SoW-quality model.

The thing is, i don't expect everything i wrote to happen, but i expected some of it. As it stands in its current state, the reason i am going to wait for it to mature a bit is that absolutely none of these things are in the sim yet.

In regards to the aircraft/content issue, Oleg is going for a dozen of flyables right out of the box for SoW. We have also seen a lot of screenshots and videos from the early RoF days (when it was still called knights of the sky) with different aircraft, so it's not because they don't have time to model additional aircraft, some of them are already done. Not to mention that WWI aircraft have limited systems when compared to WWII or modern ones.

I think that a lot of the controversial decisions were made when the companies merged and the project was renamed from KoTS to RoF. The gennadich team was also a group of experienced people in the IL2 3rd party community, so they probably know how succesful the IL2 business model is. So why change it?

Well, the only thing i can think off is that they ran out of money to finish it, an investor came along and said: "Here, take this money, but you'll have to change some things first". And then came the online requirements, the lack of aircraft, micro-payment add ons and so on. Ever wonder why we used to see the Camel and the Dr.I in all the Kots videos, yet RoF was released with a Spad and a D.VII? It's simple, someone thought that having two of the most iconic aircraft of WWI in the initial release might be all the casual sim gamer would want, thus never buying anything extra.

All the measures taken seem to suggest an approach to securing as much income as possible, from the copy protection method to the way the add ons are handled and how these add ons become a necessity through a lack of initial content. Nothing wrong with a developer cashing in on years of work to be honest, but it pays off to exercise some moderation. Otherwise, if you go with a brand new way of doing things in every field imaginable and give the impression you're in it strictly to milk the proverbial cash cow, you simply run the risk of scaring away a load of people and having the entire thing backfire on you. To a certain extent this has happened. What remains to be seen is whether they can stay afloat long enough to address some of these concerns, at which point they'll start getting a lot more sales.

Just my 2 cents ;)

For what it was worth I had absolutely no trouble with IL2... or FB for that matter... and I agree.. the GUI leaves a bit to be desired.. although the scalability menu is nice.... I havent been able to really fly the sim yet because I cannot seem to get my TIR working right.