Poll: Why I will be supporting CLIFFS OF DOVER and why you should too
 

Salute

These boards have been in an uproar, hundreds of questions, some legitimate, some weighted to attack.

And there is no doubt we do have a reason to be disappointed. We haven't been given the game we had hoped for and which the promotions had promised.

But before we react irrationally, it's time to step back, take a deep breath, and think carefully.

There are no other games in development in the Flight Sim field, unless you want to count Microsoft, and we all know their track record.

The only other relatively new title, RISE OF FLIGHT has its positive points, I own it myself, but isn't the game that IL-2 was even a year and a half after being published. It has nice graphics, but no campaign to speak of, there is not even one period of the Great War which has a complete plane set. It also has issues with visibility distance, and can't host nearly the number of players online.

Realistically, the future of Flight Simming rests in the success or failure of CLIFFS OF DOVER.

So should we give it a chance?

I say yes.

Oleg and 1C have a track record second to none. In the past they have delivered, IN SPADES. The IL-2 series is the most successful Flight Sim ever produced.

Although the original IL-2 didn't have the bugs and issues which CoD obviously had, it was far from being optimized. Getting 16 players online at one time was problematic, there were numbers of bugs which had to be solved. But solved they were, and the game went onto its huge success.

Oleg and company are a little further behind the 8 ball when it comes to CoD, but there is every reason to believe they can solve the issues which are currently impairing the playability of the game.

But if everyone abandons this sim, if everyone reacts in a kneejerk fashion, and bails out, then the chances of failure are going to be increased hugely.

UBISOFT, that corporate entity which we love so well... :( ...will not hesitate to pull the plug on this game.

If you want this game to succeed, if you want a bright future in Flight Simming, the only smart thing to do is to support CLIFFS OF DOVER.

Personally I will be buying a copy of the Russian Game, and several copies of the North American release.

I hope you take the time to think this through, and act and vote positively.

Well..I dont revoke my orders...they did it for me....so now i'm waiting till a reply drops into my mailbox with the reason why digital river cancelled my CONFIRMED orders...

I'm sure things will be fixed eventually.

After I build my new rig, and if the game is still alive and showing signs of life - I will buy it. We do not have an alternative title / series.

If for nothing else, than for the hundreds of hours of fun I had with old IL2 series. The team showed they can do the job in the past, one should think they can pull it off again.

After 29 years of gaming/flying IL2 1946 has been the only title for a few years now, after having played hundreds of titles. I totally fell in love with IL2 back in 2002 and my love has never waned.

I will support CoD and I will keep doing so for it's entire life span.

I watched the forums lately and i just laugh, soo many crying babies.
I really think some people on this forum should really just take it easy.
As soon as i heard it was available for pre-order on steam, i bought it, without hesitation.

People here seem to forget, that patches can fix a hefty amount of a game.

I would've just wished for a collector's edition, oh well.

Perhaps it's exams coming up that's making me think about other things then some epilepsy filter.

I understand that a lot of people here are canceling their pre orders after reading and watching all the problems with the sim, but I dont know why would anyone pre order a digital download copy if it wasnt to support the devs.So if you want to support but cant play the game as it is right now,just step back for 2-3 weeks or maybe a month and come back and see how things have developed.All this complaining wont help the team solve the current issues.Just remember how was ROF when it came out, I couldnt get more than 30 fps on high end machine (back then).Now I can max it out without problems and I surely enjoy it.We need to RELAX!

I pre-ordered CoD on the strength of previous Il-2 releases. When I read yesterday that it could be bought via YuPlay I had no hesitation in spending a bit of extra money to play the game a bit early. Well, having spent a few hours with it, the sorry state of CoD has burned right through that goodwill and has thoroughly undermined my belief in Maddox Games' as a developer. They can keep my money this time but they have lost all credibility in my eyes and I will never again pre-order or purchase one of their titles sight unseen.

Canceling pre orders is the most stupid and short sighted thing to do. Just after pre ordering a new flight sim, which is the second most stupid and short sighted thing to do.

But anyway, if you have pre ordered you should stick with it now. Canceling just sends a very bad message in form of a excel sheet to a guy in a suit somewhere, who doesn't care if this is maybe the next mother of all flight sims, or a Pokemon against Ninja Turtles game. All what it will do is cutting off support to the executive studio, in this case 1C.

Don't cancel the order guys.

You have clearly not witnessed the beginning of many flight sims...
I have. I think the COD start is still fairly ok compared to other titles I have witnessed. Many are classics today, like ROF, FS series, BoB WOV, etc. Give it some months.

Hi,

I voted yes. But let me point out that also Gaijin has a new sim in the works. This genre can use every drop of lifeblood, and competition is always good for us, the consumers.

MAC

We should post your comment as a sticky.

I thought you meant these guys, I can only say they're bloody hilarious.

On the contrary, I have been playing flight sims since Digital Integration's Fighter Pilot in the mid 1980s. This release is the shoddiest I have ever seen.

Then my second guess is you haven't read a lot of the user reviews ;-)
I have spent 6 hours yesterday on sukhoi.ru with google translator (a huge pain), and many reviews are actually quite good. Today there have been more and more good ones from western guys who bought the russian version. Go and check SimHq, there is some interesting stuff there.

I will continue to Support Oleg the 1C team and have ordered The Collectors edition.
I remember iL2 when it first came out and it knocked spots off anything else that was about and the successive releases and free content in the patches that stopped the simm becoming stale.
Yes ,even on some of the top hardware available at the time of release it would not play smoothly and seamlessly,but patches were bought out to sort out faults .
Even then tweaking was needed to tune it to the varied hardware around and many individuals from the community ,"mucked in" & spent time,finding solutions which they shared amoungst the rest of us.
I trust that the community will work together as it did before submitting any positive findings and relaying any glitches or errors so that the development team can respond and fix it.
All you guys from the early days will remember the different sites and forums that had info for tweaking your conf.ini ,Ati or Nvidia gpu.
I am sure many of you spent time running "Fraps" and the "Black Death"ntrk trying to get better FPS by tuning bios ,hardware ,system and game settings .
Well this is a new "Game Engine", and "New Engines " all need a bit of tweaking and tuneing to get running sweet.We have been told that there is work in progress for DX11 ,64 bit support etc etc so I can wait .I like what I have seen so far and have no doubt that as in the past Oleg and his team will deliver the goodies were all after .

I've bought the Russian version, and I am keeping my pre-order for the western collectors edition too.

1C/MG deserve our support.

BobTuck.

Really? What's it called? Is there any info anywhere? Is it going to be an actual sim or just like a WoP sequel?

I've paid for my 3rd copy now. A Ubi download preorder, A Ubi Collectors edition and I had a go with the Russian version last night. It has massive potential, what we have here is the ugly duckling, waiting to become the beautiful swan. The ingredients are there in spades, the fm is fantastic, the lighting and cockpits are draw dropping, it needs tuning for sure but I have absolutely every confidence that 1C and Maddox will polish this into something spectacular.

S!

It's idiotic to think that after waiting six years for this that I would say..Oh some problems, screw it I'm not buying it. How mudh is that anyway? As much as it costs to take some ugly chick to the movies with popcorn and drinks included. Relax take a pill and wait for a patch or two.

Salute

I think this poll shows clearly the naysayers are in the minority.

So don't be put off by the whining of the vocal few, have patience, this game has potential.

All you have to do is look at video reviews like this one:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG2o16LDtBI&feature=player_detailpage[/video]

Support it and you will be rewarded.

I like how this looks:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4.../Memorable.jpg

I still can't believe the way people are overreacting. It's like MG are purposefully trying to screw us. Sort of like they are expecting Oleg Maddox to think there's lots of money for the taking in fooling the WWII combat flight simulator community...

I mean, the industry standard is to shovel out copies of the same games over and over, and release at best a couple of minor fixes until the game is discontinued. So here's this team of people working for years on something that noone else wants to work on, as they have done for the past 10 years with one of your favourite products. They're doing this out of sheer passion, who knows under what difficult and stressful circumstances, to bring you the opportunity of reliving the period you love so dearly in so much more immersion, and all you can do is whine and cancel preorders as if an initial release means anything.

So, take a step back... and grow the heck up. At the very least, show some respect for the people who've done nothing short of continuous, amazing work on your favourite products for a decade.



My pre-order's staying no matter what - even if CloD turns out to be a huge botch, which it won't, I'll at least feel I've somehow contributed a bit more to the developers of the simulator I keep coming to time and time again, for countless hundreds of hours, like no other game has ever managed to do.

Well said.

Great thread!

I can understand your disappointment, but the unfortunate truth is flightsims do not make the sort of money that a FPS or console shooters will make, while the development period is very much longer and more difficult, meaning most flightsims these days are released to early and have serious issues on release, the upside is they are usually supported a lot better than an FPS and the entertainment they supply usually lasts a lot longer.

With the cost of good peripherals this is more of a hobby than anything and it is a hobby where patience is required, at $50au I cant really lose, its worth that IMO just for the cockpit modelling, the other COD cost me $99au and was fun for about 3-6 months and then the next version is released for another $99au, you sometimes have to put things into perspective, overall the outlay for this will hopefully be worth every penny.

I've pre-ordered a collector's edition via a relative in the UK and i agree with you. I never pre-ordered any kind of game until now, even the previous IL2 titles (which i own most of) i bought by going to a local store, asking the clerk if they will ship it and he would tell me "come back in 3-4 weeks"...i would go there and buy it.

This is the first time i've pre-ordered and to be honest i was thinking of canceling at some point but then i thought it over. I know the developer team's track record which is part of what pushed me to preorder in the first place. The other half of the reason is that i really wanted a box that resembles the flight sims i used to play as a kid, with printed manuals and the like, so since that means a CE and these are usually limited run copies i thought "what the hell, go for it".

In all honesty, i don't subscribe to the "buy it now or the genre dies" rhetoric. That's what people were telling me about RoF but i didn't buy it and it didn't die. I think that people should be free to decide on their own and if they want to wait until a game improves, i have no problem with it because in our genre (small % of the gamers as it is) the guy who passes a title by today is the same guy who will pre-order another title tomorrow because of a few certain features or just a couple of things that caught his eye and he happens to consider important.

What this community suffers from the most is not lack of support for the hobby, but ridiculous amounts of self-contradiction caused by impatience :-P

I can see people day in and day out going into panic mode at the first sign of stutters on a youtube vid and posting threads about canceling their pre-orders, then before you know it the same people could be asking for instructions on how to buy the Russian version because they saw a different vid on youtube that looks awesome on a mid-range PC. This stuff is completely hilarious :grin:

It's also what contributes the most to the atmosphere of all-pervading crankiness on these forums, a ton of mixed signals and contradicting posts that serve to further confuse and draw others into the vicious cycle, all because some people can't exercise elementary self and impulse control on their itchy forum posting fingers.

If people were contend to just say "i'm buying because because of reasons ABC" or "i'm going to wait a bit for reasons XYZ" there wouldn't be a problem at all. It's the legions of headless chickens that make a mess of it, which is not far from reasonable expectation: have you ever seen a few dozen headless chickens running around the place? there's blood sputtering all around :-P

My opinion is, let everyone have their opinion, but actually stick to their guns for once:
a) If you pre-ordered to give a boost to the game's launch stick with it, because you're obviously interested enough to want it to succeed. Canceling your pre-order and buying when it's fixed doesn't get you a working game in less time, you'll still have to wait for the patches.

And since you could obviously throw money away on a pre-order just to help "jump-start" the sim, you can not only afford it but you also care enough to do it. If the state of the game upsets you, shelve it for a couple of months and come back to it after a few patches.

b) If you didn't pre-order and are not happy with how things look, feel free to wait it out. But if you said you're doing so, have the decency to back up your words and do it.

There are games i've stated i won't buy unless certain things change and guess what, i didn't buy them because they haven't changed. If whatever feature is important enough to you to keep debating daily on the forums, to the point that you state you won't buy the game until it's done to your standards, i'm just fine with it as long as you do it. There's nothing wrong with pre-release requests and jockeying for public support in favor of something you like, because that's actually the timeframe where a request has some chance of being considered. However, if the game progresses in a course completely divergent to your rock-steady assessment of what it should be, have some common decency to stick by your opinion and not buy it.

The "you"s are impersonal by the way ;)

I purchased IL2 when it first came out. I was much younger and had a computer at that time that would be classified as lower end. I am now a 38 year old American. The original IL2 did not perform perfectly on my system at that time. However, as I upgraded my system as the years went by I was able to have my setting set to max. I have enjoyed the game through the years and have purchased 3 copies through that time period. I am active in the WWII FPS and Flight sim communities. What I have noticed through the years are the younger guys/girls complaining about games and features they want without understanding the economics of what goes in to designing and making a modern day pc game. The original IL2 was designed for future computer engine capabilities. Oleg has stated that they have designed COD to be able to take advantage of future technologies as they become available to the general public. The money/time/risk involved with an adventure of this level I am sure is very nerve racking. It amazes me with discussing with younger individuals the mechanics of economics 101 to have them still cry how they want this and that. Everyone has to realize the limitations of time/money when judging the development of anything. I feel that these are the individuals complaining when they have not even had the opportunity to try the flight sim out. I mean no disrespect to the younger lads here however I feel it is this group that are making up much of the harassing remarks. I am delightfully surprised how attentive the 1C company is on the forums and their responses to issues they will work on. If you want to see future projects like the one they have taken on then please have some respect. Think before you post a disagreeable post before you have had the liberty to even try the sim out. I fear everyone is pre-judging the sim before it is even released in their home country. If you do not support the game then there will be no expansions. The world does not revolve around what you want but what can make money and enable a company to thrive. There has been many years work on this project. First all I would read are people complaining that the sim would never be released. Then when they do release the sim people are complaining that they are not going to buy it because it has some glitches or issues that have already been addressed by the the company that they are going to eagerly work on to fix. All I can say to the complainers is to man up and grow a pair! Post something that will be productive and mature. The people who design these great games that we all love also have lives outside of their work. Show respect for them and this great community and support them to further create additions to this genre. I apologize if some people took offense to this post however I felt that someone had to say these things after reading the non stop drama queen posts the last few days.

Hi,

Title is not announced yet, to be expected in the coming weeks. I expect Gaijin to use an improved smooth graphics engine and much refined flight models. There was an interview with Anton Yudintsev in February, read here.

MAC

Console... I own a ps3 and the thought of playing any flight simulator game on there makes me cringe and even if it for the pc as well, I have found 90% of the games made for the consoles and pc have led to an inferior product... which makes sense why would you spend tine adding bells and whistles to a pc version that has a smaller consumer base and a high likelihood of being cracked.

That said I will keep an eye our for it but I highly doubt it will be anywhere as close to a sim as clod is but nicer graphics to draw the suckers in.