So won't the real IL-2: 1946 successor please stand up, please stand up?
 

So won't the real IL-2: 1946 successor please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?

Come on developers! I’m talking a true successor, that simply gives us all the basics that have made 1946 great, but with a modern game engine and the following must-haves:

• No silly marketing bull$#!% (that means no up-sell, no rip-off premium plane purchase mentality – just give us a good game up front as a single purchase and then add expansion packs like Oleg did!)
• The Pacific! We absolutely must have the essential maps and planes for the Pacific!
• A true, accessible mission-builder, and the ability to share such missions on the net,
• Quality AI, and offline single-player support, and with a range of difficulty options that clearly cater for all types of player to maximise popularity and sales.

And ideally I’d love to see an initial purchase that at least includes the following as flyables:

• Hellcat
• Spitfire
• Kittyhawk
• Fw 190
• Airacobra
• Wildcat

I’d pay a 3 digit US$ price for that! :cool:

(Oh ... and the repeated "please stand up" is intended to be a humorous play on an Eminem song, just in case you didn't get it and think I've gone completely nuts) ;-)

I think the future for realistic flight sim games is (bi-?)YEARLY subscription, I know many people don't like the idea but I can't see any other way developers can make the (relatively) niche games like il2 and to keep supporting it.

People who like sims will pay ~50usd each year, people who don't will play it one year then go like they always do.

I've been a WWII flight sim fan since Aces of the Pacific came out in 1992, and my observation is that the most successful sims have two things in common. They all received great reviews from reviewers like PC Gamer at some point, and had a certain amount of mass appeal. I believe these are two of the secrets to gaining the wider following and commercial success that these games enjoyed.

The sims I'm referring to are Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator in 1998, and IL-2 Sturmovik in 2001. Both of these sims featured in PC Gamer's Top 100, and I personally purchased both on the basis of this recommendation (though I didn't buy into IL-2 until Pacific Fighters came out in 2004). I don't think any WWII flight sim has achieved such a high recommendation since. I don't know what the devs did to achieve this (sweet talk, bribe, salesmanship or just design brilliance), but I think any aspiring devs these days need to get those reviewers on side somehow. This would ideally include having a polished product on initial release which is too good for reviewers to ignore, including an easy arcade-style entry point to appeal to casual gamers while still being a fairly hardcore sim for the serious flyers, and not doing silly things to annoy the player.

Or if the devs of an existing sim that has been refined over the years, like Great Battles, think their sim is now genuinely better than "1946", "DCS" or "War Thunder", it's probably never too late to actively seek some fresh reviewer recognition and promotion of it. :cool:

As for subscription, that might work for the lemming types who don't seem to think too much about the cost as long as they're playing the latest fad game, and it might work for hardcore cashed up fans, but I think most combat sim fans of the type that bought into those previously successful titles are more discerning than that.