I remember playing through the IL2 demo and getting stutters and freezes every step along the way, but it was so much more advanced that everything i'd seen before that i decided to buy it.
I remember getting the first IL2 release back in 2001 and being unable to run missions with more than a dozen aircraft or so.
I remember that firing rockets from zoomed-in view caused an almost two second freeze due to the smoke particle effects, which led me to either pull up while the image on the screen was still frozen or switch to wide view just before pressing the rocket triggers, otherwise i would end up slamming my sturmovik right beside the panzers i was supposed to attack.
I remember flying European Air War in parallel because it was a more well-rounded title that i could run easily on my PC while recreating massive battles, but always hoping that one day i could run IL2 with EAW's numbers. Well, it happened, just not immediately after IL2's release.
I remember the initial Fw-190 which had the acceleration and energy retention of a truck.
I remember there were only scripted campaigns on the first version and there wasn't even a difficulty option to allow you to advance the missions regardless of result. If a mission was particularly hard (and many of them were, because the scripted campaigns tried to closely follow actual happenings) you could very well be stuck and unable to advance the campaign because you couldn't succeed in one mission.
I remember when flying a career with level bombers that the AI wingmen would initiate a diving attack from 5000m of altitude because no level bombing AI routines were present.
I remember people testing, discovering and reporting on the forums that in order to improve frame rates and performance when using certain high rate of fire machine guns, the game completely disregarded normal rounds and only took tracers into account.
I remember the myriad inaccuracies in terms of flight models, scale issues and ammunition loadouts.
I remember that a lot of graphics options where completely absent from the in-game control panels because no PC could run them when it was first released. They were enabled during the course of future patches and add-ons and people had to manually edit configuration files to get them.
That's what IL2 was. It's not what it is today though. It got patched, it got fixed, it grew and it got the place of the king in the prop-sim genre.
It's still not perfect because nothing can be and it's still not the most immersive or user friendly piece of entertainment software. It's just that force of habit means that we prefer dealing with a set of intricacies we are familiar with while b*tching and moaning to a disproportionate degree when having to deal with other, not necessarily worse, but simply unfamiliar quirks of another software title.
To describe the current situation all i would say is, let's take a look back and stop pretending it was all roses with the previous series just because it's the best it can be today, have a bit of faith and stop getting our collective panties in a twist.
