Here we go again with the sweeping generalizations.
The truth is, some things worked in IL2 from the start and some were implemented at a later date by the community.
It's the same thing with CoD, but due to the increased amount of features there's an increased amount of bug fixing to do as well.
It's the same with other sims too, some things take time. RoF anyone? It took 18 months or so before it really took off and that's a much more limited engine in terms of how much objects it can handle and what you can do for dynamic mission environments. Heck, last time i checked it when it went free to play, they were revamping the visibility range to be more than a couple of kilometers because up till that point performance didn't allow it and thus, people couldn't really boom and zoom because they couldn't see their targets. SLI/Xfire took quite a while to implement as well, shimmering ground textures at long range also, etc, etc. Oh, and all guns had the same ballistic characteristics (don't know if they changed that). Why? Because a small company tried to make a complex game, because big companies don't make games for this genre.
It's easy to think we are the only ones being slighted here in CoD land, when in fact the way things go is pretty straightforward in software development: the amount of bugs is proportional to the complexity of features and inversely proportional to the amount of people and money you have to throw at the problem.
It's also easy to look back on a 10 year old series that has been tweaked and modded to kingdom come and expect that kind of quality standard as a given, completely forgetting that it took 10 years to reach that stage.
On a side note, how many were there for the very first release of IL2 back in 2001?Does anyone remember that none of the LW planes had mine-shells?
Or that the sim was so hard on the CPU that to cut down on DM and ballistics calculations only the tracers were accounted for, giving an advantage to the Russian machine guns with their higher tracer frequency?
Or that we only had canned campaigns and you couldn't progress until you got the "mission accomplished" message because there wasn't a difficulty option to set the "no instant success" parameter?
Or that in all campaign missions with level bombers, your flight of, let's say, 111s would get a task to bomb a truck convoy yet the flight altitude was set at 5km, you couldn't see the targets due to the rendering limitations, the AI leader wouldn't aim bombs for you and then they would all start dive bombing from 5km, release at 3km or so and score direct hits and you would go all "wtf? how is that possible in a realistic scenario?"
Or that, due to the fact it was designed as a low-altitude, ground pounding sim, there was no high altitude atmosphere model to speak of, giving all sorts of FM problems?
Or that without a 3rd party tool (Hyperlobby), its multiplayer would be dead in the water?
Do you really want me to continue? A lot, most in fact, of those things were corrected, some by the developers and some by the community, but it took three things:
1) time
2) a positive attitude
3) rolling up one's sleeves and doing something about it, instead of just crying "gimme" constantly
I remember very well. Things were not all rosy back then either, the only thing that's rosy is your nostalgic glasses people.
When the population of this forum learns to present opinions and not strawmen designed simply for the purpose of winning points in a forum argument, maybe we'll get somewhere.
