Quote:
Originally Posted by ACE-OF-ACES
Abandoned the same way IL-2 Forgotten Battles was abandoned..
As in once they made the sequel (that included IL-2 Forgotten Battles) the support (patches, new content, free updates of planes, maps, etc) moved to the sequel.
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The main difference is that Forgotten Battles and all the other titles were essentially complete and had achieved their (more limited) goals
before the series moved forward.
The Battle of Britain was such a well-defined historical engagement with a distinctive atmosphere and varying strategic/tactical goals that any successful simulation needed to provide the capacity to recreate both individual engagements and give some feel of the overall campaign by including a career mode. The potential for exciting gameplay was HUGE.
There is good evidence that the developers goals for the game were to provide something along these lines. Luthier had a detailed (several hundred pages if I recall) design document for the planned dynamic campaign.
The enforced (?) early release and subsequent difficulties obviously killed any possibility of this being completed to schedule. We have instead got a threadbare, dryly technical simulation of the aircraft that took part in the battle flying over a mediocre (in my opinion) map of the area of operations. There is next to nothing in the way of gameplay, missions are incredibly few in number and limited in scope, the much-needed dynamic campaign is unfinished, historical atmosphere is negligible. The game fails totally in recreating any feeling of what it would have been like to take part in the Battle of Britain.
Compared to the original vision and any reasonable estimation of what a decent BOB sim should be able to do COD is woefully incomplete. And here is the main point - the fact that it is no longer the developer's intention to supply those missing elements does mean that the original vision and intention for COD has certainly been
abandoned. We have the planes and a map. We don't have a decent BOB sim and we aren't going to get one.
Backdated game engine tweaks from BOM won't change that fact.