Molgera, that's a very dark vision you are painting. I still hope that we will see more great games/movies/books/songs and other pieces of art in the future.
Times have become tough for game designers because most things have been tried already. Psygnosis just had to create a game that allowed two players to fight each other with a sword and chop off heads to amuse us with Barbarians. I was amazed by ACE on the C64 because I could pretend to be flying a fighter jet and shoot tanks and other planes. But the next games had to try harder to achieve a 'unique selling proposition' and not to be compared to some older game.
When it comes to sim games all you can do is actually simulate accurately - but it would not buy you butter on your bread because us simnuts are only few. So Anton and his team have to please the crowds by 'Hollywood style explosions' and other cheap tricks to win new customers. I think that Anton himself loves simulations and would like to make IL-2 BoP as realistic as technically possible, but the publishers think about the butter on the bread and push him to create an arcade experience for the masses. - And still we got a simulation mode with a pretty accurate flight model.
If BoP sells well, Anton might have a chance to include more realistic stuff for the sim mode, tone down the damage impact on landing to give us back belly landings, include more accurate cockpits and whatever else we asked for.
In the time of Barbarians or ACE you did not need a big studio to create an amazing game because the hardware limited the possibilities. Fast forward 20 years (OMG I'm old) and suddenly you can include realistic landscapes that are modelled to every detail possible from satelite images and WWII aerial photographs. That costs money - a lot of it. So selling 10,000 copies to sim nuts will not feed Anton's family and won't feed the publisher. Therefore they need to sell more.
What I heard so far about BoP and what I saw in the demo is enough for me to say that I will get my fun for my money. It's not perfect, but it may become better.
