Quote:
Originally Posted by jameson
I'm confused about about why anyone would want little red arrows flying around the cockpit or statistics writ large in the corner. Why can't they learn to fly by instruments and learn to shoot properly, and then get situational awareness by looking out of the window? I thought this was going to be a realistic flight simulator....
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I don't use them but i see the use for such helper tools. Poor scaling of difficulty is one of the prime reasons we don't get more people into flight sims.
Everyone likes games with explosions, so why aren't more people into flight simming? Well, what many of them don't like is getting smacked across the forehead with a 500 pager that details just the basics for theory of flight, formation tactics, gunnery principles and so on, not to mention that most of the times today the manual doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what's in the simulator. It's not just getting smacked across the head with that 500 pager, back in the day it was at least provided in the packaging, now you have to print part of it yourself from a pdf file and then scour the internet for the missing parts before flogging with the manuals can commence. That's the extra masochism that we long timers appreciate and crave, but it's easy to see it doesn't work any miracles for bringing new faces into the hobby
Just because the arrows are there doesn't make this a not realistic simulator, as long as we have the option to turn them off. Effectively, having a wide array of difficulty options to choose from enables us to have more games in a single title: from ultra realistic (PCs of the time permitting) to ultra arcade.
I don't use arcadish gameplay options but don't diss arcade mode, it's what can bring the new guys in and new guys help pay for our expansions and implementation of realistic features.
If i scoff at something , for me it will be the lack of personal chalenge in arcadish gameplay, not the people who use the options. For them, the challenge is there and when they reach a certain skill level when it's not enough the answer is simple: they either put the game down or up the ante by starting to fly with more realistic settings.
Frankly, as long as a person who flies with all the realistic FM options turned off doesn't try to play know-it-all on the realistic-flying guy about the physics of flight or claim expertise in how things should be, i have no problem whatsoever how he uses his simulator.
In a similar fashion, i don't think people who fly full switch are snobs just because of flying full switch. They have a more varied and accurate experience and as a result their knowledge pertains more to what is closer to reality, if people want to challenge them then they need to do their homework first and that's not snobbish, it's reasonable. Being a snob is telling people to "stfu n00b, i fly full real", it's perfectly ok however to say "i fly
full switch and so i think that your opinions only apply to your preffered difficulty settings and not the entire simulator environment".
I think we all have to keep in mind that we didn't arrive at the point we are overnight. The reason i want ultra realism is because i've been using flight sims for 18 years and i've seen pretty much every trick in the book, so i'm looking forward to something a bit more challenging and maybe surprising. However, there are other people who are just starting now. It would be stupid of me to expect them to acculumate in a few weeks the same amount of knowledge i have managed to collect over the past 18 years and then proceed to degrade them when they try to learn gradually. It doesn't do good to anybody behaving this way, neither the new guy who will be discouraged, nor the veteran who is looking for some "fresh meat" or maybe the challenge of training an up-start wingman and finally, not for the genre on the whole which will suffer reduced sales.
The question is simple. We either try to accomodate the up-start guys and ease them into the hobby gradually, or the hobby gradually dies as we get older and start suffering from poor eyesight, hand eye coordination or worse
10-11-2010, 02:48 PM
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