Friday 2010-10-08 Dev. update and Discussion

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by jameson

Sow's box should have a label stating that the recommended age is "Over 25". What teenager could resist? It would be an instant 'must have'. Lol!

Lol, that might actually be a sound marketing strategy.
"For full difficulty settings: Recommended age 20 years or more.
Recommended experience with other flight simulator products of at least 3 years".

The little kids would not only want to pick it up, they'd also want to boast that they are uber and play in the "grown-up's" division, resulting in a drive for them to try and learn the higher realism settings.

Originally Posted by Splitter

To Blackdog and others who have posted similar: Yep.

I want to get my son (17) into SoW as one of those things we can do together. No way is he going to be able to know what I know (since I have been flying flight sims for almost 25 years off and on) or compete with me on settings that are more ""realistic".

But we could "dumb it down" and have some fun together right from the start. More realistic settings could be introduced to him as we go along. Eventually, we may go from playing "his" game to playing "mine"....and he'll probably kick my backside by that time lol.

Other people have friends and family they would like to get into "flight simming". 16 year olds are going to see the product on the shelves and pick it up. The wider the audience, the more copies that will sell. That helps all of us. Why limit the audience?

Just understand that people will be playing different games. Having the option to make it more "arcadish" would not take away from the "simulation" crowd at all.

Look at the Total War series. There are a dozen different way to play that game. Some people automatically resolve all battles. Some people control every little aspect of each battle. Some use diplomacy, others ignore diplomacy. The list and combinations go on. If the developers of those games said "Everyone will use diplomacy and fight all their battles" the over all market (and popularity) of the games would be severely limited.

As long as the "realistic" options are there, I am happy. If people can turn them off, how does that effect me?

Splitter

Very good analogy with the Total War series. I'm trying to get a few of my friends into flight sims and i would really love to be able to take them out for training flights and such, upping the scales as time went by. I'm talking about guys who will play anything from call of duty and company of heroes to theater of war, hearts of iron and silent hunter. They have a solid WWII background but no flight simming background at all, because "i don't mind it being difficult, good games usually are, but man it does take ages to learn" as they tell me

Xilon: Little kids don't have a lot of patience, but they have free time to learn and evolve.

My friends are all people in their late 20s/early 30s with jobs, enough money to get good PCs, HOTAS sets, TrackIR sets and enough patience to sit down and learn a complex game. You know why they don't use flight sims? Because they don't have the free time required to learn it.

I fly full switch or almost full switch (externals on when playing offline for screenshots). I campaigned hard and annoyed people in this forum to have more in-depth systems modelling in SoW, something that will be for me like a fusion of FSX and IL2 and when SoW arrives, i'll fly full switch again and i do want navigation tools and protractors to use in flight and draw up flight plans on the go as i'm skimming the waves on a cross channel raid to France in a Blenheim. But do you know how i started?

I was a 12 year old kid flying secret weapons of the luftwaffe, which by today's standards is even less realistic than IL2 with all the helper options turned on.
Also, RoF, DCS and all the other sims you mentioned have difficulty options. They are not "100% default difficulty" affairs.

It's just like school. If you teach simple arithmetics to small children, some will show enough interest and talent to become mathematicians when they grow up. If you try to teach advanced calculus to them, then none of them will ever touch a mathematics book again in their lives.