But we can still live with it, I guess…

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Bullethead

I'm an IL-2 virgin but have been doing flightsims since most of you all were in diapers. I did the very first version of Flight Simulator on an Apple II back in 1980, which took 20 minutes to load from a casette tape. I flew every flightsim there was in the golden age of computer gaming, when flightsims were what it was all about. I was flying online in DOS Air Warrior before most folks knew there was such a thing as multi-player games outside of hotseat and split-screen. And I went through Air Warrior, Warbirds, and Aces High.

I never did IL-2 because I got into online flying so early. In those ancient days, flightsim AIs totally sucked and once I'd found the MMO persistant world format of AW, WB, and AH, I never had any desire to play 1-off "deathmatch" games with only a few players. Besides, about the time I got into the MMOFS scene, offline flightsims went into scripted campaigns that were universally corny and had exactly zero replay value.

Unfortunately, these days I live way out in the sticks where I can only get broadband via satellite. Because I require broadband for my job, I can no longer fly online due to satellite's built-in lag of several seconds. As such, I'm once again insterested in offline play.

And to me, that means a fully dynamic campaign. I don't want to be able to change history, I just want the flavor of flying in a huge battle for as long as I live. You know, the way RB2 and OFF do things. Of course, the AI has to be pretty good, too, but that's no longer the problem it was back in the day.

So, until a few days ago, I was VERY interested in COD. I was almost obsessing over it, rereading all my books on the BoB. But then I found out that the dynamic campaign had been scrapped. As such, I will NOT be buying this game unless and until it has a dynamic campaign.

I'm not hard to please on the eye-candy front and flight mechanics front. After all, I date back to when airplanes were just tiny dots no matter how close you were to them, and terrain was a grid pattern with a jagged line along one edge representing mountains, and all controlled via the keyboard at about 5fps. So while I greatly appreciate all such realism efforts by the IL-2 team, I view it as a total waste because offline play is practically nonexistent.

Oh well. Maybe one day Maddox or the community will make a dynamic campaign for COD. That, and only that, will make COD worth my money. And by that time, COD will be in the bargain bin so I'll get a better product for less money than I would by buying it now.

So my $0.02 is that it doesn't matter all that much what eye-candy and FM/DM realism get into a game. What I want is offline play value, and I just don't see that here. And you know what? Even if I had DSL out where I live, I'd still only want COD for offline play because its online play is so limited compared to the MMOFS format I'm used to.

IOW, if the IL-2 community wants converts from other flightsims, it needs to offer them something they don't get elsewhere. It needs either a fully dynamic campaign for offline play, or it needs to go MMO. Without either, it offers nothing to folks who like those things more than they do arguably better graphics and realism. And that, IMHO, is a real tragedy.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion by all means, it's just that not everybody will share it

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum ), i think you get my drift.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone. For example, i didn't buy Rise of Flight because i disagreed with the way it did some things. Notice the plural here, it was a decision based on 4-5 different instances of what i considered shortcomings, not one. For CoD, i will buy it because the amount of things i agree with are more than the amount of things i don't and guess what, i too am a fan of having a proper dynamic campaign in the sim, especially if it's done in a way that we can use both of online and offline play.

Again, you're perfectly entitled to think this way and buy at a later time or not at all, i'm not going to try and convince you.
It's just that this focus on a single feature seems a bit shortsighted to me (especially when you discount FM/DM in favor of playability in a simulator game about aircraft, if we all wanted it like this we'd still be flying lucasart's secret weapons of the luftwaffe), more so in fact under the current situation: they can release the game now and get cash to work on the dymamic campaign to be patched into the game at least a year from now (according to their words), or delay the entire game for a similar time frame. I think they did the right thing by providing us with options, since you can enforce this delay on yourself by not buying early while the rest of us can enjoy whatever is there. Just because the game is incomplete for some people, it doesn't mean the rest of us should be unable to play around with what's already there while waiting for the improvements

Originally Posted by Bullethead

Absolutely not.

At BEST (which is very, very rare), they're fun 1 time through, but they have zero replay value because you know EXACTLY what to expect. Where's the feeling of having to check six constantly and wonder what you'll be getting into this time when you know full well that the only enemies out there are those you saw the last time you played this mission.

At worst (most of the time), scripted campaigns are so corny that they're unplayable even once. Instead of just letting you be a regular pilot of that time and place, you repeatedly have to do some utterly bogus thing like kill a particular enemy ace flying some ridiculously amped-up uberplane, or rescue "spit girl" (I'd rather rescue "swallow girl"), or what have you, with the fate of the world hanging on your actions, and you have to keep playing the same damn mission over and over until you finally beat it.

Either way, the ONLY replay value of a scripted campaign is trying to beat your previous score by memorizing a pattern of actions based on complete familiarity with the situation. This might appeal to the Nintendo crowd but not to anybody beyond puberty.

Look, I'm a game designer myself, and I tell you, a "hand-crafted scripted campaign" is a complete joke. The "hand-crafted" part is just a marketing ploy to cover up the fact that the devs put next to zero effort into it. It's just a series of linked scenarios with little if any carry-over from one to the next. Anybody with a mission editor can do the same thing. The only thing the devs add is bogus things like your best friend from childhood always going down in flames during this one mission while saving you from some enemies who always magically spawn right behind you no matter how well you check six. Gee, what fun.

So, to me, in the absence of MMO action, a flightsim simply must have a truly dynamic campaign or I won't buy it. If I can't join any squadron on either side, and fly whatever missions come my way (and they're different each time I play that squadron), then forget it. It doesn't matter how pretty the game looks or how realistic it is if there's nothing meaningful to do with the aircraft. I'm not spending $50 to fly a few corny missions and be done with it.

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

This is coming from one of the developers that was actually responsible for designing the campaign engine. He said that they didn't want to do a simple dynamic campaign like the one we have in IL2, but one that will do the rest of CoD justice. He also said that it was a very hard decision for him to postpone it, because he had already prepared a few hundred pages of documents on the subject and that's just for the design phase, how it should work, what features to have, etc.

I already said i'm a fan of having a dynamic campaign that's good for single and multi-player use. Imagine people flying fighters over the channel in 30 minute hops to the combat area. On its own it's not much. However, if i'm flying a catalina in bad weather along the convoy approaches and hunting for U-boats, those players who are after a quick dogfight are actually shielding me from having enemy fighters wander into my operational area and we get a bit of spontaneous synergy going.
Now, if the campaign engine is good enough, me sinking a U-boat or just driving it away and saving the convoy, would have a positive impact on the amount of fuel, ammunition and spare parts these dogfighters have at stock on their airbase, and so on...

It's this kind of a campaign i'd like to see, one that the strategic layer can be automanaged by my PC (or the server, if i'm flying online), but may also be optionally managed by the players (for fans of BoB:WoV), missions have consequences in the proper scale (not winning the war thanks to the efforts of one pilot, neither having our actions have no effect at all, something in the middle), etc. However, this is a massive undertaking for such a small dev team, it's like an entire separate module to the base simulator, so it's going to cost some time and money.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year.