Rise of Flight - To buy or not to buy?

[robtek]

My experience with RoF is that it has many things to attract players but not enough to hold them (except a, not really big, number of hardcore fans)

[Corto]

S!

Buy ROF.

[kimosabi]

Originally Posted by robtek

My experience with RoF is that it has many things to attract players but not enough to hold them (except a, not really big, number of hardcore fans)

I wouldn't agree with you 3 months ago but now I do. I find myself moving back towards IL-2 more and more as time progresses. When CoD:IL-2 arrives, RoF will most probably fade away from my PC completely.

#1 reason is that WW1 aircrafts aren't hardcore enough.

There are other reasons as well but that's another story.

[bf-110]

About the lack of stuff.

RoF is on the early stages.It´s quite like Cliffs of Dover when get released.Very few things compared to the veteran IL2.
It´s like a pack of chips.You can´t just eat one today and other next week.You need to see everything at once.That is the only thing that makes me kinda upset with the first release of SoW

Originally Posted by kimosabi

#1 reason is that WW1 aircrafts aren't hardcore enough.

No??I fired at some planes and they resisted quite enough!If you mean firepower,then you are right.

[onlyforbrian]

I have it but I'm a really disappointed with it, I use a logitech 3D stick, so I'm not sure it's the stick but I found the flight model overdone. The planes really overeact, and bob around making it extremely difficult to line up a shot. Also I find the gunnery unrealistic. It seems I need to pump an unreal amount of hits into a plane to see any damage effect, and yet the ai planes, including tail gunners only seem to need to hit me once or twice to take me out. The only way I managed to reduce these problems is to set myself into "invincible" and "simple" flight model. But that now makes it feel like an arcade game,..but at least I now can "fly" it. Although the graphics are nice. I have every version of IL2 and found even the early versions fly , handle, and shoot much better and more realistic than ROF. Plus ROF only gives you about 4 flyable planes, and you need to purchase each extra plane for 7 or 8 bucks each, a real rip off in my humble opinion. I'm a real pilot by the way, so I should have a pretty good idea of what feels more realistic.

[onlyforbrian]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I don't think the RoF guys were lazy. I think they were forced to release it way too prematurely due to financial reasons, plus one of their investors decided on using the constant online requirement. All that gave it a slow start and it's been playing catch up for a while.

That being said, i've tried the demo on various times during its life and i still think it has some way to go before it's something i can consider what i call a complete game in an "out of the box, install and play" sense.
If they had a version with enough flyables, a different DRM and a proper offline campaign (that uses the correct AI opposition, not spawning sopwith camels against my eindecker) i would reconsider.

Then again, i was recently looking it up again and i see people still complain about the render distance and the need to use zoom view to see the dots as close as 2km from their aircraft, so i don't know if such annoyances can be ironed out or it's a case of something that's buried too deep in the game's engine to change.

I think that's the problem with a pay-per-plane business model, even if they are cheap: developers are forced to focus on creating a constant stream of new flyable aircraft to sustain their revenue, almost to the expense of everything else in the sim, plus these flyables are not really that pricey from a developer's point of view but they are from a user's point of view if you want to have more than 4-5 of them.

On the other hand if they did it a la IL2 (content upgrades with major expansions only), they'd have more time to work on other stuff in-between releases of expansions: bug fixing, game engine upgrades, extra AI units to help enrich missions and campaigns, etc. Plus, they would be able to sell it for $50 instead of $5 and more people would buy it. Even if an expansion includes 5 planes i'm not interested in among a total of 10, i still consider it a better value than buying 5 planes individually, because expansions usually include extra maps or other goodies (some AI ground units, added mission builder capabilities or just a new mission type or multiplayer mode as an extra selling point). So, a full-on expansion is also a way for a developer to sell extra flyables to me that i wouldn't otherwise buy individually.

What i'm really interested to see is how long it takes before a 3d party group makes a WW1 sim out of Oleg's new engine and how it would compare to RoF.

$5..?? Say What??? I paid more than $50 for my copy of ROF and although they occasionally have their older planes on special for $2.99, the regular price is much higher, for example the new Gotha bomber is $11.99 FOR ONE PLANE!!! Naturally, I passed on it.

[BigC208]

Onlyforbrian, maybe it's time for a new joystick. I just replaced my CH Combat stick with a Warthog Hotas. Took it up for a qmb duel in a FokkerDVII. Dispatched 5 Camels with 270 bullets(135 per gun). This was at the easy AI setting so not that big of a deal but compared to before. I used too spend all 500 bullets and maybe get 1 or 2 kills. I can now aim at the engine and set it on fire or put 15 or 20 bullets in a wingroot and it'll snap right off when he pulls a bunch of g's.

I went from spray and pray to sniper over night(offline). It's not me it's the stick. The flight models for the rotary engine equiped aircraft are squirly and I'm still getting used to using the torque to my advantage. I have no real stick time in rotaries so I can't comment if it's realistic or not.

The inline equiped planes feel like the reall deal though. I've got about 350 hrs in gliders, mostly older K7, K8 and even some anno 1938 Gronau Baby time. These wood and metal, covered with doped linnen gliders feel just like the kites in RoF. Forward and sideslips are a blast and even sound like the real thing.

Anyone getting bored with RoF should join a full real server. I did a few days ago and that was a whole new experience. I got nailed a couple of times and never knew who or what hit me. One moment I see a speck on the horizon and by the time I recognized it as a bandit he allready punched me a bloody nose. Sobering to say the least. Even with CoD coming out soon, this thing's going to stay on my hard drive for a while.

[Feathered_IV]

http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/default.aspx

[waspfarmer]

I purchased it when it was first released. I saw it's wonderful potential, but frankly I was rather cheezed because it felt like I paid full price for an incomplete product. Several patches and many moons later, it's MUCH more complete and smoother running. Visually fantastic and a great flyer. I still find the online system confusing and frustrating and my attempts to figure it out have quickly lead to IL-2 sessions. I suppose you could take a friend to a movie with your money instead, but that's risky!

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by onlyforbrian

$5..?? Say What??? I paid more than $50 for my copy of ROF and although they occasionally have their older planes on special for $2.99, the regular price is much higher, for example the new Gotha bomber is $11.99 FOR ONE PLANE!!! Naturally, I passed on it.

I'm not saying these are the RoF prices, i just used an easy, round number for the sake of the example.

What i'm saying is i'd rather pay $50 for a full add-on that will have other kinds of content besides flyable planes than pay the same amount on individual flyable aircaft, because it gives me more "tools" to populate the game world and recreate the scenarios that are within a simulator's scope.