hello luthier!

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by SYN_Bliss

There's more to compute in a spitfire cockpit than the entire character in a Call of Duty game. Those MASSIVE companies that release a simple FPS still release games with bugs and they have unlimited resources and work force. A flight sim, especially this one, is soo much more complex, yet is sold to a very very small community of people. In other words, the profits are nowhere near (if anything) to where a console crap game or a PC FPS is.

Folks, bear with me on this post.

Some people may have tried this game called Test Drive Unlimited 2, developed by Eden Games, published by Atari. It's for all systems. I bought it on the Xbox 360.
Briefly, it is a sequel to a free roaming racing game of the same name released a while ago. The first game was pretty solid with no real issues.

This sequel was probably more buggy than Clod was when released. Keep in mind this game was partly developed for static hardware. (Consoles.)

After 10 hours of playing this game, my saved game was completely wiped out. Gone. Apparently it was a known problem, but it still happened to me and thousands of others.
There was so much slowdown that if I wasn't leading the race, it was almost unplayable. I'm talking maybe 10-15 fps, tops. There was slowdown even when I was driving around on my own.
The GPS in the game was so buggy that it forgot to track my mileage, and if I went off course I was put back MILES from where I went off, and the car handling?
Well, the Golf Gti and The Audi R8 were undriveable. It's like they had trolley wheels at the back.
Not only that, but they hacked out a lot of the cars and all the bikes that were in the original game.
There were other issues that I won't go into, but my point is that this was a pretty simple arcade racing game developed for static hardware, and it was absolutely ripe with bugs.
The complexities of developing a complicated flight sim for PC versus relatively simple arcade racers developed for static hardware don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath really.

Anyone played Medieval Total War for PC? The game could not even be completed without a huge patch that followed later. Slowdown on even the fastest systems (I was getting 5 fps in some parts at the time) and a myriad of other really significant bugs which made the game a real chore to play at first. (It did blossom later, after a few patches.)

People act like bugs or early releases are something new. Well, they're not. And thanks to the era of digital downloads, you can expect more and more games being released early and full of bugs, patches to follow.
It's just the way it is these days.

Only the biggest development houses with hundreds of employees can really release a polished (not bug free, mind you) game these days, and even then their job is made inifintely easier because the largest gaming audiences are on consoles, which haven't changed since 2005.
Last time I checked, there was no flight sim on the consoles, nor will there ever be.

I'm not saying paying customers should just put up with whatever comes their way, but a little understanding of the enormous challenges these guys who develop simulators face need to be understood.

Sorry for the ramble.