Answers to Community Questions

[csThor]

Originally Posted by luthier

First of all, I disagree with it being “below standard”. Your definition of single-player standard is probably different from mine. If you expect Mass Effect or Skyrim, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Cliffs of Dover was intended to be a sandbox game more than anything, expansive, open, giving complete freedom to the players. If you’ll remember, the original Il-2 owed much of its success to user-made content. We aimed for the same with Cliffs of Dover. Instead of building complex single-player content in-house, we gave the tools to the community. Cliffs of Dover has a much better mission builder with scripting support, supports complex moddable briefings and debriefings, and so on.
Unfortunately 3rd party support never materialized the way we hoped it would, and we ourselves cannot at this point go back and redo single player.
Still, I strongly disagree with your criticism of the single-player. The two campaigns, quick mission builder, and the full mission builder offer a lot in terms of single-player. Standard? I’ve played plenty of AAA games where the entire single-player content is under 20 hours with 0 replay value, and I didn’t even feel like finishing the entire thing. At the same time I’ve logged way more than 20 hours in quick mission builder alone. What does that say about industry standards?

You're joking, right? You aren't really saying that CloD contains any offline and/or gameplay content worth the bits on my HDD?

As for the rest. Building a sandbox for the customers to play in is all fine and dandy if the karking thing had a solid fundament! In the current situation you're essentially saying "You want offline gameplay? Code it yourself." Yep! *shattering round of sarcastic applause* Brilliant. Marvelous. Sorry for the sarcasm overflow. I couldn't help myself at this apparent disregard of an entire slice of your community.

On a more serious note. Yes, the overwhelming majority of good offline content in 1946 came from external sources. But ... you know there was going to be a but ... they had a solid fundament to build their campaigns on. There was a campaign module with rank system and medals (regardless how primitive), but CloD doesn't have any of that. Hence my "Code it yourself" statement. Well ... I can't code, programming languages don't make sense to me. Desastersoft did that, but they have their own style of campaigns and won't (for obvious reasons) release their campaign module for public consumption. Not that this would make much sense given the issues with the AI and the problems with player - AI interaction. Or has there been any addition to the radio menu with ground-attack options? Not? Oops!

So ... bottom line for me is that luthier apparently thinks that gameplay is a luxury and not needed at all. Interesting perspective, especially when you remember that Maddox Games wants to sell computer games. Unless, of course, MMO's are all you're interested in (what a coincidence, isn't it? ). I'll keep an eye on further developments, but I won't expect anything anymore. Have fun with your sandbox in which nothing but the usual clusterf*ck between fighters is possible. Too bad about the possibilities. *shakes head*