Ouch! It's official, no dynamic campaign.

Originally Posted by addman

Of course the Germans can win, just create your own campaign, defeat the RAF. There are ground units -from both sides- in the game but crossing that narrow strip of water with the whole of the Royal Navy in your way might be a bit problematic. Especially if your troops are on river barges LOL!

Off topic , I see you are from Vasa. Do you know a certain Greger Huttu?

[jpinard]

Originally Posted by David603

But how do you propose to do that? In a campaign of this size, no one below strategy making level is able to make changes that have an effect larger than the destruction or survival of a few aircraft, or the successful destruction of individual targets that would otherwise have survived.

Now if you were talking about something like the defence of Malta, then a squadron leader might actually have the power to change the overall results of the battle, but not here.

We had three games from 20 years ago that did a good job with this. Based on your mission success/failure it amplified the results of the missions set for that day. Once you were skilled enough, you were promited to commander and able to set priorities for missions. One big mistake the Germans made was not focusing enough "contiued" effort on airfields, radar, and planes on the ground. As a commander of the Luftwaffe you would change this and see if history would have played out differently. These 3 games were brilliant (for their time) at accomplishing this:

Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

B-17 Flying Fortress: the Mighty 8th

[addman]

Originally Posted by machoo

Off topic , I see you are from Vasa. Do you know a certain Greger Huttu?

Never heard the name before, should I have? I'm from Sweden originally so haven't lived here for so long yet. Maybe I'll bump into him LOL!

He's a extremely famous sim racer , goto any racing forum and put in his name and everyone will know him. Just google his name and google has a melt down

[TacKY]

No purchase from me then until they make one. Dynamic campaigns are the reason I play IL 2. It is immersive as hell to use the Dynamic Campaign Generator and be on a bombing run to Germany with 150 planes in game at once then when the mission is over to check and see if the guy that saved your life in the last mission had survived. It also allows for unlimited replay value. The online campaign sounds good but for me it will never replace a good dynamic campaign.

[Novotny]

One thing to consider, Tacky, is that without sales, there may never be a dynamic campaign. If you like the genre, consider purchasing.

[Blackdog_kt]

I think we all need to weigh things at their appropriate value.

I too would like a dynamic campaign.
I don't believe that just because we're a niche gaming genre we should just accept what's served to us either.

That being said, there's a thing called track record and the ability to make reasonable assumptions about future developments and installments in the series.

Long story short, if a new studio came up and didn't include certain features then i might be tempted to wait it out or not purchase at all, although in most cases if i don't have a problem with how the game functions and its business model i'll probably buy it.
In this particular case, we have a development team that has both a well proven track record and a stated desire to follow on the footsteps of the original IL2 series as far as business model and expansions are concerned.

Explanation? I bought IL2 back in 2001 and it didn't have a dynamic campaign. It had other things though and i divided my time between IL2 and european air war in order to cover all the features i wanted. After some time the IL2 team started churning out expansions and free patches, so it caught up and i stopped flying EAW.

It is the stated goal of the team (they've said so countless times on this forum) to do a similar thing with CoD: release a version with the basics in a state that's playable, functional and not too lacking in any single aspect, then improve things as time goes by. Fine by me, i'll divide my time between IL2 an CoD until the new series can catch up.

Why should we believe them? I do because a) they've pulled off the same thing before and b) the major work of building a new game engine from the ground up is complete, in fact to such an extent that it had to be scaled down to run on current PCs.
The meaning of this is simple: they might need to do some minor tweaking work as time goes by to possibly accommodate newer hardware, but for the most part the engine is good for the next couple of years, so they'll only focus on enriching the content.

I definitely love a good dynamic campaign with immersive elements like the one in red baron 2, even the one in EAW was good although it was repetitive (but that was also realistic, certain squads mostly flew a certain type of mission). However, the lack of it is not something that will prevent me from enjoying the rest of CoD's features.

The way i see it, no single feature is capable of sapping my interest in this sim on its own. If it was a combination of missing features then yes, i'd have a problem, but as long as the sum of what's there weighs more on my personal scale than the sum of what's not, i can buy it and happily wait for the rest.

Whatever simulators i didn't buy the last couple of years, i made the decision not to buy with a similar mindset. I didn't exclude them for just one feature, but for a combination of features.

Some questions i ask myself before buying usually go like this:

Does it have realistic FM/DM?
Does it have extra features on top of FM/DM that tie in with how the modeled war machines in question operate?
What do the graphics/sounds/effects look like?
What does the campaign system look like?
Can i use it whenever i want to with little or no restrictions (ie DRM and stuff)?
What are the system requirements?
Does it deliver a good hardware to performance and quality ratio?
How is the customer support handled?
How are the add-ons handled in regards to delivery methods, pricing and content?
Does it have enough player controlled and AI units out of the box to enable a sufficiently accurate representation of the chosen theater of operations?

Etc, etc.

With the exception of the FM/DM which is the defining feature of the simulator genre (that is, you can make arcade games with WWII airplanes and still include most of the other features apart from the FM/DM), i can compromise on the rest. All of them? No, some of them and not particular ones.

If i am missing 2-3 features that i have a pretty good possibility of seeing added in the future (a possibility usually judged from the developer's track record and stated goals), then i go out and buy a new sim.
If it lacks enough flyables, has a low count of AI units, a rudimentary campaign, a hassle of a DRM scheme, is buggy, has an uncertain future that might leave me with an unsupported (or even unusable in the case of online verification) game and i have to fund it through the development of core components of the game engine through DLC purchases, then i don't buy it. But if it survives and there's a way to fix these drawbacks, i might reconsider and purchase at a later date.

There's a lot of room for variation, so i don't see why all of a sudden there's a bunch of people going "i won't buy" based on a single feature. I'm not saying what's important to me must be equally important to everyone else since it's a matter of taste. In fact, what i'm saying is not what you should base your decisions on, but how many of those things you like and expect to see in a new sim are actually there.
I just can't understand why we should base our decisions on the inclusion or lack of one single thing among many equally important ones

[Acid]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I definitely love a good dynamic campaign with immersive elements like the one in red baron 2 :

i agree, what made that game fun was its dynamic campaign and pilot career mode lot of depth to it. The awards and medals you gained through skill and not just given them through some scripted event, im hoping they'll have something like this in CoD, if not on release later on.

[Flying Pencil]

Will the game feature a dynamical campaign?
No, at least not in the initial release of the game.

Even if CoD is only 1/2 as good as IL-2, chances are DC will be implemented later.

[BigC208]

The reason a lot of people say they're not going to buy the game is they think they can force certain things into the game before release. Too late!
Most fence sitters and malcontents will be back on board within a week after release when they read how great all the features are, that did make it in. If the release mimmicks RoF launch, all bets are off. I remember playing the RoF demo when it was just released and that was not a pretty experience. Took untill the Iron Cross Edition for me to open the wallet. If the RoF team had the track record Oleg has, I would 've bought right away.

For the diehards it won't make any difference. We trust Oleg to make this game the best WWII simulator money can buy.