But we can still live with it, I guess…

[Majo]

With this game again we run into the problem of trying to target for the wider possible audience. The publisher is trying to make a profitable product targeting to as many possible people willing to pay for fun.

Some of us just value this game and pay for it as a mean to reach the highest possible fidelity of simulation, historically accurate, tactics, navigation, FM, DM, peripherals, and so on... like in the “warbirds old days”.

Some others just want to have fun and pay for it. They will play this game among others, depending of the mood of the day. Just another game...

I am not sure if there is any possible migrations between these groups.

With the years Il2 has been distilling its self becoming more and more the pure essence of online WWII aircraft combat, and an offline/online way to truly reproduce events of WWII aircraft combat.
In my opinion thanks to this and with some “help” form the modding community, il2 has been a success during the last 7 years.

We do not care about simulated girls. We do not care about “renegade” pilots or romantic nonsense arguments (in my opinion). When we read this in the interviews, we just fake a smile trying to understand what the hell this guy Luthier is thinking…

But we can still live with it, I guess…at least as long this thing does not get out of hand. Because you have to remember that the people that will make this thing move for the next years won´t be the “just another game” people.

I honestly think that the tougher competence for il2 is il2 its self.

Salutes.

[addman]

I don't mind being entertained while I try to keep an airplane in the air, flying full real. I don't feel Oleg/Ilya has compromised on what's the core of the game and as long as there is a solid foundation you can always keep on adding more stuff. Install and play IL-2 Sturmovik 1.0 for a while then install IL-2 1946 4.10 and play that for a while, you'll see what I mean. We've been very spoiled with all the free contents in all the pacthes for IL-2, even though I've been on the "train" since the bluebyte forums I've also been spoiled through the years. Right now I'm just being grateful this thing is actually hitting stores in less than 2 months (!!!)

[winny]

Originally Posted by Majo

Some others just want to have fun and pay for it. They will play this game among others, depending of the mood of the day. Just another game...

I am not sure if there is any possible migrations between these groups.


We do not care about simulated girls. We do not care about “renegade” pilots or romantic nonsense arguments (in my opinion). When we read this in the interviews, we just fake a smile trying to understand what the hell this guy Luthier is thinking…

I came to IL-2 via Birds of Prey on console, so the migration does happen, I'm proof of that.

And shouldn't you be saying 'I' instead of 'we' ? One of the things I'm looking forward to is being placed into a historical setting in the Battle of Britain, as I find IL-2's whole breifing system very dated.. Read this, go and fly, read this, go and fly. No wider picture.

[1.JaVA_Sharp]

Just about the only thing where they got this right was the Glowing Glory campaign. That narrative left me speechless.

[Blackdog_kt]

Jesus, this is not about the Spit girl again, is it?

It's a plot device in a scripted campaign that happens ONCE, probably as a way to show off some triggers of the new mission builder, not something that will happen every time.

So you can chill out and don't worry about your entire campaign being unrealistic or hollywood sequences.

It's just like flying a scripted, user made campaign in IL2 and you see a Heinkel that doesn't shoot at your Hurricane.
Well, maybe the guy who made the missions wants to provide some surprises but apparently a single occurrence of imagination at work is a punishable offence unless there are documents to back up it happened

The realism for me is in how the planes fly, shoot and get destroyed. As long as 14 missions out of 15 are normal missions i don't mind 1 in 15 where something unusual and interesting happens. Oh, and don't keep thinking that a normal mission involves always meeting the enemy, fighting to the death and returning home with multiple kills like it is in iL2, because such a high frequency of combat is as unrealistic as flying with a girl on your lap.

Every mission ending in a dogfight is Hollywood too, it's just the acceptable type of it because explosions sell games, but i don't see many realism experts complaining about not enough missions where we don't make contact with the enemy

[Majo]

Blackdog_kt
Jesus, this is not about the Spit girl again, is it?

No of course is not, like someone said you have to look a little further.

This is about who is going to maintain this game alive long enough to emulate the il2, forgotten battle, aces, pacific,... path?

Who? The girl? The renegades?...

I do not think so. But like I said before is just my guess.

Salutes Majo.

[recoilfx]

Man, this reminds me of a church of old geezers who screams at anything remotely unorthodox. As the years go by, there are less and less parishioners - and they wonder why their church is dieing.

As long as the core principle is still in place for CoD (and Oleg has again and again proved that this will be the most detailed ww2 flight sim ever), I absolutely have no problem with spending dev time on semi-fictional missions/campaigns. We got a 1946 expansion didn't we?

If anything, I think Oleg should've spent more time easing people in with better user interface, better training missions, missions with great voice overs and trigger events that will let an average user understand the 1940 BoB mentality.

Flight sims is awesome in that it really takes our patience to learn, and in the end, we feel a sense of accomplishment. We need to keep user's interest and feeling of accomplishment as they climb the learning curve.

We old timers can create 'dry' historical missions/campaigns ourselves - we are more than capable of that, so why complain now that we have better tools at our disposal?

[Majo]

I like that:

"The core principles".

I think that is what we need, to ensure the "The core principles" are in place.
That will keep il2 moving strong.

Thank you recoilfx, sir I could not have it expressed better.

Salutes.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Majo

No of course is not, like someone said you have to look a little further.

This is about who is going to maintain this game alive long enough to emulate the il2, forgotten battle, aces, pacific,... path?

Who? The girl? The renegades?...

I do not think so. But like I said before is just my guess.

Salutes Majo.

Well, then let me extend my apologies for misunderstanding you

To be honest, i'm not worried. The game seems to have enough content for launch, certainly equal to the original IL2 version of 2001 but done with a lot more fidelity and complexity. Between learning all the new methods of controlling an aircraft, learning to apply them in combat and having a huge community of mission makers with a mission builder in their hands, we will be busy enough and probably not have the chance of getting bored before the missing stuff gets implemented.

The guys who will carry the new title forward are already here. If a couple of unorthodox happenings in the campaign have the potential to draw a few more people in without derailing what the game's scope is at large, i'm all for it. Some of these new people might not be cut out for flight sims, others might be able to continue onwards and gradually progress to full flight simmer status. I mean sure, i've been flying full switch for years, but i didn't start out that way...we all started somewhere

[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

The guys who will carry the new title forward are already here. If a couple of unorthodox happenings in the campaign have the potential to draw a few more people in without derailing what the game's scope is at large, i'm all for it. Some of these new people might not be cut out for flight sims, others might be able to continue onwards and gradually progress to full flight simmer status. I mean sure, i've been flying full switch for years, but i didn't start out that way...we all started somewhere

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.