In the latest patch, high-gore effects was removed entirely.

The arrows in arcade mode are quite long and don't effectively show when a bullet has been stopped by armor or bounced off the skin of the aircraft. ie, the arrow may be going through the pilot's torso, but it actually went through bits of the aircraft structure and was stopped.

It's also important to note that the latest Il-2s had rear-gunner armor. It was a 3-sectioned steel plate. There is also extra armor around the top of the fuselage around the gunner. Because of the weight of this extra armor, the wings were redesigned with a backwards sweep to maintain CG balance.

Lastly, it's important to remember that in the Il-2, the gun was springloaded or balanced such that it would always point upwards when the gunner was disabled, in order to trick the enemy into thinking he was still alive, and deter attacks. It might not always be so obvious when a crewman has been hit.

Does anyone know why the high-gore effects were removed? I don't need blood in the cockpit, but slumped down pilots and gunners are a useful feature and would make the game more realistic.

Probably affected the game's ESRB rating to have gore. Developers have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get sign-offs with the ESRB. The less of that one has to go through - and still put out a game within it's intended design philosophy - the better.

The Russian version was not affected by the removal of :
Gore=1
Probably around the same time the Swastika was removed from the sim.

The bloodiest cockpit I've seen..................

Slumped down crews shouldn't be a problem for the ESRB rating, as long as no blood is shown. Rise of Flight has slumped down pilots and gunners too and it has an ESRB rating of 10+.

I wonder if it would be possible for Daidalos Team to re-introduce the feature (without blood). This would make the game more realistic and we wouldn't have to guess any longer if a gunner is still active or not.

I hope a DT member can comment on that.

If seeing if you have killed the enemy Pilot/Gunner is important to you, it is to me, there is at least one very good high gore mod.

To find it go to the SAS forum. The Name of the moder is Wolfighter.

This only works for some planes. More valuable, Wolfighter also worked hard to get realistic blood splashes on the inside of certain planes and realistic moving oil splashes on the outside, which were also visible in external view. It's a nice bit if "eye candy" with important game effects in full-cockpit view.

@Luno: I was thinking of the field mod Sturmovik. You're right that later versions had better armor for the gunner. Even so, his head and upper body were exposed, making him vulnerable to attacks from above and behind. That was a problem for just about all gunners.

It also appears that in arcade mode, that a bullet has to hit a pilot in the center of his head in order from him to be killed. Even in unarmored planes, bullets that pass cleanly through the arms, legs and torso either don't hit or only wound, which is odd. But then, Arcade Mode only registers pilot and crew kills, not wounds.

While it's low priority, arcade mode could be reworked to record more recent changes to damage modeling - fuel leaks, oil leaks, bleeding crew, injuries to limbs. Also, the arrows could be reworked to remove the "fletching" at the trailing end. They're just a waste of polygons; there's no need for them given the length of the arrow.

I have no problem with the length of the arrow itself. Sometimes you need that length to see how a bullet passes (or might pass) through a large plane. If you know where the vital parts and armor are, you can sort of guess whether a bullet has been stopped.

"Over the top" comes to mind...

What'd they do? Blow a grenade in the cockpit?

I don't think anyone with blood that colour would pass the Luftwaffe pilot's medical...

20mm cannon shell hit?

But I agree, it is over the top. The idea is to tell you if an opponent is out of action, not to recreate the horrors of war.