Quote:
Originally Posted by Ali Fish
(Post 287025)
a failure ? thats mighty harsh for a 1:1 scale representation of south east england. the un-educated critique around here is astounding. no wonder the developers shy away from any form of up front discussion. this is a simulation. not a game.
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Well, my astounding, harsh and uneducated critique is based on the fact that I actually live in the area covered by CloD's map and frequently fly over it in a glider.
Generally, I find that CloD does a poor job of reflecting reality. The colours of the fields are wrong, the distinctive and near-universal dark hedges are missing, the trees are too light and so look like tropical specimens rather than the trees that actually grow in England, the horizon is too sharp and the colours don't mute into a blue haze in the distance like they do in real life [1]. Other sims get these things right, CloD doesn't. Of course, it's better at dawn and dusk, and best of all at midnight. Unfortunately, a BoB sim that doesn't work well in daylight is a bit limited.
What's exasperating about these (IMO serious) failures is that they were all quite avoidable. A lot of what's wrong is just the colour palatte. So claims that CloD looks less realistic than WoP because it's actually much more advanced rather miss the point. For instance, ClodD's higher resolution terrain textures could actually have used realistic colours and still kept their high resolution.
Speaking only for myself, I find the peculiar landscape CloD uses to represent England to be a real immersion killer. I didn't mind when IL-2 represented the Kuban or somewhere as a vast green plain, because I don't know the place in real life. But England is very familiar and it just doesn't look like CloD's representation. WoP (if the filters were removed) and FSX do a rather better job, in my opinion. Even RoF's France looks more like England, at least from high up.
To this particular English pilot, CloD looks like a cartoon version of the real England put together by someone who has never been here and didn't do much research before starting. And perhaps that is exactly what it is.
Now, obviously, some people are perfectly happy with CloD's England. And good luck to them and I hope they enjoy their game.
1. Some problems may be because I use an ATi 6970 and CloD doesn't seem to have been designed with modern ATi cards in mind. On my old GTX285 the horizon did look better.
