Total disagreement to your views of BOP being 'immersive' & PC flight sims as being largely dull & boring but respect your points & the way you put them across.

IL-2 (proper IL-2), Lock On, Rise of Flight, Battle of Britain etc are titles you would have to include in your description & each one has immersion by the bucket load & as much customizeable playability to suit any aviation enthusiast or indeed gamer. Wanna just taxi around, take off, freefly then land again? you can do that with all the above mentioned PC sims. (Hell, BOP even takes away the landing OPTION by about a few missions in & landings in the single player game are as rare as easter eggs). Tailor each encounter with a simplistic quick mission builder, giving total longevity to the title & finish it all off with the option of a replay facility to view your action? it's all there in all the titles but completely non-present in BOP.
Then there's the gameplay of the above mentioned PC titles. They can all be tuned down to almost blatant arcade shoot em ups with auto this & auto that.
I think the stigma given off by PC flight titles being dull & boring is derived from the microsoft flight sim series (which you would have a good case but I personally find FSX, together with great addons, photoreal scenery of your area & your local airbase in 3D etc, one of the best virtual flight experiences going).
I'm afraid I have never been able to associate BOP with any form of immersion but it's finding a fan base & that's good news. The PC version Wings of Prey is where I'm at now with this series & that is finding it's own fanbase. Everyone's happy.
Before last October though, I was convinced that Birds of Prey was going to steal the title "most realistic & immersive console flight experience" from Over G Fighters but I was very wrong. It's sure pretty & the arcade fun of blasting endless Heinkel after Heinkel outta the sky in seconds flat finds a market but when you mention immersion, that's where we are in healthy disagreement.

I'm also a race fan & have been since the early colin mcrae titles & so GTR series was great fun with total immersive race experiences but IMO Race Pro was a graphical & gameplay disaster with horrendous ai damage detection issues (you could overtake THROUGH the sides of opponents etc). It had the atmosphere of a wake & I think it, along with FORZA 2 & 3, fell long short in realism & feel, of even the TOCA Race Driver series on the last gen machines. :)

Yes Indeed
 

I think some of you hit the nail on the head with this. I don't think anyone is debating that flight SIMs on the PC are more in depth and offer more realistic flight models. But in order to run these games anymore you need to invest in a high performance computer which in turn dwindles the market. I think a lot of us had the unrealistic expectation that BOP might somehow bring depth and high performance to the console and thus make it available to a much larger market. Unfortunately they fell somewhat short of this mark, and so despite BOP being an impressive and entertaining game in its own right, one cannot help but notice that it fell far short of its potential. Some of it is limitations of the console but I still believe a lot of it comes from rushing the game to production and skipping corners on design. It seems to be the trend with a lot of games nowadays...

Whatever happened to games like Red Baron, European Air War, Air Warrior, and Luftwaffe commander?

RUSSIAN BUSINESS MODEL: FIRST, STEAL ALL WORLD'S UNDERPANTS, THIRD, PROFIT...

I'm not gonna get involved in the rest of the thread because I've said my piece more than once. But just wanted to say, bang on the money, I miss the Air Warrior Days :( it wouldn't cut the mustard by today's standards, but by god it was amazing at the time. And no mentally long lists of keys just all done using commands in the escape key :)

European Air War :D

now that was a game, i loved it! heres a clip i made when i used to play it, naturally in my hurricane lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS92fKZyntk

Air Warrior and EAW
 

Of course the graphics are dated on both of these games but what flawless design! 50+ flyable aircraft in the Air Warrior series to include COCKPIT views on ALL planes, even the heavy bombers! On top of this it had an incredible online setting in the form of taking part in historical missions or the amazing free-for-all war mode in which a campaign was ongoing constantly online with players from all over the world! Fighters of all types, bombers of all types, paratroopers, and even tanks! This was over 10 years ago! EAW had breakthrough graphics for the time and a great career interface. BOP reminded me a lot of EAW when it first came out, but again, the older game had the better design, setup, and realism. If anything they should have borrowed the 256 color German cockpits from those games... No excuse...

lets not forget multiple gunners and gunner views, plus bombsights, independant engine management, and an intricate capture system, plus 200+ multiplayer... not even modern PC games can do that these days.

accept for Aces High which is still going I Believe.

Jeesh
 

It almost makes me cry to think about it... We need to pull some developers out of retirement I think...

could anyone put a ball park monetary figure on the sort of PC one would need to run a decent sim these days...something that would make the most of , say, storm of war, if it ever gets here...leave the multiple monitor set up out of your equation ...just doing some sums for this year;)
________
Grape Ape

It's been a while since I owned a PC but most of the budget PC's will have adequate RAM and Processor speeds but may not be well suited to be upgraded or have adequate graphics chipsets. The fly in the ointment for me has always been the Graphics card. Every time a new and better game comes out you can bet its written for optimum performance using a later Graphics card of a particular type and you end up having to continually replace it or download some sort of bloody 'Patch' (that word again!...) or 'driver'. That's why I bought a console, all games are coded for the same graphics chipset. Best to check the recommended spec for the game you want and make sure your PC meets it or can be upgraded to meet it. Should be fine for 6 months........(eternal pessemist me!) which is why I bought a console...........no worries about 'drivers' and 'patches' or games that don't work........oops! ......I'm out of here before I get shot and dismembered....:rolleyes:

Gotta laugh at the radio chatter. The pilots were terribly proper English gents in those days.