Well, well.
here you got a story of a 1C:customer.
I heard the superlatives as 1C was feeding its potential customers. I listened to them. When it was out, I bought it first day.
I went through setting up and found out my plain TIR3 was not supported. I ordered TIR5 from US. A first warning bell went off in my head.
I continued with setting up and on my fairly average rig (Phenom X4 3,2Ghz, 4Gigs RAM, 260OC) I got unplayable game. I was forced to play it in 800x600 window in order to keep framerates high enough. I was shocked by "quality" of sounds. I was horrified of lack of AA/AF. I was terrified by landscape ugliness on low settings. I was shred to tears having 5fps over London, 800x600x32 no AA and no AF.
Then I went to do some proper flying, in the countryside, where fps was somewhat OK. I am a sport pilot IRL and a history buff, so I know what do in WWII airplanes. Equipped with a copy of pilot's notes of Hurricane Mk.I, I spawned myself with a Hurricane, keen on trying the advertised superb clickable cockpit. Yes, I went through the switches and levers. But I was not able to fire that crate up. Not because of bad settings of mixture or whatever. I did not find the coil boost and starter buttons. I tried for 15-20mins blaming my sillyness and after that asked my mate what I am doing wrong. The answer presented with a hearthy laughter was I had to hit I for an engine to start. A second, very loud WTF warning bell started to swing in my dumbfounded head.
After that I was able to fly, wondering how easy it was (full realistic, of course), my approaches and landings were on spot. Sure. I would never accomplish anything like that in real deal. This time, no bell went off, I just accepted that is due to other player's experience issue, yes, I have very high demands on FM and not all simmers are real pilots. Mmmkay then.
Then, another mate asked on forums how to deal with his problems flying the Blenheim. He was somehow able to take off, but afer few minutes, engines went dead. I plunged into that problem, equipped with yet another pilot's notes copy. What I found was, the link between analog controller and the in-cockpit lever was reversed. That means, while the GUI lever was in full rich, the cockpit lever was in full lean, thus reversing the control input. We have been flying on full lean all the time. After that, I found out the ground handling of Blenheim in that test mission was utterly unrealistic from what I know of real flying, as it exhibited a massive tendency to swing to the side both in three and two wheel attitude, which I was only able to counter with setting less power on one engine as controls seemed to be innefective. Later I found out there was a default heavy rudder trim set, which was very effective even in slow pace in three point attitude.
Very strange linkage between the real world input and the cockpit lever, coupled with strange FM behavior on takeoff, that was a bell #3 and a last one.
And that was the end of my flying with Blenheim and the end of my flying CloD. I just quit playing it, it was not worth my precious time and effort as these could be spent more reasonably somewhere else
As I got a digital download, there was no DVD to put on back row on my shelf.
Two weeks after, my $130 TrackIR5 arrived. It was put to a very good use in Rise of Flight, shame I do not have enough time to become another Red Baron.
There was a few bucks lost (and no, it is not a cost of a single date here) and some lessons learned.
I paid a price, expecting a reasonably finished product. I got early aplha. So there is no way I ever buy any 1C:Maddox game in the future unless proved playable by people I trust.
How is it called? Loss of customer's trust towards the developer? A marketing failure?
Because as this customer was cheated, was lied to and after several months did not get the product he bought, he just don't care anymore and is very sceptical about the "support your sheriff" stuff. He knows there are many possible sheriffs out there in town. Sure there is one better then the current one, who is hastily covering his mistakes in keeping public safe and happy.
Decide for yourself.
|