Is it just me, or do some some of us expect "weird" things from this sim? I mean, it's a matter of taste obviously and every opinion is welcome, but think about it.
Given the limited development time remaining and the need to get everything right and released within 2010, wouldn't it be more important for a flight sim to have something else modelled in place of an FPS mini-game when you get shot down? There's countless of things that could be done to enhance immersion when you're still in the cockpit, why think about what happens when we leave the cockpit when we're still this early in the sim's life?
For example, if Oleg's team told us they had time for one more cosmetic feature and put up a poll on this forum, i wouldn't vote for "let me kill some women's auxiliary baloon corp members with my luger, before i dive from the cliffs of Dover and swim across the channel back to Abbeville"
I would vote for things like historical engine start sequences, with an option to have it both ways like FSX and Black Shark. That is, you can click all the switches yourself, or press the ignition button and the AI does it for you, but there's still a check-list to go through and you can't just get it running in seconds. It would make for some interesting scramble missions, don't you think?
Or the ability to be a ground controller in multiplayer, which would only take a screen of a radar scope to implement. Maybe the ability to have animated crewmembers inside a mutli-crewed bomber and give specific orders to them like lowering gear manually, putting out a fire or giving first aid to the tail gunner, like it was in B17 II: the mighty 8th.
If we really want to run wild with ideas, there's a lot of things we haven't yet covered about the experience of flying these aircraft. In a flight sim, i think these are more important than trying to turn the game around from a flight sim to a semi-tactical shooter.
Don't get me wrong, i'd love to see servers someday where we have air, land and sea units all battling it out and it could also be done in 1:1 scale maps. If a unit was too slow (eg, infantry or tanks) or too far away from the target (like a B17 flying a 6 hour raid), we could have certain nodes and tell the AI to drive there, then the players take control. So, a fighter pilot on a CAS sortie would start inside the hangar but the infatryman would respawn at a node much closer to the action, while the heavies would be halfway across the North Sea and nearing Holland before the player jumped in and took over control from the AI. There's a load of things that could be done and a lot of terrific ideas are being proposed, i just think it's a bit early to be focusing on anything else than aircraft and air combat right now.
In any case, i'm mighty impressed during the past couple of weeks. Keep up the good work Oleg and team and as for the rest of us, let's keep the ideas going.
11-03-2009, 05:08 AM
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