Some new official info from ubi forums

[BigC208]

Heliocon, you answer you own question in the last paragraph of you post.

"Its a question of sales, and to get sales they have to target the right market sectors."

The right market sector is the lowest common denominator. The kid playing the game on a hand me down, bought at Best Buy 4 years ago. Upgraded with $150 gpu 2 years ago. If that kid thinks CoD is going to be a slideshow he won't buy it. If he does buy it, and it runs and looks halve decent, 1C has another convert for life. In two or three years he'll upgrade with a, by then cheap, middle of the road computer, turn the eye candy up and play the game as well as you and I on or now expensive high end computers.

Sad for us more fortunate? Jus the way it is. Wish it was different but without that kids $50 you and I will not be playing this game at all. I've got the best I can afford today coming down the pipeline and will probably only be able to use 50% of it's potential with CoD out of the box. That's really my own bad cause I knew that when I ordered it. I'm pretty sure though that I can get it on its knees when making custom missions.

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by BigC208

Heliocon, you answer you own question in the last paragraph of you post.

"Its a question of sales, and to get sales they have to target the right market sectors."

The right market sector is the lowest common denominator. The kid playing the game on a hand me down, bought at Best Buy 4 years ago. Upgraded with $150 gpu 2 years ago. If that kid thinks CoD is going to be a slideshow he won't buy it. If he does buy it, and it runs and looks halve decent, 1C has another convert for life. In two or three years he'll upgrade with a, by then cheap, middle of the road computer, turn the eye candy up and play the game as well as you and I on or now expensive high end computers.

Sad for us more fortunate? Jus the way it is. Wish it was different but without that kids $50 you and I will not be playing this game at all. I've got the best I can afford today coming down the pipeline and will probably only be able to use 50% of it's potential with CoD out of the box. That's really my own bad cause I knew that when I ordered it. I'm pretty sure though that I can get it on its knees when making custom missions.

Right - but I would say COD is aiming for a slightly different market, not many kids play flight sims (compared to say, FPS's). If it is scalable then it will be all good, but scripted missions to me are "not" scalable (usualy ).

Actually I just realised, I am more irritated with peoples excuses of CPU bottlenecks then the actual 21 planes themselves... lol

[vicinity]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

Actually I just realised, I am more irritated with peoples excuses of CPU bottlenecks then the actual 21 planes themselves... lol

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of CPU it takes to create decent physics in a combat flight sim type game such as COD. Think of all the forces that have to be calculated lift, thrust, drag, weight, torque etc. and this isn't one big simple calculation, it is many many calculations that have to be applied to many surfaces and objects continually and will change based on other things such as altitute or damage sustained. Then you have to take into account all the other things that are modelled such as ballistics and other ground based objects.

The difference with a RTS game is that your units will not have any physics at all to compute. Each unit is a list of numbers which go through a relatively basic calculation to determine which number is bigger i.e. who wins. The reason RTS games are CPU intensive is because of the large numbers of units possible. Path-finding is indeed CPU intensive but do you think that there is no path-finding in COD? Path-finding in 3d space is exponetially more CPU intensive than on a single plane.

The point being that yes, both types of games are CPU intensive but for very different reasons. As others have said larger formations will be possible but this is a product, and you sell a product to as many customers as possible - it doesn't mean the game has been coded badly or they are trying to dumb the game down to remove all your fun.

Besides, as others have said if your computer can handle it there'll be plenty of big formation missions built by the community. Goodluck shooting down 20+ bombers when they come along.