Friday Update, February 24, 2012

I don't have anything against the ground vehicles per-say, except that I'm afraid that it is going to make the flight aspect less enjoyable online.

Example:

This engine is limited to 128 people in multiplayer (realistically, much fewer than that). You have maps so large that they make ARMA II maps look like Quake III maps. Fitting 64 players into a BF1942 map was possible, and even then some of the maps resulted in spending more than 10 minutes driving around and never seeing an enemy. Move those 64 players into a Clod map, have them divided between two sides, and two different aspects (air and ground) and you'd have pilots who never run into other pilots, and ground vehicles who never meet their own side, or the enemy for that matter.

Let's say that by some miracle 80 people logged into the same map.

40 on each side.
One side has 20 pilots, and 20 vehicles. Assume the same for the other side. Putting that many into a CLOD map means that there is a hell of a lot of ground to cover before you even meet an opposing player, if you do. To make sure ground units even have a chance to run into their opposing side you have to bring the scale of the map down drastically, and in that case flying becomes a claustrophobic experience much like BF1942.

You're going to have a half-assed ground war, and in order for it to even be a little bit fun you have to handicap the air war by limiting the map size. Hell might as well just play ARMA II and get the 1944 mod.

Maybe they have some revolutionary idea that will circumvent this, but they're not saying anything except, "This is a test, we don't know if it will be implemented". To me it sounds like they are going for a market that isn't just a niche or a sub-niche, but might not even exist.

The only way I see this working is if the tanks were already AI controlled and doing their own thing to begin with. Maybe when the AI tanks approached where the action is, human players could just jump into them. But then you have fewer people in the air. If most of the aircraft are just AI controlled, then what is the draw for the human players to play online instead of SP?