More useless blather from a self-important video game player who is deluded by his web forum admin account into believing he is qualified to judge how a company runs its business. I can't wait for "Tom Cofield" to release a flight sim so I can write my commentary about it.

Yes, but common sense and being happy about the fact that it's much improved from its initial release state doesn't give people the ability to rub it in and chant their "i told you so"s, so we end up delving in the past, day in and day out :-P
In other words:



As for the article, well, it's pretty funny considering all the soft massaging that RoF got over on SimHQ during its early days but i guess the reason is already mentioned in the article: people expect more from someone who's already released a flight sim series than they expect from an up-start company, aka double standards.

The comparison with DCS in terms of business model is only partially valid as well. Doing it like DCS:A-10 and releasing CoD as a beta for people who pre-ordered would indeed be better and deflect the negative criticism. Just make a PC gamer feel he's somehow privileged and the ego swell will take care of the rest even if you provide them with the same build of the game: "wow, i'm part of the beta and get to play before everyone else woooohooo!" as opposed to "man, this game is buggy" :-P
On the other hand, the people who work on DCS have some pretty lucrative contracts with the military in various countries and that's how they subsidize their flight-sim department: make a 100% sim for a military client to train their pilots on, get money, replace the top secret bits and military-specific interface with a gamer packaging and feel in terms of menus/mission editors/etc and sell to the wider public.

Maddox games has nothing of the sort to subsidize their efforts, unless there are air forces who still fly Spitfires and we don't know about it.

Other than that, i think the article is accurate (if a bit aggressively worded at a couple of points). It's just not relevant to the present.

Funny how people can't move on to better things while the game that gave them so much grief is doing exactly that. I mean, i knew each one of us flight sim fans is a bit of a masochist deep down inside, but some do make the extra effort in that department to keep feeling bad as long as possible :cool:

Tree, if this was really similar to what you had been posting over at SimHQ we would all be forced to read this review in every thread everyday for the next six weeks, I think they banned you to save the sanity of the rest of us ;)

You have to close your eyes AND tape them, very tightly, to not seeing how this way of running the business is blatantly wrong. Oh how I wish, as random customer #25135, to not having to write this bellshuuut all the time and instead spend my time playing a great simulation where you are NOT encountering major bugs and flaws on nearly every. single. screen...

The things that were done which are blatantly wrong are not even mentioned in the article.

Point is we have heard it all before... its all redundant bitching now... how many times do we need someone to point out what is wrong? *golf clap* for SimHQ.... they get the Captain Obvious award... maybe the need someone writing articles that actual research something new and interesting...

I am gonna write an article about how the sky is blue.... be back later.

It doesn't surprise me, to say the least, but then my once very favourable opinion about Maddox Games has taken a sharp downturn since "the crunch" (as I call it). I do not know if the new leadership is simply swamped with work so that communication with supporting external parties falls prey to time constraints or if they simply don't care. The former would be understandable - but then it would be easy to post a quick sticky on this board saying so - but the latter would be an inexcusable gesture of contempt to those who spent considerable time on making additional stuff for CloD (i.e. Foobar and his railway stuff). I've already heard rumors about a new behavior when it comes to being offered information for Clod and future titles - key phrase here would be "talking down to externals".

Since Oleg departed MG (and no "press release" can take that opinion away from me) the company's policies have taken a sharp turn to the worse simply by ignoring the potential and creativity of the community and the willingness of individuals to spent their freetime to help bolster the flight sim genre with a little research work of their own. If the CloD release has shown one thing then that MG isn't large enough and not "rich" enough to pull of so fundamentally complex projects without outsourcing some non-essential parts to externals ... Ilya, if you read this (which I doubt), start thinking about the way you and your guys are treating the community and the people who could support you.

This made me chuckle.

The article is not a critique of the game but rather of the way its release and pre-release were handled (in the writers opinion) How further forward it takes the game is easy to guess- nowhere. It does seem odd that there is a firestorm ongoing as to why SimHQ has not put out a review of the game yet at the same time this article gets front page space.

As to the content I think it is for the main part factual, the game was mis-represented as to what it actually was prior to release but then Ubi and the developers were hardly going to yell 'roll up, roll up, give us £50- The game doesn't really work that well but hand over the cash anyway !!'.

I'm not really up for running around with a pitchfork but the single most irksome thing for me is that one of the great names in flight sims (if not the greatest), IL2, has been used to generate sales for a product that didn't really deserve to carry that name. It was a cheap trick and for that Ubi should be rightly criticised.

i wondered why you hadnt posted for some time in simhq;)