It's not so much that this sim was/is buggy, but that pretty much every decision that was made up until this point was the wrong one! I’m talking 1C, Ubisoft, and ESPECIALLY Maddox Games! I wanted this game to do well, but it looks like the above mentioned have successfully managed to shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly. Maybe if they read this they will avoid this same situation in the future. If you diagree with a point, feel free to mention it.

1. Years ago Oleg and Co. were showcasing tank and double decker bus models made with incredible detail, for a sim that depicts a battle pretty much devoid of any ground vehicle having any impact whatsoever. We're missing the E4, but at least we have a Churchill tank. Great priorities.

2. Trying to appease the rivet counters who were complaining about the colour of Big Ben and pointing out that the handrails on Tower Bridge were not 1940 appropriate instead of working on content that affects the gameplay. Fixing a landmark’s shade or hand railing is a job for patches, priorities again! I have no problem with making sure the Pitot tube is in the right place, or that there were spelling mistakes in the cockpit since they are things you see every day, but if you're actually devoting time to changing the shade of grey used on a landmark you'll probably fly past twice at an altitude to notice. . . well really!

3. Putting too much priority on Dynamic weather when it was obvious you would need a separate computer just to run it. Get the game running first (like sometime in 2009 or 2010) and worry about the weather later. Once the game is running close to 100% optimized, then you throw more processor intensive stuff at it. I’m sure that 99% of the gamers here would have been happy to just have clouds a step up from IL-2 instead of trying to get "Weather Simulator 2011" added as well.

4. The SP campaign. That was embarrassing! The mission briefings, and debriefings were laughable, and honestly, I have never seen anything that poorly done, and I’ve been playing PC games since . . . 1992 or so. The campaigns themselves were horribly done as well. The battle of Britain was about massed bomber formations attacking airfields and later cities, not piecemeal packets of bite-sized bomber groups being intercepted by a handful of fighters.

5. DirectX9 compliancy. . . why? Firstly DX9 cards are woefully inadequate to play this game, and people using XP are a slim minority of simmers. Plus DX9 is a nightmare to code for and a huge waste of time. The number of people we would have lost by not supporting DX9 would have been tiny compared to the number of people we lots because this game is a bugfest and doesn’t have DX11 support which would do wonders for optimizing and getting faster frame rates.

6. Textures. We’ve got 20mb textures of a pilot’s trousers. . . do I need to say more?

7. The Name change! Been done to death, it’s a problem that’s too late to fix. How many people have looked at IL-2 Cliffs of Dover and thought the following two things. “Hmm, what happened to storm of war” or “What the hell is an IL-2?”. Oleg had a great name, “Storm Of War: Battle of Britain”. The SOW part would work for any conflict, and the BOB straight up told you what you could expect to be doing. Cliffs of Dover doesn’t carry the same context or weight for a lot of people. All that word of mouth being built up for SOW, and three months before the game was released, change it?

8. Speak of the Launch, what the hell! There are hundreds of people Seeding this game on dozens of Torrent Sites. They have been doing this for the better part of a month, and stats say this has been downloaded a lot. A synchronized release date can help combat this by not making gamers who want to play it now, wait for a month. “Luckily” (using that ironically) the game is so buggy that the people pirating it think it’s some manner of brilliant DRM/Copy Protection.

9. Speaking of a Buggy Launch. . . What would have been better wait until it was playable, or get it out of the gate ASAP so that people can play it and then badmouth it. Every review out there says that it’s a bugfest that should be avoided. When it’s fully patched do you think that anyone is going to bother reinstalling it to change their year old review of a niche title? Probably not. The only reviews out there for probably the next few years will be ones that say, “Avoid this Product”. If they wanted to get the game out early, make some money and avoid all the bad press they could have taken a page from DSC A-10, World of Tanks, Minecraft etc. Say the release is an open beta that entitles you to the full game once it’s released. That way you start making money for people who want to play it now, they give you valuable input as to gameplay and bugs, and reviewers are stopped in their tracks when it comes to bugs/poor content because “It’s still in Beta stages”.

10. Speaking of getting it out there. What kind of advertising campaign was this? A single event in Moscow, a few interviews with Sim HQ, and a web site that looks like a 12 year old made it then got bored and never finished it. What are these publishers being paid for? Everyone downloads the game now, and they can’t even be bothered to make a real website for it or spend a dime to put out an ad? Youtube and Steam are good to get the word out there, but actually spending money on advertising is much better to move a product. Or does Ubi want this to fail?

11. Oleg and Luthier taking the time to post on these forums to appease the rivet counters, but when things go to hell give no manner of info to the community, just "here's a patch, everything fixed!" Meanwhile over half the people that install it find one issue resolved and 10 more created.

Well, that's the end of my rant, hopefully the continued work on this game and the follow up title (crossed fingers) avoid some of these issued.