Salute
To address the question put forward by the original poster:
Oleg had a definite vision of what the STORM OF WAR was going to be. That would have put it far ahead of anything else produced in the Flight Sim genre.
However, for reasons we are not privy to, he left for an opportunity in industrial graphics, taking with him his chief code programmer.
Whether his leaving was primarily to do with an opportunity to explore a new field, or whether it was a function of issues between himself and 1C is a question which has not been answered.
Those who remained in the development team were not able to accomplish the goals which Oleg had originally set.
Luthier was an individual who had entered the Flight Sim business from a starting position as an amateur enthusiast, who started by doing volunteer graphics modelling. (remember the Bi1 in IL-2?) For whatever reason he and the team of programmers and coders were not able to implement the business plan set by 1C and the Maddox development team after Oleg left. Perhaps that plan was too ambitious? Perhaps the decisions made were not achievable with the skills remaining in the development team. I think personally quite a number of aircraft and objects included in the game were superfluous to the basic requirements of a BoB scenario. Perhaps the effort put into those objects was a factor in the lack of attention put to more basic and important concerns.
In any case we were left with a published game which was seriously lacking, full of bugs and not ready for use.
It took another year and a half to get it into reasonable shape. Now it is actually a well performing online game, more than able to accomodate 80 players, with most of the graphics bugs gone.
However, many issues remain, the primary being the failure to model altitude performance correctly.
Could these have been fixed with another 3 months of focused work? Perhaps. Perhaps the decision to focus the efforts of the development team on a BATTLE OF MOSCOW sequel should have been put aside until the basic game was performing as it should have.
1C made a financial and managerial decision, which we do not have the details of, to drop the game. How much of the decision was a function of their evaluation of the code's failings, and how much a function of their evaluation of the development team failings is unclear.
So we are left with an unfinished dream, which any detailed examination will tell has enormous potential, but which is now a seeming dead end.
A waste? Perhaps. Oleg's vision has not been fulfilled by the publishers. Maybe the goals were too lofty.
Now it is up to the community to take it further. If people believe in CoD sufficiently, they will step up and move it forward. Otherwise it will be just another dream unfulfilled.
We are where we are.
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