SimHQ preview: First Look: Rise Of Flight

Feathered_IV · #1 03-01-2009, 09:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

In RB2 i liked the period-specific feel that pervaded the whole sim, from the little video clips, to the ability to set up lone wolf patrols. To borrow some terminology from the MMO game genre, a good sim today needs to have a "sandbox" feel to it, like the old ones did. We have the technology for clickpits, amazing graphics and highly accurate FM/DM, but we are missing the sense of being there, ie some of the new sims feel too sterile.

What i'd like to see is a believable environment where you are somebody else leading a different life for the duration of your gaming session, much like it's done in MMO games. Don't get me wrong, i love IL2 but this is one area where it was severely lacking from the beginning of the series. No matter what, there's always the feeling that i'm playing a simulator, mainly due to the menu screen layouts and the impersonal way the AI is handled. I get the feeling ROF will walk some steps toward correcting this trend and i hope the final release and SOW (when it comes) will give us that feeling again.

Couldn't agree more. So many developers seem unable to grasp this though.
The Il-2 series never did really handle the single player experience with any particular soul. I worry that the same thing will happen in SoW. Luthier reckons he is overseeing the single player aspect of BoB. He was the one who championed the idea of abandoning your aircraft, to run to a flak gun instead....

I suspect Oleg is too much of a technician, and Luthier is too much of a gamer, for either of them to make a truly next-gen single player experience.

Blackdog_kt · #2 03-01-2009, 09:50 AM

Well, according to the latest interview by Mr. Maddox (it's linked in the questions thread) and after the necessary "decryption" when using online translators, i think that the SoW engine will be a huge step forward and may allow 3rd party developers to give us something like that. Honestly, if SoW is half as good as i expect it to be i'll still go out and buy it. The important thing is to make a solid base to expand upon and make it easily and legally moddable, to an extent that you can also safeguard against cheating.

If you take the time to read that interview, you'll see they are really working hard on that aspect of enabling people to adding new content in the engine over time. Maybe SoW will not be something spectacular as far as the amount of flyables go, but i'm pretty sure it will shake up a lot in a sim's ability to expand. The guy talked about the possibility to add player controlled patrol boats and subs for online play at a later date, or even create pay-to-play spin-offs from the original engine. Maybe the SoW engine is not so much a game, as it is a modular operating system, the Linux of simulators. We'll see. Until then we'll be getting busy with DCS:BS and RoF, so it's bound to be a good year for all of us