But we can still live with it, I guess…

[Kikuchiyo]

Originally Posted by Bullethead

Look, I'm not dissing IL-2, Oleg, or anybody who plays these games. While I have never owned an IL-2 title myself, I've flown them a few times over the years at friends' houses and have always been very impressed by the overall quality, both visually and mechanically. It's only been the rather limited forms of gameplay of the franchise that have kept me from buying the games. Obviously, the existing IL2 community is quite happy with it, but they're a niche within a niche. While all serious simmers want realism, most of them are willing to settle for a bit less to get the gameplay they want. So until the IL2 franchise puts out that type of gameplay, it won't attract much in the way of new customers, no matter how realistic and graphically stunning it is.

I only got into this conversation because, from lurking here and at Ubi in anticipation of COD, I've noticed a lot of folks (such as the one I quoted in my 1st post here) hoping COD will bring in more customers, thus allowing Oleg to do more IL-2 stuff in the future. Or at the very least, that it would generate enough sales that Ubi would quit dictating release dates that cut planned features from Oleg's games. Being both a potential new IL2 customer and an indy game developer myself, I felt qualified to comment on these subjects. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.

I don't believe anyone is truly upset about your providing of a contrary view point. Personally I see where you are coming from and what you mean. I must,however; point out that our tastes obviously differ. I can live with two campaigns that are scripted and then the countless scripted campaigns that this community will invariably come up with. Oleg's campaigns I doubt will have scripted "friends deaths," and I don't seem to recall any such scenario in any of the other Combat Flight Sims I've ever played. Seen it a lot in arcade flight games.

I personally prefer the realism of a flight sim (I too have been playing them for quite some time). Over the more "user friendly" types of sims. I like jumping on line and doing a co-op dynamic campaign, or a good old fashioned
dogfight. Just because our two tastes differ doesn't mean that either of us is inherently wrong or right. No game ever will appeal to all consumers, and will always miss out on a demographic of one kind or another. Yes Combat Flight sims are a niche market of the Flight Sim niche market, but that shoe fits the other foot too. MMOFS are in fact a niche of a niche as you say.

In time we will have dynamic campaigns, and hopefully then you will give it a shot. I am sorry you can't really enjoy online play due to the latency inherent in satellite.

[Sven]

I've also like Nearmiss never enjoyed a computer generated campaign, a good scripted campaign gives me much more enjoyment, immersion and historical accuracy a computer generated campaign cannot deliver.

All I want is to focus the time spared by not creating a dynamic campaign to be put into the dynamic weather, that is something we'll all benefit from, in any aspect of the sim. If time was not limited I'd of course say we would be best off with both, a dynamic campaign and a dynamic weather system, but there so much more to work on after BoB has been released.

Reading these "Spit girl" posts is not unlike flying the same scripted campaign over and over again. It's amusing at first but it gets stale after awhile.

So now the artist(s) who had created the uncontested most re-flyable sim of all time have added a little flourish to their latest creation. Instead of standing back to contemplate and admire their creativity (which will in no way devalue their work overall) we who love the sim start a verbal fist-fight in the art gallery "I DON'T LIKE SPIT GIRL" / "I LIKE SPIT GIRL" while the uncomprehending public wonders -- "what in the hell is up with them?"

[Chivas]

I find it amazing that people can't drop the price of a couple pizzas and beers for even a one time fly thru of a scripted campaign. "Triggers" should make even a scripted campaign very interesting. You should get at least a few weeks of entertainment with the knowledge there will be more dynamic campaigns in the works by third parties and developer. This minimum investment could insure the long life of the only WW2 combat flight series on the market for the foreseeable future.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Bullethead

I'm an IL-2 virgin but have been doing flightsims since most of you all were in diapers. I did the very first version of Flight Simulator on an Apple II back in 1980, which took 20 minutes to load from a casette tape. I flew every flightsim there was in the golden age of computer gaming, when flightsims were what it was all about. I was flying online in DOS Air Warrior before most folks knew there was such a thing as multi-player games outside of hotseat and split-screen. And I went through Air Warrior, Warbirds, and Aces High.

I never did IL-2 because I got into online flying so early. In those ancient days, flightsim AIs totally sucked and once I'd found the MMO persistant world format of AW, WB, and AH, I never had any desire to play 1-off "deathmatch" games with only a few players. Besides, about the time I got into the MMOFS scene, offline flightsims went into scripted campaigns that were universally corny and had exactly zero replay value.

Unfortunately, these days I live way out in the sticks where I can only get broadband via satellite. Because I require broadband for my job, I can no longer fly online due to satellite's built-in lag of several seconds. As such, I'm once again insterested in offline play.

And to me, that means a fully dynamic campaign. I don't want to be able to change history, I just want the flavor of flying in a huge battle for as long as I live. You know, the way RB2 and OFF do things. Of course, the AI has to be pretty good, too, but that's no longer the problem it was back in the day.

So, until a few days ago, I was VERY interested in COD. I was almost obsessing over it, rereading all my books on the BoB. But then I found out that the dynamic campaign had been scrapped. As such, I will NOT be buying this game unless and until it has a dynamic campaign.

I'm not hard to please on the eye-candy front and flight mechanics front. After all, I date back to when airplanes were just tiny dots no matter how close you were to them, and terrain was a grid pattern with a jagged line along one edge representing mountains, and all controlled via the keyboard at about 5fps. So while I greatly appreciate all such realism efforts by the IL-2 team, I view it as a total waste because offline play is practically nonexistent.

Oh well. Maybe one day Maddox or the community will make a dynamic campaign for COD. That, and only that, will make COD worth my money. And by that time, COD will be in the bargain bin so I'll get a better product for less money than I would by buying it now.

So my $0.02 is that it doesn't matter all that much what eye-candy and FM/DM realism get into a game. What I want is offline play value, and I just don't see that here. And you know what? Even if I had DSL out where I live, I'd still only want COD for offline play because its online play is so limited compared to the MMOFS format I'm used to.

IOW, if the IL-2 community wants converts from other flightsims, it needs to offer them something they don't get elsewhere. It needs either a fully dynamic campaign for offline play, or it needs to go MMO. Without either, it offers nothing to folks who like those things more than they do arguably better graphics and realism. And that, IMHO, is a real tragedy.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion by all means, it's just that not everybody will share it

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum ), i think you get my drift.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone. For example, i didn't buy Rise of Flight because i disagreed with the way it did some things. Notice the plural here, it was a decision based on 4-5 different instances of what i considered shortcomings, not one. For CoD, i will buy it because the amount of things i agree with are more than the amount of things i don't and guess what, i too am a fan of having a proper dynamic campaign in the sim, especially if it's done in a way that we can use both of online and offline play.

Again, you're perfectly entitled to think this way and buy at a later time or not at all, i'm not going to try and convince you.
It's just that this focus on a single feature seems a bit shortsighted to me (especially when you discount FM/DM in favor of playability in a simulator game about aircraft, if we all wanted it like this we'd still be flying lucasart's secret weapons of the luftwaffe), more so in fact under the current situation: they can release the game now and get cash to work on the dymamic campaign to be patched into the game at least a year from now (according to their words), or delay the entire game for a similar time frame. I think they did the right thing by providing us with options, since you can enforce this delay on yourself by not buying early while the rest of us can enjoy whatever is there. Just because the game is incomplete for some people, it doesn't mean the rest of us should be unable to play around with what's already there while waiting for the improvements

Originally Posted by Bullethead

Absolutely not.

At BEST (which is very, very rare), they're fun 1 time through, but they have zero replay value because you know EXACTLY what to expect. Where's the feeling of having to check six constantly and wonder what you'll be getting into this time when you know full well that the only enemies out there are those you saw the last time you played this mission.

At worst (most of the time), scripted campaigns are so corny that they're unplayable even once. Instead of just letting you be a regular pilot of that time and place, you repeatedly have to do some utterly bogus thing like kill a particular enemy ace flying some ridiculously amped-up uberplane, or rescue "spit girl" (I'd rather rescue "swallow girl"), or what have you, with the fate of the world hanging on your actions, and you have to keep playing the same damn mission over and over until you finally beat it.

Either way, the ONLY replay value of a scripted campaign is trying to beat your previous score by memorizing a pattern of actions based on complete familiarity with the situation. This might appeal to the Nintendo crowd but not to anybody beyond puberty.

Look, I'm a game designer myself, and I tell you, a "hand-crafted scripted campaign" is a complete joke. The "hand-crafted" part is just a marketing ploy to cover up the fact that the devs put next to zero effort into it. It's just a series of linked scenarios with little if any carry-over from one to the next. Anybody with a mission editor can do the same thing. The only thing the devs add is bogus things like your best friend from childhood always going down in flames during this one mission while saving you from some enemies who always magically spawn right behind you no matter how well you check six. Gee, what fun.

So, to me, in the absence of MMO action, a flightsim simply must have a truly dynamic campaign or I won't buy it. If I can't join any squadron on either side, and fly whatever missions come my way (and they're different each time I play that squadron), then forget it. It doesn't matter how pretty the game looks or how realistic it is if there's nothing meaningful to do with the aircraft. I'm not spending $50 to fly a few corny missions and be done with it.

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

This is coming from one of the developers that was actually responsible for designing the campaign engine. He said that they didn't want to do a simple dynamic campaign like the one we have in IL2, but one that will do the rest of CoD justice. He also said that it was a very hard decision for him to postpone it, because he had already prepared a few hundred pages of documents on the subject and that's just for the design phase, how it should work, what features to have, etc.

I already said i'm a fan of having a dynamic campaign that's good for single and multi-player use. Imagine people flying fighters over the channel in 30 minute hops to the combat area. On its own it's not much. However, if i'm flying a catalina in bad weather along the convoy approaches and hunting for U-boats, those players who are after a quick dogfight are actually shielding me from having enemy fighters wander into my operational area and we get a bit of spontaneous synergy going.
Now, if the campaign engine is good enough, me sinking a U-boat or just driving it away and saving the convoy, would have a positive impact on the amount of fuel, ammunition and spare parts these dogfighters have at stock on their airbase, and so on...

It's this kind of a campaign i'd like to see, one that the strategic layer can be automanaged by my PC (or the server, if i'm flying online), but may also be optionally managed by the players (for fans of BoB:WoV), missions have consequences in the proper scale (not winning the war thanks to the efforts of one pilot, neither having our actions have no effect at all, something in the middle), etc. However, this is a massive undertaking for such a small dev team, it's like an entire separate module to the base simulator, so it's going to cost some time and money.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year.

[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum ), i think you get my drift.

When I started in forums in the late 80s, EVERYTHING said was what today would be called a bannable "personal attack". But that was back in the day before some idjit thought kids should have computers. So now, allegedly, a mere Facebook page can cause a bloody revolution these days. Give your kid a gun before a car and a car before a computer, based on the amount of harm he can do with each of them. So I do get your drift

Anyway, yup, until say 3 years ago, I'd only done online flightsims since the early 90s. Dial-up sucked for everything else but at least it could do a server-client MMO game as well as broadband.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone.

Sure, but some features are more important than others. Gameplay is a feature, and IMHO it's the most important feature. Without it, everything else, no matter how well-executed, is pretty useless. For instance, let's say you always wanted to own a Harley-Davidson, totally customized to your personal taste. You constantly dream of riding it all over the country, "looking for adventure and whatever comes our way". But when you go to the dealership, you find out that while you can get a bike exactly to your specifications, you're told all you can do with it is ride around the same block in the same town, over and over. But you still have to pay the full price for it. Maybe, someday, you'll be able to fullfill your dreams, but there's no guarantee, and all the while depreciation is setting in.

So what would you do? Buy the thing now and just admire the paint and chrome, without getting to ride it as you want, or wait a few years and buy it used for less than 1/2 the price and be able to hit the highway immediately?

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

My own game company has way fewer employees and we do dynamic campaigns. I write the campaigns all by myself, AAMOF, on top of my many other responsibilities. It's not that hard to do, just tedious. Want to see my work?
www.stormeaglestudios.com

So I'm really not impressed by this argument. Reading between the lines, as a member of the industry myself, I see the lack of a dynamic campaign in COD as just the latest chapter in the long, tragic saga of Evil Publishers chasing short-term profits and to Hell with the interests of the Good Developers, the genre, and the customers. Ubi told Maddox that the game WILL ship by such-and-such a date, so Maddox had better have the FM, DM and artwork done by then, leaving no manhours left to do a campaign, and all gameplay worthy of the name limited to "small batch" online.

This is why my company is an "indy", as in it self-publishes.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year.

And folks wonder why there are hardly any PC games on store shelves these days. The Evil Publishers and the Evil Retailers are to blame.

[Blackdog_kt]

While i share your complaints about how distribution companies handle game releases nowadays, i think we have to be a bit honest with how the community at large operates as well.

I would probably have no problem waiting an extra 6 months to get a fully polished product and by the sound of it, it seems you share this opinion.
However, there's a large part of the community who's been chomping at the bit, going "is it ready yet?" and "how much longer?" all along the way.

I too dislike incomplete games but i know there is no such thing as a 100% complete and realistic simulator. The thing is, what happened with CoD was a choice of "scaled down release now" instead of "full fledged content half a year later".

I have no problem either way, because i can weigh pros and cons and if the "completeness index" is to my liking i can purchase, if not i can wait until more things are added (which is exactly what you describe, it's a perfectly valid outlook on things).

The stirring up usually comes from members of the community who on one hand want the game to ship early, but on the other hand don't realize that this will put a dent in things with regards to how complete it will be. I'm not referring to you here, it's obvious you realize this counter-balancing going on behind the scenes and i would expect no less from a member of the industry.

What i'm trying to say is that just like the features that make it into the release version are a compromise between time, cost, feasibility and hardware requirements, how to deal with the community and balance the desires, wishes and sometimes downright demands between different groups of fans with diverging agendas and priorities is also a tough balancing act

[BadAim]

Originally Posted by Chivas

I find it amazing that people can't drop the price of a couple pizzas and beers for even a one time fly thru of a scripted campaign. "Triggers" should make even a scripted campaign very interesting. You should get at least a few weeks of entertainment with the knowledge there will be more dynamic campaigns in the works by third parties and developer. This minimum investment could insure the long life of the only WW2 combat flight series on the market for the foreseeable future.

BINGO!

Sorry about the shouting, I'm a little excitable with all this tension over waiting for COD.