Lock On: Modern Air Combat will get an expansion in 2005, Oleg Maddox might get his rendition of The Battle of Britain finished. Course of my list only Silent Hunter is backed with a major publisher (Ubi) and they are getting out of the rivet counting business. Further the first two titles are rereleases but I do think we’ve found a survivable niche.
Yeah, the Sims will probably have a pretty good year. There’s the officially announced expansion pack for the University thing, and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one more expansion out in the third/fourth quarter. The original should still sell pretty well, too.
Er, what? [size=1]Nevermind.[/size]
Seriously, though, the Dangerous Waters title is definitely on my Interested list. The flight sims, not so much, but it’s good there’s still enough to shake a stick at the inaccurate-rivet-counts of.
Very true, IL, probably the best year for sims in a while. I hope at least one of them does very well, because history has shown it takes only one or two high-selling simulation products to start a resurgence in the genre, as Apache did in the mid 90’s.
Shockwave Products is going to become the Battlefront of the sim community. They’ve shown that they can trick out mediocre sims with Firepower!, and scoring BoB (along with all of the BDG developers) was a coup. And B-17 II with multiplayer next year…
The simulation market would benefit hugely by following the first person shooter model; a couple of development houses whose primary focus is building and licensing engines. Third parties would then license those engines and add their own content. Amortizing the time and resource expensive R&D required to develop the underlying engine over a number of titles should help open the market.
Apparently, the X Plane engine has been licensed for the development of a new F-16 sim by the same people who were behind licensing and developing Falcon 4.0, so we’ll see.
The sensation of speed in this vid from Jet Thunder is fantastic. So are they shooting for a '05 release for this sim?
We hope at least entering Beta in '05. Problem is the campaign, it fees like we’re building two products in the end, a modular campaign system and the Flight Sim itself. Campaign work is top priority for early 2005.
