Yeah, I love a good dynamic campaign. Besides F4, if you want a great DC, WOFF is one of the best, and if you wanna try to get older games to run, Red Baron 2 is great, and even with their idiosyncrasies, the Interactive Magic games (iF-22 and i-F/A-18) had excellent dynamic campaigns. :)
flyinj
1662
Ugh, I hated the iMagic dynamic campaigns. Iām pretty sure they were actually canned, and just gave the illusion of being dynamic.
The best dynamic campaign next to Falcon 4 is definitely in the Razorworks heli sim series - Comanche Vs Havok and Apache vs Hind or whatever they were called.
Oh right, I totally forgot about those! Good call. And Iāll be crushed if the IM campaigns were indeed canned.
Editer
1664
The only dynamic campaign I really enjoyed was Longbow 2 ā because it was a dynamic campaign with some interesting canned missions included as well. Real air combat missions tend to have fascinating backstories/setups, something you donāt get from dynamic campaigns. I think the mix is perfect.
flyinj
1665
The LB2 campaign was canned as well, it just had a clever branching structure. It did a great job of seeming dynamic, though. It was a great campaign.
I thought you worked on LB2?
Editer
1666
Nope, I just had a monthly flight sim column in CGW. :)
In the āOkay, now that is a seriously special-interest flight simā department, I just spotted a video on YouTubefor an ILYA Muromets sim based on Rise of Flight.
The video does a good job of explaining the significance of the plane.
I kinda want that. Badly. I love bomber sims. Love.
IL2: Stalingrad just showed up on Steam.
Still early access, of course.
Iāve not been following along, but will its world be moreā¦alive than the original IL2 was, or will it still be basically a dead, empty area for rivet counters to masturbate in?
Thatās the big āwhat if?ā there. While it carries the Il-2 name, itās mostly a 777 Studios joint; and while their Rise of Flight isnāt the greatest thing in single-player bliss (WoFF is), itās not chopped liver, either. Iām hoping that carries over to BoS.
Although (from Steam forums)
Our goal is to tell the story of Battle of Stalingrad to as many players as we can. This approach along with restricted development period surely limits us in comprehensive recreation of smaller details. Thus it will not be a single player campaign about a pilot or a squadron. It will be about aircraft and war history.
Weād be glad to avoid endless community arguments on that matter. However, thereās a lot to discuss since even historians are not certain about some moments. So we just turn away a bit from these issues and create a game about planes. Let your imagination personalize your gaming experience. Weāre an unbiased story teller. You are pilots living virtual lives in the sim. Also, this community is quite segmented in its desires, just because you are the loudest, does not mean you are the biggest. A lot of players canāt afford to spend more than 1 hour a day in the game while the other group of players is able to play the game 10 hours a day or even more. And we realized that itās not us making the game emotional, it is you. Our part is to deliver necessary conditions for your experience.
IL2:BOS campaign will tell you the story of Battle of Stalingrad from November 19th 1942 till February 2nd 1943. The whole period is split into operations (phases of the battle). Each phase has a realistic template on how ground troops and airfields were positioned. We did our best to be as precise as possible in this and all templates are based on historically correct data and real maps. We divided the battle into several key parts: Uranus, Little Saturn, Aerial Bridge, Winter Thunder and so on.
Meanwhile the player is not limited with anything and the playable character is impersonalized. Each player is going to have their own virtual life and singular, specific experience and emotions. Youāll be free to pick any plane, any airfield and any mission that is available at that moment. And this unique experience of yours will build your personal campaign.
Time of a day, weather conditions (within a list of historically correct ones for each period) will vary every time you start the mission. And you play this or that phase as many times as you want. Several successfully completed missions open access to the next phase leaving the completed one available for reply at any time. This is akin to sand-box style gaming.
Players who are looking for precise reconstruction of particular historical events will have community created missions to satisfier their demands. Those missions can tell about specific pilots, events and real combat missions down to historically correct personal skins and battle conditions. But our studio is not able to deal with such amount of tasks right now, thatās why community weāll need to provide themselves with those WWII reconstruction missions. And the main campaign will remain available for the wider audience.
Players who are looking for precise reconstruction of particular historical events will have community created missions to satisfier their demands.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA, okay, awesome, thatās a steam sale game for me.
Editer
1673
Actually, I bought in at the $100 early access level and have no regrets. Iāve had fun flying the various planes around for the past six months or so.
Alas, coming from these guys, out of the box the number of rivets will be right, but they miss the point about recreating the experience of these epic battles. But the editorās there to hopefully let talented people do that.
Brian, I wouldnāt be so quick to dismiss it on the community mission basis. A talented history buff can spent a lot more time crafting a recreation of a historical battle than a mission designer at a company who has to turn out X levels in X time can do. Iāve seen some impressive stuff over the years. If thereās a level of randomness in placement/timing to allow fresh replays, a series of well-crafted missions can kick a shallow, sterile dynamic campaignās ass.
Still, God, Iād kill to have a few million bucks and a talented team to design a modern flight sim thatās designed from the ground up to be about the experience of air combat. The hardware should feel authentic and let you play each plane to its historical strengths and weaknesses, but far more important than BS like going through five-minute engine start sequences would be to recreate that feeling of being in a squadron of people you know (the super-primitive Larry Holland sims and sims like EAW even accomplished this to a degree, by letting you name your pilots), of recreating historical missions you read about such as coming back from combat to rescue a struggling B-17 thatās been jumped by Jerries, of huge formations, huge air battles, and long odds.
I got so much more satisfaction from sinking Japanese ships flying Dauntelesses in primitive 1990s sims than Iāve gotten from any sim published in the 21st century, because those classic designers understood this.
Damn you, late 90ās c.s.i.p.g.f-s denizens. You maniacs. You got what you wanted. Damn you. Goddamn you all to hell!
What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound :\ Weāll see what we get on this one.
I was also looking over DCSās Sabre, but Iām not paying $50 for one plane. $20 I can see myself doing, especially with the level of detail weāre seeing, but $50 is a bit much. Disappointed that the MiG-21 will be the same price :\
I got so much more satisfaction from sinking Japanese ships flying Dauntelesses in primitive 1990s sims than Iāve gotten from any sim published in the 21st century, because those classic designers understood this.
LOL but we were in our 20s then Denny, everything was new and satisfying :)
(Goes back to playing AotP)
Enidigm
1675
Someone please remake European Air War.
#1 on the list.
#2 is TAW.
schurem
1677
and #0 on that list is falcon 5 isnt it? ;-) I cant wait for the consumer version of the oculus. I cant wait to get flyin with that. its the dream. has been since as long as i can remember. so find me some bugs flyinj!
Not wholly disagreeing with you about the gameās merits, Denny, but I feel the same way you do, and am honestly still bitter about the way the sim genre has flown over the last decade and a half. Itās just crushing, really. This is why I love WoFF so fucking much, because it harkens back to that time wherein devs knew flight sims were also about the experience of being a pilot in a believable world along with the fidelity. ;)
Looking forward to your thoughts man.
God, GOD yes. Iād also take 1942: PAW. Can one get EAW working on a modern machine these days? Iāve not fired it up in years, but this talk about the recent 3MA podcast made me itch for it.
Thereās this really weird, inclusive EAW community that somebody handed out the EAW source code to. Itās a confused situation and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
All it has produced is an endless series of online mods by folks who are stupidly desperate to emulate Il-2: 1946, which I just absolutely donāt get.
Nobody seems to have taken the code and given it the Falcon 4 AF treatment; i.e. bring the sim to a modern version of DX, fix the bugs, leave everything else alone.
It is a shame.
Oh god, that is a massive, massive shame. EAW is such a great sim, it deserves the love that Falcon 4 has gotten.
