That is a pretty funny open admission of the limited single player campaign. Don’t often see devs come out like that.
Not sure you can just blame rivet counters anymore. The old legends are bringing back space sims just fine. There doesn’t seem to be enough people who want that pilot experience in a flight sim to fund the Kickstarters.
I think you overestimate the audience for a middle-ground sort of flight sim, honestly—there’s room for super-casual flying games, but not enough of the people who play Ace Combat would play something like Rise of Flight with simpler flight mechanics and a better campaign to deal with losing the genre aficionados. I might, but in the absence of that, I’m actually really looking forward to the DCS MiG-21. (There’s also a Mirage 2000C coming later this year which I’m somewhat salivating over.) Just needs a Phantom to fly against.
Feh, I’m gonna crawl over my corner and pet my copy of Mig Alley as I lament the evisceration of the genre.
Editer
1685
Nobody’s asking for casual or middle ground. We’re asking for reprioritization. If you ask any fighter pilot what his 100 favorite things about flying a plane are, the multi-step start-up procedure isn’t going to be on that list. All of the focus is on the hardware nowadays, with none on the experience. These people need to stop reading blueprints and start reading fighter pilot memoirs.
Imagine DCS MiG-21 with an authentic, living Vietnam or Cold War combat environment, with rich, historical or what-if missions.
The plane should absolutely still feel real, still let you use the same tactics against a Phantom or Crusader as a real pilot would, etc. But combat sims need more focus on the world they fly in and less on over-modeling departures and switchology.
Asking for a living, breathing environment is well and good, and it was the most exciting part of Falcon 4. I don’t think there are sufficient developer hours in the flight sim world today to make a game that focuses on the experience without compromising on things like the switchology, and that has two downsides: 1) the super rivet-county grognards won’t turn out to buy it, and 2) once you get into the 60s or so, the switchology becomes a big part of modeling comparative aircraft performance. If you can use the MiG-21’s fiddly radar as easily as the Phantom’s, you end up with a relative edge you shouldn’t have.
Plus, I like my switchology. What can I say? The act of coaxing a pair of turboshafts to life, hearing the blades start to whop over my head, and watching the avionics slowly come online works for me in ways that pressing E doesn’t. It’s immersive in its own way, and I’ll freely admit it doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for me. Having a dynamic war to fly it in would be neat, too, but there’s a ways to go in rebuilding the genre before I can have both again.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Which makes me wonder: the golden age sims were necessarily limited by technology, and the designers had to fill the gap with (for lack of a better term) ambiance. Would Andy, TK, et.al. gone the switchology and rivet route if the technology was there?
And who woulda thunk that the Su-27 Flanker V1.0 route was the one that would dominate sims 20 years later?
So I think we may have gone a little too far in F-15, but the intent was not to out-switch/out-knob everyone else. We spent a full day in the F-15E simulator (and filmed it all!) and spent another full day interviewing DS aircrew ( including the crew that got the helo kill with a GBU) and that really gave us the desire to model their experience as closely as we could. I fought hard to get the radar model (both a/a and a/g) as close as possible, simply because it wasn’t magic in real life…it took real skill. I also fought hard to keep the missions as close to DS as I could…that meant long transients, multiple tanking events, and minutes of shear terror. That was conscience choice, and in hindsight I think we lost track of some of the little things that Longbow or Falcon did better than we did.
Hard core is hard on the Dev team, even with great references and consultants. Who here remembers Eagle, a real life F-15E pilot trying to convince the Usenet crowd that our flight model was not underpowered, and that in real life he had real trouble tanking with a full load aboard. You can’t please those guys, and just defending yourself or your design decisions gets old.
Editer
1690
Sorry, Fishbreath, I don’t want to go all Richard Ordway on you, but in my back-seat ride in the F-15D a looong time back, I gotta say the lights coming on in the cockpit were exactly 0% of the thrill. Ditto flying laser combat in T-34s.
And if the game was done right, the market for an entertaining, immersive combat sim would hopefully be so much larger than the rivet-counter market that it wouldn’t matter.
Nothing wrong with absolutely realistic radar models and performance, etc. But a moderate design-- where performance differences and pilot AI are taken into account, but the systems are settable to be accessible to people who haven’t been through flight school and don’t have the time/depth of interest to learn the intricacies of ultra-realistic systems – along with a living, breathing, and non-sterile combat environment, is what it would take to make “serious” sims anything more than the depressing niche they’ve become.
Erm, this may be a stupid question (actually, it definitely is stupid), but why not combine forces? One version for the rivet-counters, one version for the rest of us. Re-use assets and code where possible, change where necessary. Even with rivet-counters and casuals combined the flightsim market isn’t that big; slicing it into even smaller bits doesn’t help anyone.
schurem
1692
AFAIK that rivet counters’ paradise that is the descendant of su27 flanker 1.0, DCS is made in such a way that (at least in theory) you should be able to ‘tack on’ a game, as long as you write it in LUA. There used to be talk of people doing just that, but very little ever came off it.
Still, if people pay good bucks for a detailed model of an ancient and underpowered transport chopper, i dont see why there isnt a market for a dynamic campaign module that simulates the life and times of Ivan Strelok, pilot in the VVS.
It’s not a stupid question, but it’s not as easy as it would seem to be. Sure, you can reuse the art, but the rest is problematic… simplified avionics probably mean tweaked missions to increase the challenge. It’s not 2x the effort to design/code, maybe 1.5x, but 2x to test. Hard to justify the economics.
Editer
1694
Also, there’s no reason to remove the realistic world/missions from the rivet counters’ version. They may not care about that, but they’re unlikely to dislike it.
Am I imagining things, or did someone here do a very simple “this is how you get from systems off to off the ground in the DCS Frogfoot?”
I thought I’d seen something here, but I’ve been back to page 40 and can’t find it.
There’s this one from the DCS forums. There are probably a few on Steam, as well.
The DCS MiG-21 comes out in a little over two weeks, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to resist.
JMR
1697
Same here even though I’m not a huge fan of DCS’s switchology fetish this thing looks too good to pass up. I had no idea the Mig 21 radar was alcohol cooled and that the coolant was good for only 20 minutes!
I’ve always liked temperamental machines.
In other news, DCS has announced some exciting things: a two-seat L-39 trainer with a light attack variant, which ought to be great for introducing people to the switchology and the fancy flight models, and, at long last, a release date for a map: a Strait of Hormuz-centered Arabian Peninsula/Iran map that’ll be coming out this winter. That’s a day one buy for me.
schurem
1699
Once I get my hands on an Oculus, i will be dumping all my cash into DCS i think. The maps, the MiG, me wants em all. Perhaps I’ll then start gathering some like minded people and see if we can get some momentum on building an actual game to the nice planes and maps. I know there’s a need for it ;-)
I’ve not gotten into DCS because the world seems a bit bland. Is that the case?
