Yeah, I’m an old fart and once upon a time I use to write for the mags and covered sims for many years. Thus I played just about every sim, good and bad, from the days of Red Baron 1 through Falcon 4 and IL-2 etc. I watched the usenet forums abuse great developers like Andy Hollis and attack the great sim designers, proclaiming knowledge as if they themselves had flown with Galland’s JG 26 in WW2. A loud voice that not only declared that, say, a padlock view was unrealistic, but demanded that designers not even make it an option as having such an option made it clear this was an arcade game, not a sim!
I prefer taking off, navigating, landing (some of my most gripping missions have been nursing a damaged aircraft home and trying to make it to a base and getting safely down on the ground!) So that’s not my issue.
And somehow we then lost the heart of great combat flight sims. Which, IMO, was a living breathing world at war, with a mission and purpose and unpredictability and decisions that mattered. We got some great combat aircraft sims, i.e. sims that really did a nice job of simulating the flight characteristics of certain aircraft. But they began to eliminate a simulation of being a combat pilot in these aircraft, flying in a war. That’s why I said it was if you had a simulation of a Witcher that was focused on the details of his armor and weapons and precisely how deep a certain type of sword can cut into certain types of bone or wood, based on the precise motions of the player, and then plopping the Witcher into completely predictable world devoid of “feel.”
Showing my age - I remember my astonishment many years ago when I was playing Microprose’s Knights of the Sky, a WWI sim that didn’t get nearly the love of the original Red Baron. But in my mind, it was superior. The reason: I was flying a mission, and on the way home from the objective I decided to fly out of the flight path home just to wander. I saw some planes in the distance and started flying their way, when all of a sudden I was being shot at. Two German aircraft had jumped me. I fought hard, had one of them smoking, but I was damaged and knew I was about to be done. Then suddenly the plane on my tail lost a wing and fell out of the sky. I was baffled and when I turned I saw two allied aircraft had come to my rescue. I’d never experienced such a non-scripted, living, dynamic moment in a flight sim (or just about any game!) like that. Red Baron 1 had great graphics, great design, but if you flew out of your designated flight path the world was sterile. Of course, Red Baron 2 fixed that with one of the best, most immersive living and breathing simulations of being a combat pilot ever, only challenged for that title when Falcon 4 came along.
Falcon 4 is a great example of giving you as much or little as you want of the nuts and bolts. I get why some people want to experience what it is like to climb into a cockpit and go through a complete start up. I think it is cool for a few times. But I don’t need to be forced to pee into a flight suit and not be allowed to pause for a game to be a great sim. I used to argue with people who said nothing but the “actual” experience was good enough for them and tell them, OK, have someone stand next to you with a gun and when you get a bullet through the cockpit have them fire it at you, or have someone break your back when you are forced to eject. Or, if you crash and die in the sim, it self destructs and you can’t play it any more.
For me it comes down to whether you want a great simulation of a combat aircraft or a great simulation of being an aircraft pilot in combat.
