Quote:
Originally posted by FinnN:
The problem with this is that all of the flight sims are in fact games and of the 3 areas it's the campaigns that make them games.
Just want to say I agree completely with what you say, FinnN. I hear that KoE is probably gone for good; but I have a sneaking suspicion it would never have delivered as a game anyway - enormous effort seemed to have been expended on graphics and damage modelling, but I never heard anything about how it would play as a game.

I suspect that flight sims have killed themselves as a genre by their obsession with graphics and flight modelling at the expense of gameplay. I firmly believe that the game should be developed first, then the flashy graphics and realistic (whatever that means) flight models added on top, if there is time. Instead we see products like KoE with superbly modelled aircraft, and the plug gets pulled on them before anyone gets around to adding a game. No wonder the publisher lost their nerve. (Apologies to all at Aspect if I'm wrong - that's how it looks to an outsider).

The two things I want from a flight sim are gameplay and immersion. Graphics and flight models can be essential to immersion (just as arcade gamey things like power ups can kill immersion), but they aren't an end in themselves, IMO. I would guess that most in the flight sim community are propeller heads, more concerned with technical aspects of flight than anything else. The board wargame hobby went through a similar phase a few years ago, as the obsessively 'realistic' (in a technical sense) wargames died out when people discovered that there were other games out there that were much more fun to play.

The sad part is that I believe that a realistic, immersive, fun game could very easily be built around WW1 aviation, much more easily than in any other period, because of the relative simplicity of the aircraft. But so long as people insist on 3000 polygon models and perfect to the last newton physics modelling, then they will never get what they want; or if they do, they will soon discover it isn't much fun to play.

So it's back to playing RB3D with FCJ for me...