Originally posted by FinnN: Campaigns though - just what has happened? I look back at Aces of the Pacific, the Lucas Arts' BoB, Red Baron (and RBII/3D), Falcon, etc and then I look at what's available in the current slew of games. IL2 has very primitive campaigns (a bit better in FB/FBAces), CFS2 was pretty simplistic, etc. CFS3 had a good stab at getting a campaign back in the centre of the action again, but was clearly just a first version of something that could have been a lot better with refinement. I've not really played much of the other sims out there, but nothing I've read indicates to me that any of them are even half of what's available in Falcon or RB3D. So not only have things not progressed in 10 years, they've if anything gone backwards.
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. Whilst we all appreciate realism and graphics it seems to me that flight sims have pigeon-holed themselves by failing to have accessible campaigns. Years ago flight sims were fairly mainstream and whilst the number of computer games sold has gone up enormously I'd bet everything I have that the proportion of flight sims sold has dropped dramatically. I think this is because all the effort has gone into graphics and flight modelling and precious little into gaming. For sure 1&2 need to be top of the priority list, but not to the exclusion of everything else (at least not if the genre is going to become more and more sidelined in the next 10 years).
Its not only flight sims that are lacking offline. Cossacks for example didn't have any AI to play historical battles against. After reading several posts regarding piracy, I was thinking that maybe the single player game is being neglected because of piracy. You can steal a game an play it offline all you want, but try to take it online and you have a problem(if I understand correctly). Guess maybe that doesn't make producers too keen on single player gaming.
