After getting sick this morning I was happy to receive my copy of ROF in the mail today. GoGamer gave me free shipping and it only took 2 days to cross the country, so it was a pleasant surprise.
Installation took two attempts because I've got Vista64 and although I was warned I pressed on without disabling the User Account Control. Honestly, every program suggests this but ROF was the first to bite. The box shipped with a separate warning sheet so I won't complain...I mention it more for the benefit of people who are used to ignoring such warnings.
With the help of posts here in the technical forum, I was able to work around my setup issues. All I can say is that nothing was too much of a big deal due to the help of those who have gone before me, but setup was a chore and not always intuitive or straightforward. It took some time but if I got out of the chair I threw up. I think the developers need to do some work here, but for those uber-naysayers all I can say is the setup is certainly preferable to vomiting, just to keep things in perspective. My rudder was always reversed no matter what I did and checking the inversion box did nothing so I had to go into the config file and make an edit. Now that I went through the setup and know the quirks and fixes it is easy to make changes.
I've got mixed reviews so I will start with this statement: If the developer gets their butt in gear and fixes the stupid mistakes this sim will be a winner because its got a solid, solid core. Its kind of like in that movie, where the dog eats the diamond; ROF is a dog but I think that if we wait a bit and aren't willing to dive into some turds, we'll have a prize.
But the dog still needs to poop, and we are still waiting.
Anyway, here is the bad first, because that's what you all will skip to anyway, right?
Training is ridiculous, vague, overwrought and cheesy. You MUST read the briefing because the audio is screwed up and the instructions are unclear. I couldn't get past the limitation training because they never told me I was supposed to do a stall (I finally read the briefing page and found out, but gave up). Maybe they did actually, but when two audio tracks started going at the same time, it all got garbled....and there was no inflight prompting.
My Career was pretty short because the other guys in my flight decided to run straight into the hangers rather than turn around and use the runway. So obviously I did the smart thing and resigned my commission immediately. They were Germans anyway so I didn't trust them to begin with, I just liked their plane.
I joined up to multiplayer and spent 5 minutes looking at a screenshot of trees. I like trees, but I eventually gave up on this too because thats all there was and after a while trees are so 1970's.
In general, the whole game is completely shot. Only the quick missions work.
And every AI plane in the game was faster than my Fokker, even older, factually slower planes. I got annoyed when a Nieuport 17 kept dusting me, but at least the FM was accurate enough to let me outturn him when he came back and I took the cheating #%&*$# down, hard. He must have installed V-Tec or something.
And since I am no negative nancy, here is the good:
The flight model, while obviously not completely accurate yet in terms of plane to plane performance, is a complete joy to fly. It does slips, spins, stalls, and turn coordination better than anything I have seen, including FSX. It does a GREAT job from what little I have seen in terms of takeoff and landing. It's terribly difficult and twitchy and that is real folks. When I chewed over why my Fokker kept ground looping as it slowed, my real life tailwheel training finally woke up and told me I needed to blip the throttle to regain some airflow rudder authority. I tried it and it worked like a charm.
Like others have said, ROF does a fantastic job of providing realistic "senses". Incipient stall shake and loose unforgiving controls, a proper sense of awe at altitude, the gut wrenching danger of scud running across the deck, and the complete disorientation of flying into a cloud are all head and shoulders above any sim I've seen before. I think the ground textures give a poor and uniform sense of height during the flare which makes landing a little difficult but I think I can manage. Its the only chink in the "sense" armor that I can see right now. And I am only able to run Landscape at Medium so that may not be a factor at High.
I am hyper critical of flight models, and while ROF's is not perfect, it is in many respects the best one I've flown.
NeoQB needs to FINISH this game. They nailed the tough stuff and mailed it in on the easy stuff.....it makes no sense to me. Because without the missions, training, multiplayer and whatnot, you can't get much use out of the awesome graphics, flight dynamics and dogfighting capability of the game. It's like building a Lamborghini and then using it to cart old people around the Walmart isles.
I've spent lots of time and money on FSX so I just closed my eyes and bought this game, with full knowledge of all the problems mentioned on this board. If NeoQB holds up their end of the bargain in regards to their trickle-release, subscriber-like business model, I think this sim can grow into a classic and capture the larger market. If not, Great War fans such as myself will be happy just to have a nice-looking, great-flying sim to putter around with. I don't blame the "wait and see" crowd though, because the game simply isn't finished yet.
I am happy enough but not satisfied yet. I guess I'll just keep waiting for my dog poop and hope I get the diamond.
Edited by dreidecker (07/01/09 08:44 PM)
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