I agree with several comments here: it's great to hear that the Battle of Britain and Stalingrad missions are going to have take-off included. You're going in the good direction, but there's still some way to go before "it's IL2".

What about landing? Do we land at the end of all BoB and Stalingrad missions? It's a really important part. Sometime you've got to drag a plane that's got more holes than lift surface, a fuel leak, a dying engine... it's a huge part of the fun to fight to keep your plane airborne and bring it back in one piece, or perform the most gentle emergency landing.
It was a huge disappointment for me when I realized that with Birds of Prey - to the point that despite its brilliant execution for a lot of other parts (and on a console, quite a first), I'm like others here flying more often on the good old IL2 1946, and I'll skip WoP entirely without seeing more work done in this direction (and I'll do the same for any PS3 release)

I'll miss custom skins too, but that's less critical than the take-off /landing situation.
Nevertheless, it's good to see the sim market expanding, so I wish WoP a bright future and good luck.

Todace, any chance that these features might still change or is too far in the development now to be changed?

Well it won't last long once Storm Of War Battle Of Britain comes out in october everyone will drop it like a cold carp up the bottom.

+2

Sorry for delay guys. The reason is simple:
There are a lot of answers in interview with SimHQ
Enjoy!

In online - what about server host being able to use setting so that players must to return to base and LAND to get credit for kills? Then, players need to take off from airfield to fight after landing.

This is important for gameplay. Airstarts encourages poor behaviour in online games. I'm afraid if the online doesn't have enough options for players to adjust to the style of play they want - then the lifespan of the game will be short.

1946 you can have a server setting vary from (airstart, no stalls, laser gunnery, no cockpit, ect) <---- to ----> (takeoffs and landings, cockpit only, stalls, no icons, no external views, realistic gunnery, ect) and everything in between. You can restrict planesets to teams or allow anything for both teams. It works great.

You can still find many people playing 1946 online, how many people are playing BOP online right now (most times of day, NOBODY)? Pretty graphics might draw me in, but they haven't kept my interest.

The rigid structure of teamplay already is a turnoff - players do a better job of deciding how their online game scenarios are setup.

i have the MS force feedback 2 ... will be functional?

That doesn't make sense.
We have special mode - capture airfields, which requires to land (and then take-off).
And in simple dogfight that was not the case even in real war - pilot got credit if someone has seen his kills. Of course, loosing his own plane wasn't good, but here mathematics of war (and scores in game) cames in - if you kill three planes and lost once, it is still great.

There also about the same number of options in WoP. Takeoffs and landings option is replaced with special Mode.

And THAT is problem of BoP, but not for "Wings of Prey". Let me explain: the game has 3 difficulty modes, and 4 gameplay modes (and number of additional options). That gives us at least 12 possible sessions (and actually - much more).
If there are, let's say 100 of people willing to play in different settings and coming to a game one after one each 1 minute - they simply can't arrange a one session!

In Wings of Prey, we have join-in-progress and persistent lobby.
So, even if there are 16 people playing Simulation with cockpit-view-only for last 3 minutes, and you want to play with icons and external view, but OK with pure Simulation - you'll still be able to have fun.

And also you'll be able to start session with only 4 players, not wasting half an hour for each one of 32 players - but that play with 32 players after a while.

Should work.

Hi, one thing that I haven't understood from the interview and promotions if there will be at least one or two full 3D cockpits playable with TrackIR, which is widely accepted requirement to all flightsim games nowadays?

Thanks,
Dirk.

There are 34 cockpits. Each one of them playable with TrackIR.