I'd imagine that in a battle they don't want you to take your own sweet time to do your part or the battle's lost or won without you. Sounds realistic to me.

"We need you to help take out some tanks on the northern front that are about to assault the town. They're about 20 minutes out, if they reach the town they'll wreak destruction on our light defenses, not to mention the remaining civilians."

"Sure, but not until I've flown around for an hour to get the feel of my P-47 again after it's recent maintenance. I'm sure the enemy will wait on me to begin moving."

---------

"We spotted an enemy reconnaissance plane that likely has photos with the locations of our radar stations. He's about to cross the Channel to deliver the information to the Germans we know are there watching our every move. This could be a prelude to invasion. There's no time to lose, he's running to safe territory. Shoot that plane down!"

"I'll take care of it. While I'm up there, I'm going to do some sight seeing at Dover, snap some pictures and head North. I'll land at another air strip to top off my tanks and have my windows washed. I'll then cut back South and take him out. He'll probably be circling around trying to figure out where East is by looking at his shadow, so it's highly unlikely he'll head straight to safety immediately, that would just be retarded."

See? Doesn't really work, does it? LOL
However, there is the training area if you want to fly around without the urgency that comes with a battle.

Justify it however you like, it's not realistic to have everything go black and be told timeup in any way shape or form, simple mission failure after the time limit is reached yes, dumping you out no.

I agree with Dano's point about realism, but it's also not realistic to start an engine with a single keystroke--the most "arcade" feature, ever--or be lined up on the runway with the engines off, or have the engines keep running at speed with the throttle idle, or have pilots who bail out go through spinning props without injury, yadda.

With every flight sim it's all about how much realism the individual is willing to suspend, because all of them require realism suspension. All of them.

Unless you have one of these there's no such thing as a true simulator in a home environment.
I'll trade a startup sequence for graphics that actually seem realistic outside of just the cockpit. Most "sims" are very good at giving you a cockpit, but they fail miserably outside of that area, ruining the experience with disjointed graphics seemingly from 2 generations of pc gaming. Want arcade? Look beyond the cockpit in almost any simulator represented on these forums. They ALL have trade off's.

Of course not, you were the one who stated that the screen going back and timing you out sounded realistic so what's your point?



Of course they do, no home computer has the power to truely represent flight, but graphics are only a small part of the whole and getting dumped to a black screen just because you failed to achive the mission requirements in the requisite time is one of the biggest immersion killers I've ever come across in a modern sim and in my mind is a terrible mechanic that is there for no good reason, it's not even a trade off for anything relevant that I can see.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but my *guess* as to why there's a fixed time limit might be because the after-action replays would take up too much hard drive space or not work properly if the player was allowed to fly around for hours until the fuel ran out. I haven't had chance or time to test this for myself yet, so can anyone confirm how much approximate disk space is taken up by say, ten minutes of flight? If it's over 1GB for every ten minutes of "gun camera footage", I think we have our answer why the devs put in a fixed time limit.

I can remember back in the days when we used to have thick manuals with our flight sims and had to press a seperate key to record our replays in games, like Rowan's 'Overlord' (1994), and LucasFilm's 'Their Finest Hour:The Battle of Britain' (1989) but of course that was in the days before western society was relentlessly dumbed-down as it is today. Asking or expecting the average gamer nowadays to have to think to press another button or check how much "film" is remaining may be asking a little too much?

That's my guess anyway. If one of you guys can confirm the replay data is actually a small file though, I'm out of ideas as to why there's a time limit.

How many people actually do the whole engine start thing once you've done it and the novelty wears off? I agree that it's either your cup of tea or not. I don't mind air starts. I don't mind not landing. I don't like the idea of an ingame timer, though.

I agree with you Dave63. Everyone has personal bookends regarding what defines "arcade." Like the "refly" option in WoP. Some call it arcade, I call it convenient, and one doesn't have to click it, after all. I very much agree with you and everyone else about the time limit; I couldn't stand it in RoF, either.

I understand your point about the timer and it bugs me also but even if there was not a timer of ending your gameplay, and you could continue to fly and shoot down a plane or two, You should not pass the mission if you could not complete it in the time frame of your mission objective.

Example : if your attacking enemy bombers and you as one pilot don't take out a required number of bombers before the bombs are droped on their target, the mission has failed. You should still be able to fly on and even continue your attack but you shouldn't pass the mission.

Wop screwed up making the mission gamplay end after the mission success time table failed. They were correct in making a Mission time table but the gameplay should continue even if the mission is failed.

I would like the ability to continue on also but I still think in some mission situations there needs to be a time requirement for mission success based on real life mission time tables.

Desode

That, I can agree with.
And without a "mission failed" staying on the screen. Sometimes you could use the time to find your way around the map, especially if playing without any indicators.