What really did surprise me was how little the sim made you feel your taking part in the battle, no build up, no sound bytes from the time, no stories from pilots. No history of the commanders.
It has no immersion and for me it means i have no attachment to the campaign.
Anyone play "Their finest hour" now that was a time machine! i remember being able to train wingmen to fly with.
It even had a better flight recorder than CLOD...lol

I totally agree although it is firmly in the same mould, immersion wise as the IL-2 series eg. no real historical sense of "being there" so I'm not really suprised. I played "Their Finest Hour" and just about every simulation of BoB that's been made including purely strategic/tactical sims on the commodore 64, spectrum, atari and PC such as Talonsoft's BoB and also, if I remember correctly Garyy Grigsby's Battle of Britain for the C64.

IMO EAW had a passable campaign and a fair bit more immersion (than CLOD), it is just about the only sim that I actually cared if one of my AI squad mates lived or died!. Both the original Rowan's BoB and even more, Wings of Victory are the same but the IL-2 series always struck me as totally "sterile". I don't think that 1C are interested much in that sort of thing they are all about clinical tecnical simulation but, IMO, there's no heart to their products as the dreadful token RAF single player campaign amply demonstrates.

Regards

Aces

That sim was way ahead of its time. Graphics aside, it still is! LOL. Re wingmen: you could even assign names to them. Naming them after friends and family made the immersion a little poignant when, inevitably, you took losses to your squadron. (Poor Uncle Bill.........he was such a great fellow.....).

Back in the day my daughter had to do a high school history project; one of the choices was The Battle of Britain. I simply handed her the excellent docs that came with Finest Hour and reminded her not to forget to credit it via footnotes. She got an "A" on that assignment.

Much as I am a fan of the current CoD (warts and all), I agree that it is sadly lacking in the offline dept. For the Campaign I had hoped, at the very, very least, that we could follow in the footsteps, mission by mission, of a choice selection of the top aces/experten of both sides, and even a more strategic offering like BoB2's engrossing Campaign. Ideally, a more dynamic set of Campaigns should have been envisioned by the devs during the 7 years of development. At least we didn't get a scenario of RAF pilots sitting around the dispersal playing banjos.........

I think everybody should have realized that MG always concentrated on the simulation part, the game part was at best secondary.

In CoD there wasn't even time nor resources for that to become the secondary part.

We do/will have the basic construct, to be filled with live by talented enthusiasts.

I think it is part of a modern trend to strive for technical fidelity in depth and and neglect historic fidelity and breadth of gameplay. These modern games are lacking a dimension somehow, they are sacrificing a lot of immersion in the game experience. I think it is also at least in-part a generational thing, part of the "who cares about all the history stuff, give me something bright and shiney to play with" mindset. I cannot subscribe to this train of thought at all, it is totally alien to me. I was brought up with history and first-hand family account of the Battle of Britain all around me and it was so much more than the aircraft it was literally a battle of life and death nationally speaking so much more than a few token disjointed single missions with no concequences for success ior failure.

I think that I remember reading Oleg as saying something about "not being able to re-write history" for the battle of Britain. My thought's are "Why not?". If I can defeat the RAF commanding the Luftwaffe or Vice Versa commanding the RAF then why not give us historically accurate tactical and order of battle options rather than a few boring scripted missons. In the "old days" there wasn't any such thing as online gaming and so everything was either single player or play-by-mail etc., I think online gaming has given the excuse to developers to virtually forget about offline enthusiasts and provide the immersion that is a MUST for offline play.

Regards

Aces

Simply put I knew it wasn't going to be a great campaign in advance. Maddox Games has always been a team of "engineer designers" who are proud of technical simulation but totally lack what made the great sims of old so great: atmosphere and gameplay.

What I didn't expect, though, was the total absence of anything even remotely comparable to gameplay. There is no campaign system at all and the missions that came with the game are a bad joke (and that's putting it mildly). And all of that despite the input Oleg received over the years from Starshoy, Ian Boys and others (me included). I don't know if the problems with the technical side swept any kind of gameplay development off the table or if Maddox Games is really incapable of envisioning, designing and creating a truly enjoyable offline campaign.

Oh come on, we had "spitgirl" ACE have you seen spitgirl yet?

Bravo Christian, very well put!.

It's a shame as there were so many who have passed on such things to do with the Battle to the devs over the years, myself included as well. All of which effort seems to have been completely and utterly forlorn.

Edit, yes m8, you're right, I have seen Spit Girl, that makes it all so much better!, not believable but better

Kind regards

Leigh

Quite honestly I don't know what Ilya was thinking when he cooked up that nonsense for a campaign. Sorry, but we aren't in Hollywood here where every story has to include a cheesy tear-jerker component, are we?

no mate, certainly not Hollwood around here, no big illuminated sign and no sunshine and orange juice in sight