I'll chime in with some thoughts here.

1. I'm not a hardcore simmer. I want something that sits somewhere between War Thunder's arcade battles and DCS's level of fidelity. Planes should be correct for the time and theatre, and they should at least FEEL right when you fly and fight with them. I don't care if the flight model is as close to 100% as possible. If a Zero can out-turn a Wildcat, but is fragile when it comes to taking damage, yeah that's pretty much fine for me. Just an example.

I'm fine with the way the planes fly in BoS. Although yes there does seem to be an unnatural bias towards the Russian aircraft. I'm reading Adolf Galland's autobiography right now, and he keeps mentioning how at the start of the war vs Russia, the Luftwaffe had much superior aircraft and pilots. The historical record of losses and kills of the time would seem to confirm Galland's statements.


2. I bought into BoS basically expecting a WW2 version of Rise of Flight. I expected we'd have a career mode eventually, similar to ROF's beta career. What we're getting is like the complete opposite. And I suppose that's what I get for buying into the game at the earliest possible moment without waiting for more details.

All I really want is a compelling single player mode, because I don't play online multiplayer. Of course if they don't let you accelerate time on the way to/from the target area, this would quickly get shelved at my house. Forcing your player to sit around bored for 15-20 minutes at a time is never a good thing.


I feel like the single player market got completely shafted with this.


3. I hate the business model, but would have been willing to deal with it if the underlying game was compelling enough. I own most of the ROF planes. But asking $20 for a single plane is a bit rich. Still better than DCS asking $50 though.


So those are pretty much my gripes with it. Basically it boils down to a lack of a decent single player game for me. I don't think any of my complaints are unrealistic or overly entitled. Most of the sims from the late 80's through to the early 2000's offered what I'm asking for.

I think those first planes sold standalone - La5 and Fw 190 - are a special situation:

If they sold then for less, the Premium founders will complain that Standard pay less for same content (10 planes).

This price (20$) is fair for Standard owners, they get same content and pay same final price of Premium, but can make the purchase in 2 or 3X.

To me it's all about the flight models, and the way the engine presents the game world. I don't play single player so the decision to make unlocks apply to MP is pretty... irritating. Even that is something I could get over as long as the flight models are good, the world is believable, and the servers are full.

Unfortunately that's looking iffy. The Russian planes fly OK, but the German aircraft have huge stability issues around the nose that I'm just not believing in. The only thing I've ever flown was a Cessna, but I still don't see how a plane can react that way, and it's really distracting. The world doesn't have the depth of field that the 4 year old DCS engine has, which is a real shame. It's always a surprise to me when the wheels touch down in BoS, whereas you have a perfect feel for how far off the runway you are in DCS, and you can flare a landing perfectly every time.

DCS barely has a game compared to BoS, with exactly two match planes and no appropriate map or scenario (though the Dogs of War server makes a pretty good try of it), but every time I take a Dora or Pony up it's just hard hard hard to climb back into the cold pits of Stalingrad. The planes just do not feel real after even a short stint in DCS, and that's with a crap optimized MP engine and no period assets.

People may grumble at the price for DCS planes, but if that's what it takes to make this niche market profitable to bring content to then I'll put the money down every time.

I saw this sort of thing happen with war of the roses and then culminating with war of the vikings which killed the game. Hard core players funded war of the vikings thinking they would get a better war of the roses and the devs then went and chased the call of duty arcade crowd.

I paid for the top of the line BoS and have not bothered to play it, less than 15mins to have a look.
All my mates are waiting for my determination on its value being il2 players back in the day.

It is disappointing to see so many negative posts here.

P.S. Why are they doing another ww1 sim at the same time with the same team. Does this mean people that invested money in ROF will eventually be left with no community. The good thing about il2 is that it lasted for a good 10yrs or more with addons. These days devs seem to drop games after only a few years and re-invent the wheel for more revenue.

That sent up some red flags to me when I saw that. Why are they making that, when BoS isn't done, and every one is complaining that certain parts of BoS are subpar?

It's very simple:

http://ilyamuromets.net/forum/topic/48-why-not-rof-add-answer-inside/

Money.

Ah OK, thanks Luke.

They're creating a new business model in the flight sim market

exploiting the lack of competition and hunger for some successor to IL2 they've likely run the numbers and figure that they can run these EA campaigns to get quick revenue and generate buzz...while knowing that when delivery day comes....they'll already be moving onto the next...."ohhh so sorry you did not like this one....but if you plop down a $100 bucks over here you are sure to like this new one we have in development"

A quote from Loft on the Announcement

"So we’ve commenced a brand new experiment which we believe to be very important. Lots of people keep telling us that they like the idea of trying the game, but feel the need for a flight-stick is a burdensome hurdle they must overcome. That’s one of the reasons why games of our genre can end up on a dusty shelf and rarely get back from there. This hurts us, honestly. So we’ve designed a plane control system without a flight stick, one that uses a mouse instead. This is an experiment we want to try. And we’ll be monitoring this experiment during the month of August"

By now the trajectory should be self evident

2001-2007 - IL2 achieves legendary status and vanquishes all competitors CFS2, etc

2009-2011 - IL2 CloD appears and massively disappoints (notwithstanding its second coming with TF) genre suffers immensely - 1C reputation gets black eye --- "fool me once"

2013-14 - IL2BoS announced and hope is revived among WWII flight simmers "this time they'll get it right" -- bait and switch using IL2 crowd to fund WT-like grinder with fraction of the content, "gate fee" to get into the game, less eye candy than WT - good luck with that! ha ha - obvious business decision to leverage good will expectations of IL2 community for funding while seeking to draw in WT crowd for steady stream of micro-transactions fueled by dopamine generating "unlock reward" system --- fool me twice now

Now with this decision to already shift resources towards "mouse control" of aircraft using the already licensed RoF engine.....fool who three times now? - note that there is no association with 1C or IL2 with this title

Simple...they don't give a rat's ass about the combat flight sim community and are targeting a market of mouse flying dopamine addicts with money and time to waste..

I'll quote what I said at ATAG
" Here is my take on it, I think BOS is trying to get most WT players over to it. Sure it has unlocks and xp points but no tech tree or having to repair your plane or manage your ground crew. They are thinking a mass exodus of WT to BOS would jump up the sales and the bank account for sure. How long before we see the mouse fly thing?
TFcliffs imo was always the successor to 1946. It "feels" like your in the good old IL2, just updated a lot. If you flew 1946 you can find your way around TFcliffs no problem. Even the FMB is about the same . BOS not so much.
I've had this game since day one and I am glad Team Fusion is doing the work they are!
Maybe some day BOS will be a good middle of the road game to go plink around in for fun."

I didn't know they were testing the mouse fly. Good grief! Bring on the squeakers!

Very apt comparison, IMO.

Ok I should have clicked the link, the mouse fly thing is for the WW1 thing they are working on. Still It could be ported over to BOS easy I guess.

They not only had the data but they had actual VVS pilots who flew those planes helping the team, but this make me wonder did they consult any LW veterans? They have real data and yet they fail to implement correct FM.

You just explained the problem yourself in real life you did not have all pilots of equal skill and even planes were different, no two La-5's flew the same. If in real life VVS was composed of veteran pilots, you would not see books written by German pilots with various cases of superiority complex. To me it looks like crappy AI and FM representation.

But the game as a whole is crap, yeah it has nice visuals and physics, but I do not think it reached the level of IL-2 1946, where you had interesting campaigns and even working career mode! But here no you need to gain XP just to use bombs