I fly BMS, TAW and EECH so I don't care

Marc..

Indubitably but that doesn't correlate to anything that is relevant to our situation. I'm not talking about volume of "sales" I'm talking about what our genre is defining itself as in this age.

That's a non-issue for me. Even though I've purchased from these Russian devs...it was money wasted as I'm not interested in just a "cockpit simulator" and haven't flown any of their products for two years. I guess I have a thing about boredom. So it doesn't matter if these devs are still around...many simmers have left after being fed up with the never ending string of unfinished "Betas". There are currently 12...yes, twelve "early access" Betas for sale in the DCS eshop and some of them have been that way for years.

So you'll have to excuse me if I'm not grateful for developers that have made a mockery of how software should be released and have basically ruined the "combat" flight sim genre with boring, sterile, and lifeless combat simulations.

I fly Falcon BMS and WOFF as they understand and have a focus on single player and immersion...it doesn't matter that they are recodes of old software...they're just better than any offerings today. I'm not just about "shiny" graphics so I also fire up some of the old Jane's sims.

I kept making the same mistake, every time I installed my really old sims, the ones I really wanted to play, I also ended up installing the later MSFSs, F4:AF and a couple of other much newer sims ("newer" being relative to my DOS and early-Windows sims). I figured since I was pulling out the joystick, why not enjoy a variety of older and newer sims?

The problem is looks. I can be really into an EF2000 campaign (for example), take a break with a newer sim, but then I go back to EF2000 and it's not as appealing as it was just days earlier.

So I'm applying a No-Fap strategy with my flight sims (and games in general), taking a break and no longer looking at prettier sims or even thinking about newer sims, clearing my mind and rebooting my brain. When I get back from NYC I'm never again going to look at a newer prettier sim, sticking with the ones that have that old-school "personality" I dig so much. Despite being a little aged in the looks department, they're the only ones that completely satisfy me. Meh, most newer sims are online-clingy and too big for me anyway, no way I could handle those sizes with my satellite ISP and older equipment.

I am really looking forward to getting back into retro simming, just enjoying those deep manuals for now.

A lot of games, not just flight sims, have become not much more than tech demos. They use "sandbox" instead of thought out content that's engaging. MP with the same basic, dull, game types instead of anything imaginative much less worthy of solo play. Why program AI when you can just dump the player into MP against people? Forget playing anything in the spirit of the game, it becomes about who can exploit the system the best.
A sandbox environment as an OPTION is great, but an engaging campaign to play through first makes something really worth your time. I'm enjoying Elite Dangerous for now, but I know that's based on a grind that will get old. I prefer a story, interactions and identifiable goals to frame a sandbox. That's why Skyrim is so good and remain popular. Several storylines to play, but you can also set out on your own to play how you want with a character you actually design and flesh out in proper RPG fashion rather than just unlocking this and that.

So what can be done then? Obviously the US/Western Europe based developers got out of making hardcore flight sims because the financial numbers just weren't there. Why put maximum effort and resources into something that at most might sell 50k copies when they can make an RPG, first person shooter or an RTS that might sell 1 million copies?

The entire business model for PC game development has changed drastically since the 1990's and that has obviously affected how hardcore flight sims are developed.

The global economy is picking up again, what goes around comes around.

I don't buy that for one second. Consumers having more disposable income does not mean that they will suddenly gain an interest in playing high fidelity/realistic PC flight sims.

I have wondered whether the more arcade type aircraft games out there might somehow serve as a path. In my case, I came from a background in console games like Ace Combat. Looking for air combat shooter games, I stumbled into the world of PC combat sims. I still remember sitting in a Hastings with a copy of IL2 in one hand, reading the back of the box, and a Playstation 2 game that I was considering (Front Mission, IIRC). They both offered a good deal of promise for single player experience, but my background with aircraft games and some MSFS in DOS swayed me to the PC game.

Somehow I suspect that the market audience for the current idea of "hardcore" jet sims with ultra-focus on systems is vastly smaller than what would be reached in a sim that offers more in the way of real, actual gameplay. A type of product aimed at players coming from those arcade flight backgrounds.

The interest is pre-existent. It's only a matter of time.

Most of the gaming has moved to Phones. It sells better. ADHD challenged individuals can't read through a *manual* to learn how to set the prop pitch or adjust the air restriction on the radiator. Ha.
They want something that will help them pass the time with out any mental activity required. I think the 'golden age' of flight sims has passed, personally.

You know things are bad when console gamers are often referred to as the "hardcore" gamers by the entertainment media. Heck, just look at the Big Bang Theory!! If Sheldon and the other guys were TRUE nerds, we should be seeing them wearing a TrackIR hat while flying Falcon 4 or DCS. Instead we just see them playing Halo on the console. Please....

Actually, they also play PC based games as well as non-computer games like D&D (which is the root of most RPG's that currently exist).

Maybe. I know that's true for me. Flight sims seem to have done better back in the day when they were more about gameplay rather than rivet counting graphics and modeling every radar mode or manually controlling prop pitch and radiator settings. As more computing power came available and graphics card got more powerful developers naturally took advantage of that new power and in the process made graphics and detailed systems overshadow gameplay.





I contend that the golden age of flight sims predated the need to set prop pitch or radiator setting.

And some will probably say that such a situation would probably be much better.



I'd pay $200 and gladly. I would be okay with DCS prices to be honest if their products actually did what they hype.



Nobody complains about graphics in DCS. Nobody complains about campaigns in BMS.
(well, not really, but you get the point)



They might be nerds in different ways. Not all nerds are flight sim nerds. There's your RPG nerds, CCG nerds, boardgame nerds, and so on. So the BBT guys are more like Star Trek/Star Wars/D&D nerds than flight simulation nerds.



That, and how kids used to want to be engineers or pilots or astronauts or scientists or astrologists but now it's either pop star or footballer (soccer player) or NBA star or NFL star.


To the OP, I wonder if you've tried BMS and your thoughts on it? It's not on your list of sims you were railing about.

I haven’t flown a combat sim in well over 10 years, maybe over 15. I honestly think it was Jane’s F15 that did them in for me, beautiful graphics and a clickable cockpit but no co-op mode or dynamic campaign just didn’t do it for me. Really, the last ones I played the hell out of were Falcon 3.0 and Tornado, even though the latter didn’t have a dynamic campaign per se. After those it was simply trying one after another and not being satisfied - Back to Baghdad, Flanker, JF-15, etc. Plus I could never get my HOTAS Cougar to work nearly as well and as smoothly as my gameport F16 FLCS/TQS. Gimbal & pot problems, constantly losing calibration, it became work instead of fun. So, I said screw it. Every so often I think of getting into civil aviation sims but I’d rather spend my free time Jeeping, hiking & snowshoeing than sitting at a desk. It was fun while it lasted!

Falcon 4 was the golden age. Since then, it's all downhill.

"In Russia, Flight Simulator tell you what you like. You no like Falcon 4 campaign. That is waste of time. You like online play and at most offline scripted mission set, fake medals and exacting rivet count on cockpit frame. Please happy to join our re-education training for $89.95, now on sale for Premium Gold Forum price of $99.95. Note in our next update we explain six months of work on ground interaction with landing gears on late model version of Mig 3.35623sgQ versus early Mig 3.345gQx models."

lol what he said^

I remember reading an interview to a old Corsair pilot, from Guadalcanal battles, a sim developer asked the exact speed of a F4U, and the astonished pilot answered, not a single plane on the squadron had the same speed or same behaviour, some were fine, some had strange vices, heck some of the planes even had parts of scrapped planes, why it was so important If a plane fly 2km/h faster or slower?