Well it's been a full day of near nonstop flying. Girlfriend is coming home soon but he's a few extra pics Pol has been kind enough to allow me to share.
My impressions are overwhelmingly positive. Even after... (wow)...over 10 nearly straight hours in the cockpit flying lots of different types of aircraft, I'm not only not bored of it...I want to fly even more (maybe after a pizza!) So many good things but here are a few of my personal favorites so far.
1. Weather effects like rain never get old. I used to hate flying in the rain before, so much so that I turned it off. Now, with the water effects on the goggles turned on, the immersion of it just draws me in every time. 2. Easter egg sound effects keep popping up and they are great. Wind in the wires. Creaking airframes during landings. Busy ground crews shouts before takeoff. I think some of the older sounds may have been redone as well, but not 100% sure. 3. Mission Replay is awesome. After the mission is over, you can see just your flight, all aircraft or everything and watch it all get plotted out moment by moment. Really gives you an appreciation for how much is going on in the sim around you. 4. Performance seems just as good despite all the extra goodies going on. Not sure how they managed it, but somehow they got more without seeming to cost the CPU / GPUs more. That's purely subjective. I didn't run a bunch of tests. I just didn't notice any degradation in performance from WOFF PE. 5. Damage modeling is greatly improved. Not one 4 wing explosion yet...but I did clip both left wings off an Alb once! It all just looks and performs much more realistic now. Nothing is 100% but I think everyone's going to be really happy with the quality improvements. Just feels more satisfying. 6. Rear gunners are in the war and active but also not snipers. I flew an Fe2b and set it to autopilot. When we got jumped by Albs, the AI made great defensive moves and the gunner took a lot of reasonable shots at nearby enemy targets despite rarely flying flat and level. 7. Its so immersive, even the simple stuff is genuinely enjoyable. Doing anything in the rain (takeoff, patrol, dogfighting, landing). But even without the weather effects, the way the plane engine shakes, the sounds. Everything just feels more real and you don't want to skip past it.
What don't I like? Well I'm in beta so I'm not going to say. But what I will say is the 2 things I noticed were very nitpicky in nature and at least one of them is probably easily fixable. It's just an all around a big leap forward with no real steps backwards. And they are still working on it. The pics really don't do it justice. The tracers might look too big in the screenshots possibly, but in the sim when flying, they are spot on. When everything is in motion, the world just comes together so nicely. Well, until the bad guys show up...but it wouldn't be much of a sim without them so no complaints!
