I REALLY hope the fairy dust and happy thoughts crowd have learned a lesson and in future stick to reality instead of what is 'blind faith'. Any bets?

As for previews and reviews that ommitted or glossed over issues - I hope those authors learned lessons too.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest .....

Is there any combat flight sim developer left we can trust, or are we left with community centered volunteer efforts?

Trust to do what? Fulfil our wildest dreams? Sell us something we can enjoy playing, at a price that actually gives them an incentive to do it? Or what, exactly?...

Regarding 'community centered volunteer efforts', given the mass turd-slinging contest that has been going on in the forums for the last few days regarding CloD, RoF, BoS and who-knows-what-else, the suggestion that there is such thing as 'a community' seems questionable. I'd like to think it could be done, but if I was trying to do it, I wouldn't start from here...

Gaijin seems to be the king on the rising.

On that Community centered thing..
It wasn't that long ago there was mudslinging and much wailing about the Modding Community and how they ruined Il-2 Strurmovik. Now down the road we know that even within that same community was even more infighting about how they wanted everyone on the same footing, not favoring one sides planes over the other and I can tell you from some inside information some of those modders were stealing other modders work, porking FM's/DM's to their own delight and still to this day hate each other. CoD may just be 1946 with some new code slapped on top of it I Doubt much will come out of the Mod community not many of them build entirely new Airplanes, a few but where's the joy in making something for free so everyone can #%&*$# at you about not having a working flare gun under the seat? If someone could do something I wish they would fix the disappearing LOD's at mid range, give it working AA/AF and deepen the color palette but beyond that and that's a big one already I highly doubt we'll see much Modding from the community, maybe they'll try but it would be years before anything serious shows up I think.

I think saying it was abandoned before it was "fixed" isn't very accurate. I still don't think they ever really "finished" the game. A "fix" would be tweaking and correcting problems on a final version, and I don't think they made it that far.

CLOD felt like the computer game version of an author writing a chapter by chapter outline of a novel, but sending it to the publisher to be printed as the finished book. There's enough there to get the idea of the story and the characters, but nothing is fleshed out.

And yes I do hope that in the future reviewers will hammer a poor release for it's faults, rather than let it off the hook assuming it will be fixed later. The "blind faith" is for enthusiasts, not for reviewers.

I trust developers no farther than I can throw them. Every once in awhile though I make a mistake, such as when I preordered CloD based on the videos and talk from Oleg. Had I known that CloD would lose several features I really liked in Il-2 going back to FB (like coop, dynamic campaigns...) I wouldn't have even bought it on sale.

Right now, 777 is it for me as far as actual trust because they have to date delivered everything they promised more or less when they said they would. This is tempered by the fact that they don't really promise too much. People ask for tons of stuff, they deny some of it, call some of it "some day", and only promise to do a small part...but they do it, even if it then takes a couple of tries to get it "right."

ED falls short of "promising"...they always claim they never promised most things, although the number of people who think they have indicate some failure there...and instead usually delivers things that weren't asked for/expected while leaving things that have been expected for a looong time (like the Nevada terrain slip due to the decision to make a major shift in development). ED you can trust to fix what they release, but you can't trust that they will release any particular thing because they can talk up this or that (like say the Apache, DX11 for A-10C, or a 9 month development schedule for DCS modules) and then decide later they're NOT doing it...without really ever announcing "hey, this didn't work out like we thought, change of plans." Apache just faded away (now saying they never actually announced it), DX11 is tied up with the terrain thing apparently (after being announced as "coming soon" just a couple of months before A-10C's 1.0 release, when DCS World, FC3, BS2, and CA were totally nonexistent, yet are all here now), and that 9 month development thing is dismissed by apologists as "well programming is hard". As if ED were babes-in-the-woods when Black Shark was announced, and not veterans of a decade and a half of sim development who should've known that A-10C coming out 9 months after BS' release wasn't going to work. Few of us truly believed it, but I guess ED hoped most forgot about it when they fell far behind on that.

Would you buy it if Toyota announced today they could make a 300hp sports car that gets 100mpg and does 0-60 in 3 seconds? Would you then give them a pass when 2 years later they state "oh, sorry, it was too hard to do that." Well OF COURSE it was, everyone knew that, why say it in the first place?


As for reasons not to trust, well it's still got 1C's involvement, and few really know how much of CloD's problems were Ubi, 1C, or Oleg? We also don't know how much money is being devoted, how many people will work on it, or just what they're shooting for. However, Jason has proven to be a straight-shooter, and he's always quick to temper expectations when people run amok with speculations. If he says "no," it's not happening. If he says "maybe," don't take it as a yes or no, because his maybes turn out both ways. If he says "yes," it will be, but perhaps not in exactly the way you're expecting.

For instance, the rumors were saying "1C is taking over 777 and they're doing the next Il-2 and Luthier's team is out" and he was quick to reply "777 is NOT being taken over by 1C"...and nothing more. That was true. He declined to comment on the other true or partly accurate parts of the rumors until the official announcement came out.

Community efforts? As mentioned, maybe something will happen, maybe it will be decent, maybe it will come out in a timely manner (see the Black Mesa mod for HL2 that took only 8 years!!), or maybe it will be as big a joke as CloD's initial release. I put no faith in mods, ever. If one comes out I might like, I try it, but I do not expect anything beyond skins or missions to be actually worth trying. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I do not EXPECT modding saviors.




The Jedi Master

The fairy dust turned out to be dandruff

HOW DARE MG TRY AND MAKE PROGRESS, in fact how dare the human race try to make flying aircraft let alone get to the moon... come on everyone lets go back to living in caves...

^ thats pretty much what I thought when reading your post... in other words I read some rather foolish rambling.

I have held off posting on all of this.

Although I am sad to see MG consigned to history the fact that something is going to emerge from what was the CoD debacle is a good thing. I look at CoD and it still shreeks at you about what is wanted to be and what it might have been if the fates had favoured it differently, the problem was that from the off it was clear that there were some major issues under the bonnet and despite all the effort the final incarnation couldn't address the fundamental flaws. Do I think modders can do what the dev's couldn't ?, no, I don't. The old saying about not being able to polish a t**d comes to mind.

I do think that the way that 777 manage things can be nothing other than a major step forward from the 1C/MG teams approach, it is White House press briefings as opposed to Kremlin icy silences. Using Digital Nature also seems to make a great deal of sense to me- most importantly it works, and also seems very adaptable, new water, bigger more sophisticated aircraft etc coming in RoF support that view and subjectively I have always loved its graphics. I look forward to flying WWII aircraft in that engine and as to the business model I have always been comfortable with something where I only pay for what I want, with that the pressure is on the developers to keep up the wow factor so I do want it. I also hope that by pushing the boundaries with the new title RoF itself will reap the benefits, it certainly deserves to.

I am looking forward to supporting this new title.

Yes this is very bothersome when we are trying to be serious and unhappy

Not if WoP and WT are any indication.. Mind you.. they are ok.. I thought WoP had great potential.. but they released it without a mission builder then came out with two add ons that I bought, and the promise to get a mission builder and they then came out with WT instead.. and for me the fact that they would even release it with no MB.. or even a mission editor for crying out loud says a lot about what they are thinking.. or not.. and don't get me started on that stupid YuPlay system, the wonky skinning system and of course the lack of coop capability.. .. Not my cup of yum.. No pun intended.. They can keep it. 1C777 is the wave of the future.. From their business model to the developer involvement and to what they already have on the table.. It may not be the visual feats that CoD was or the versatile package that IL2 was.. but it works and it works well. I am fairly confident that they will not repeat what has transpired with the last 4 WWII offerings to come out over the past 2 years.

wt is not released, mb is planned.



there is a mission editor



you don't need yuplay




there is coop

Yes, actually. I trust OBD Software with the development of Wings Over Flanders Fields. If you are looking for an historically accurate WW1 flight sim that obsesses over the details and has a top quality single player dynamic campaign...I trust them. It's been in development for a few years now and still no release date, but the screenies and preview videos have looked rather impressive.

Wings Over Flanders Fields

Yes this is all true.. and in the above coments I was referring primarily to WoP.. I should have been clearer.. WT is not out yet.. it looks good but it has issues, at least it did for me.. Maybe they have been fixed.. so for me Gaijin is just another contender on the rising... Whether or not they are the new king on the rising remains to be seen..but that's me. Actually the same can be said for 1C777 .. I just have a great deal of confidence in them .. but I hav had confidence in flight sim devs with a track record before.. so I have a wait and see attitude with them as well..

Couldn't agree more..it's also a pointer to what a mod crew can do to a poor original game or a game with issues..you certainly wouldn't think it was using the same engine.