It may just be a clerical mistake but this site is reporting that the Australian classification board has recently rated BoS and listed it as "multi-platform".

Then devoted fans have been denying that since the beginning so surely it can't be true...

Well that is probably because up until this point it was only speculation with nothing to base it on.
Devoted fans would probably be just as disappointed as not so devoted fans at such a development. Probably more so. Certainly more surprised.

It might as well. BoS is more like Birds of Prey than any other IL2, so it makes sense.

So, are you going to choose to believe this statement, including the opening 5 words?
From a business perspective it makes a lot of sense. Work out all the bugs on the easily patched PC side, then when it's stable you get it working on consoles. It also lines up with their design choices--removing choices that would otherwise be no big deal to implement.




The Jedi Master

Look how demanding it is on the PC. You think it would even work on a console?

I don't think flight sims would do well on consoles. Look at Birds of Prey. Did it do well? I don't know. But there's no head tracking, poor resolution and not good controller options. Too many complex commands. It was always my impression that for those reasons flying games aren't popular on consoles. There are keyboards and flight sticks compatable with consoles though.

Then there's all the user generated content that makes flight sims good. Mission editors, skins etc. how does that work on a console? If the device has an OS that can be operated, maybe?

Hey if a flight sim could bring in console $ I'd be all for it but it doesn't sound like he market.

I wouldn't dismiss Birds of Prey. It's that kind of game that can get people interested in real flight sims. I don't imagine many new players run out and buy DCS for their first go.

Another post, and another time someone (me this time) has already gone over what can be done on consoles. Another time, you have failed to read/and or understand. Go back to another one of your pro-BoS posts. Then look where you already brought up the same statement about consoles. Then look at the responses. The last step is to read and understand. Lets hope it can be done.

Same topic. Same response. Go figure

Thankfully, I bought this game for a lot less than I wasted on Wings pf Prey, for example. I'll get my €30 out of it, but am becoming increasingly sceptical that my investment will yield the huge dividends I got from EAW and IL-2 1946. I, however, will be delighted to be surprised.

Not even close.

Your assumptions are wrong, but you continue to spew them. It was already pointed out. Like I said before you have a problem understanding or reading or both, because you have no base for your arguments.

http://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4057637/Re:_BoS_vs_RoF#Post4057637

"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck - then it is probably a duck."

BoS feels and plays like a console game in so many ways it was probably designed as a console game from the get go with minimally added features to also market it as a PC game. I won't be surprised at all if it comes out as a console game for which it is probably better suited in its current state.

"Coming to a Play Station near you."

Given the likely huge amount of effort it would require to port it over to consoles, this seems massively unlikely. They would almost certainly have to hire a third party to do the actual porting, especially as it's not just some off-the-shelf game engine. It would be great news if true, though. That would probably also mean that Rise of Flight would be ported too since the hardest part of the work would already done.

If they could pull it off, and it sold a few hundred thousand copies or whatever, I figure that would be a Good Thing for everyone involved.

I'm sure it's just a misprint though.

Ok. I hadn't seen your reply before. Now that I recall I guess Kinnect can be used for head tracking although I can't imagine it working well since its trying to map your head movement from across the living room the way people have consoles set up. If head tracking worked really well for consoles you'd see it in more games like shooters which are really great with it like ARMA
Looks like it works though
http://youtu.be/DJgMRjpAcOM
And then there's Project Morpheus for PS4 which could be good.
My experience with consoles is back with the 360 where a flying game is about as much fun as putting a fork in your eye.
If flight sims could be ported over easily then I don't see the problem. It's a bigger market.
I imagine for them to be sucessful they'd have to be playable with the normal console controller though. PC users don't even want to buy flight sticks.
Do either the PS4 or XBox One accept mouse and keyboard input?

Seems I'm missing half the conversation, but why not dive in anyways.

Controls would be the biggest obstacle. There are some flight sticks for consoles (at least the previous generation), like the Saitek AV8R or the HORI Flight Stick (which actually looks decent: http://www.amazon.com/HORI-PlayStation-3-Flight-Stick/dp/B006IOAJHG), but it's certainly nothing like the PC.

I'm not sure about the Xbone version, but the 360 Kinect would not be very good for head tracking. It's a brilliant piece of hardware and could undoubtedly be made to work, but the built in webcam would be much more practical.

So far as I know the Playstation supports Bluetooth and USB mice and keyboards (Xbone probably does too, but with some minor compatibility tweak so they can charge licensing fees for massively marked-up MS branded peripherals), but not necessarily during gameplay.

Anyways, it's chicken-or-the-egg. Consoles would be a great way to get people into flight sims, but you'd have to get a Forza/Gran Turismo sort of thing going, and I don't see flight sims ever being as popular as racing.

It really does require a significant amount of learning, research and fiddling (not to mention money) just to get a typical PC flight sim set up properly. I suspect many of us underestimate how daunting that is to most people given that much of it has become just second nature to us over the years. I have no doubt MS would have tried pushing a console version of FS if they thought it would be financially viable.

Well as I said it could be just a clerical error but lets just imagine its true for a moment for the sake of discussing the merits of a PC flight sim on a console, if there was any time to do it now would be the time to do it while the consoles are still relatively new and before the gap between their performance and a PC widens too far and they would have to strip out more features. War Thunder outputs in 1080p and is popular on the PS4 and as I've already said in the post linked above the PS4 version of War Thunder supports head tracking via the PS4 camera. I think people get too blinkered with TrackIR and seem unable to consider any other method of view control, for instance I don't use TrackIR in BoS, I use EDTracker which works just as well without the need for a camera or IR/LED array. You can't just look at the raw specs of a console and compare it to a PC, its not got all the overheads of a bloated OS like a PC has where it has to run many processes it may not need for gaming its as close to the metal as possible to do one task. Its not the hardware that would hold a sim back.

Sims for racing or flight have not always done so well on the console format, War Thunder perhaps grew a following as it was one of a small number of games available at the launch (or just after) of the PS4 and it was free to download. Can 1C/777 follow that route with a free version and then charge for additional content? I'm not sure the console market would be willing to pay $20 for each extra aircraft as DLC tends to be a lot cheaper for single items on the console online stores. I don't think BoS would sell for the normal full price of a console game, its a small niche on the PC, its tiny on the console. Simbin dipped their toe in the console market with RACE On years ago on the Xbox 360 and it flopped, partly because it was released in a poor state but even it was fixed it was up against racing games like Forza which boasted a larger number of cars and tracks and had an already established following so despite being a better simulation it didn't sell even though the 360 had a capable steering wheel peripheral.

Maybe that's why we've had the preset settings forced upon us, the need to log in to play the campaign. They can get an idea of what settings run well on specs comparable with a PS4 or Xbox One, the unlocks that were foisted upon us would be ideal for the console market, the lack of historical medals, ranks, units etc. won't matter to the average console gamer that I've encountered online. If BoS does go multi-platform then I can't see many PC owners being happy when they thought their money would be put to use expanding the franchise on the PC.

Oh please. These current consoles, the PS4 and Xbox, are very close to PC in terms of hardware. They both have x86 cpus with what is essentially an off the shelf AMD gpu slapped on the same die (aka APU). There has never been a generation of consoles so close to PCs besides maybe the OG xbox, but that had enough differentiation to make porting a pita. This time that is not the case.

The ease of porting to/from console and PC is a big part of the reason why so many games are going multiplatform now. There are very few titles outside of first party games that are exclusive to consoles. The cost of porting BoS to consoles, and thus the required sales to make a return on investment, are probably much lower then you believe. Especially once you consider the current exchange rate of rubles to euros/dollars.

On top of this the developers have shown that they have no issues with experimenting with alternative forms of sim control - see the mouse mode they made for Ilya that is now part of RoF. I doubt adding controller support would be something they'd balk at now.

Head tracking with kinect and the playstation camera are part of those consoles respective SDKs which would make taking advantage of it in a hypothetical console port rather trivial.

Every other console port game has custom graphic settings on the PC so probably this isn't the reason for the presets?

A lot of games have engines that were built to be multi-platform so they are a known quantity, so before spending any money on devs kits you might set a graphics preset that would be close to the performance of the consoles you intend to develop for and get a rough of what detail they could run, how many objects they could handle in a mission etc.

Another feature of consoles that I always found puzzling was that you can't map any of the controls. At least on the 360
No idea why that is but it would make games with complex control setups like flight sims frustrating. Maybe that speaks to the type of simplicity they want for consoles. If so that's out of place for a sim. The casual gamer probably isn't the right demographic for this product.