Just want to say I agree completely with what you say, FinnN. I hear that KoE is probably gone for good; but I have a sneaking suspicion it would never have delivered as a game anyway - enormous effort seemed to have been expended on graphics and damage modelling, but I never heard anything about how it would play as a game.

I suspect that flight sims have killed themselves as a genre by their obsession with graphics and flight modelling at the expense of gameplay. I firmly believe that the game should be developed first, then the flashy graphics and realistic (whatever that means) flight models added on top, if there is time. Instead we see products like KoE with superbly modelled aircraft, and the plug gets pulled on them before anyone gets around to adding a game. No wonder the publisher lost their nerve. (Apologies to all at Aspect if I'm wrong - that's how it looks to an outsider).

The two things I want from a flight sim are gameplay and immersion. Graphics and flight models can be essential to immersion (just as arcade gamey things like power ups can kill immersion), but they aren't an end in themselves, IMO. I would guess that most in the flight sim community are propeller heads, more concerned with technical aspects of flight than anything else. The board wargame hobby went through a similar phase a few years ago, as the obsessively 'realistic' (in a technical sense) wargames died out when people discovered that there were other games out there that were much more fun to play.

The sad part is that I believe that a realistic, immersive, fun game could very easily be built around WW1 aviation, much more easily than in any other period, because of the relative simplicity of the aircraft. But so long as people insist on 3000 polygon models and perfect to the last newton physics modelling, then they will never get what they want; or if they do, they will soon discover it isn't much fun to play.

So it's back to playing RB3D with FCJ for me...

My feeling is that Flight Sims have tended to concentrate to a far greater extent on the minutae of the aircraft and have forgotten the world around them. Personally (and I know I may be in the minority here) I feel that if more attention in future games should be paid to what is going on on the ground. A world war 2 flight simulator should in an ideal world see something akin to World War 2 going on below him. You don't often see people just wonderng around in Flight Sims yet I am pretty sure this happens in real life as do aircraft taxiing. In war you tend to get ongoing fighting, damaged tanks from each other and a scene more reminiscent of Shogo Total War than most sims! I know that for practical reasons these things are difficult to simulate but I believe that the more immersive a simulator can be in the world around it the more the player is drawn into it. Immersion in games is all important and this is particularly true of flight sims - to look at it another way you won't get people buying your game if your roll rate in an FW190-A3 is ever so slightly better modelled than in Forgotten Battles. You will sell lots if you can make the average worker believe that he realy is about to cover the retreat from Dunkirk or fly observation over the Somme at the end of the first day.

I agree with von Stalhein - I've been throwing designs around for ages, and in them graphics and flight models take a back seat - they are essentially compartmentalised bits that can be developed entirely separately from the main game, the campaign engine. That's the bit I really want to have a go at designing. If I ever find myself with a barrel load of free time...

Falcon4

I was wondering whether a D-Day flight sim would be the sort of thing - huge numbers of ships, supporting troops in entrenched positions, operating from forward bases - add in a really slick interface (something like a massively updated version of Origin's Strike Fighters)and a branching storyline and you could have something quite impressive. The simulation side would be bang on and there would be mission editors etc but it would also appeal to the "casual player" so that you could shift units off shelves and therefore make a bit of money as well!

S! All!

I can certainly tell you what the future of online campaign systems is for the IL2/FB family of games...

It's called SCORCHED EARTH!

But that's not WWI, and deep down inside I'm a Sopwith Pup pilot.

Oh shut up.

So sick of hearing of the "death" of this and that.

WW2Online has all the sims bottled up into one with no end in sight. And that's just one sim. Give it a rest.

Terrible Two,

I don't think anyone forced you to read this thread, so if you find it offensive, you'll have to excuse me if I don't give a rip. This has been up until your post a very constructive thread.

You are sick of reading this kind of thread? There is a simple solution to that: stop reading!

Its not only flight sims that are lacking offline. Cossacks for example didn't have any AI to play historical battles against. After reading several posts regarding piracy, I was thinking that maybe the single player game is being neglected because of piracy. You can steal a game an play it offline all you want, but try to take it online and you have a problem(if I understand correctly). Guess maybe that doesn't make producers too keen on single player gaming.

Just to add to this discussion ...

Flight sims aren't dying because of the community. The hardcore community has always been there for many years through many different simulations.

What has changed is that PC games publishers are no longer willing to invest the amounts of money and time required to develop a AAA flight sim when they can go and develop a console game that will sell a lot more units and make a heck of a lot more money.

That is why most of the combat flight sim development has shifted to Eastern Europe and Russia where development costs are infinitely lower than the U.S. Notice that there are almost no US flight sim developers left. Of course Microsoft still has Flight Simulator but that is the only one.

The only other U.S. developers still writing sims are those publishing pay-per-play online games. IL2 and LOMAC both come from Russia. Quite a few PC games are now coming from Russia and East Europe.

Except for some major PC games franchises very few U.S. devs are still writing PC games. It may be cyclic and we may see a resurgence but the days of big ticket flightsims coming from the U.S. market are well and truly over.