Tale of two WWI flight sim projects.

[FlyXwire]

Hello WWI flight sim fans,

I've been thinking about comments and occurrences lately involving recent WWI flight sim developments in our hobby, and was wondering which forum membership would be best to submit this topic to for consideration. In the end it was John MacKay's (Xeidos2's) recent words here that made me decide that the Aerodrome forum was the best place to have this discusssion at.

So let me open this conversation here by quoting John's words again:

"Personally, I'd be very surprised to see any game studios left in the USA in 5 years. I hope I'm wrong on this, but things don't look too incouraging."

Now before I continue into the body of what I hope will be an interesting exchange of ideas for us, let me introduce the objects I'd like to submit for the topic of our future discussion here:

A: Third Wire's WWI sim presently under development, and

B: Gennadich Team's WWI sim also presently under development

As most of you who have been following these two sim projects know, and for those interested forum members who haven't been closely following these two design efforts (but still might be interested in participating here perhaps), one of these projects is being made in the U.S.A, and the other is being made in Russia.

Ok, with this brief introduction stated, I'm going to abruptly end this first posting, but in the meantime I would like those interested to contemplate this topic a bit, and to consider John's quote above, as well as to compare and contrast in your own minds what your impressions are presently concerning the on-going development(s) of these two WWI sim projects.

To be continued........

[Tim West]

I'll go with the one that actually gets published

[FlyXwire]

Originally Posted by Tim West

I'll go with the one that actually gets published

I'm with you Tim!

I'm going to drop the whole topic.....success will be determined by whether the sims get published, and how well they sell.

None of all this matters too much in the scope of things anyway.......life goes on.

[Xeidos2]

Let me give some more fuel to the fire.

I learned early on while working at Eidos Interactive that there were teams of talented and inspired game developers all over the world. We had a small team from Scandinavia come in and show us a terrain system that simply blew us away. They would later develop JSF for Eidos. We had a team from Spain develop the Commando series. Tomb Raider was made by a small studio in England which came along with the company that we bought for a better distribution system. While these groups were making great games, our American development team got bogged down and failed to complete the two flight sim projects I worked on. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is no reason why a game has to be made in America in order for it to be good.

I think the game publishers have realized this as well. Look at a list of all the game studios that work for Ubi Soft. They're located all over the world. There's a very basic economic reason why Silent Hunter III was made in Romania instead of Silicon Valley. You got a quality product at a fraction of the cost it would have taken had the game been made in the US.

Look at all of the movie production companies that moved their operations from Hollywood to Canada once they discovered they could make movies a lot cheaper and still have the same quality. I just think the same thing is happening with games. As game publishers consolidate and become these multi-national corporations, they're not going to care where the games come from, they'll just want them made at the lowest price so that their profits can be bigger.

Regarding the two flight sims in question. I think the models being developed by both teams are of the highest quality. Both sims should be a feast for the eyes. How well the planes fly and how well the AI works and how much "fun" the sims are to fly, remains to be seen. Both teams seem to be starting from good foundations. I think the real test will come when we see what kind of support these teams get from their publishers. Maybe it's been announced who will be the publisher for Third Wire's project and I don't know about it yet, but if it should be that their publisher will be Destineer, then I cringe when I think of their prospect of getting good support.

[FlyXwire]

Well believe or not, I'm kinda getting tired of the whole flight sim scene guys.

Been a fan too long now I think.

Just got done gaming one of my other diversions (Red Orchestra), and I always have a blast playing this WW2 shooter. You just connect online, find a server, and get down to it. I'm afraid a lot of flight sim communities are getting real stale, and so immersed with themselves to the point that nobody much flies the sims anymore, they're more interested in modding, or skinning, or shooting the BS on their forums rather than actually playing the games!

I'm starting to feel that modding has had a detrimental effect on the flight sim hobby in fact, at least for the multiplayer component, this because of the constant disruption modding causes with online compatability. The next thing you get are factions within the community of who's mods are "best", what you "should" have and why, and on, and on, and on. Then it ends up that nobody is gaming the sims anymore, they're just downloading the latest obscure plane someone thought would be cool to make, and the whole thing just snowballs into disfunction......I mean, just leave the damn sim alone and fly it already!

I guess if something isn't much fun anymore, or if it becomes a hassle to try and experience then you just stop be much interested in it, huh?

No need to mention that flight simming is becoming a smaller and more obscure part of electronic gaming all the time............perhaps that's because they're really not that much fun to experience anymore.

Anyway, from the beginning of this thread I was thinking of starting this topic for us to analyze which of the above WWI sim projects might have the best formula for future "success" (and why), but you know what, after all the years of waiting for a retail WWI sim to come along (and doing more than that too) it's all seeming sort of anticlimactic to me now.

Maybe it's the winter blues, who knows.

Well maybe I'll try to act excited if one of these sims does come out afterall......we'll see then. Until that time I'll be looking to other avenues for my entertainment.

Like I said, I think I've been a flight sim fan too long now......guess only time will tell.

[stoney]

I'm a avid flight simmer (off line). My PC has three installs of M$ CFS2. My most used install is the one I've devoted to only WWI and RAF between the wars. I really enjoy finding new WWI aircraft and scenery of the period to D/L and install. If a GOOD WWI sim come along I'll be first in line to buy it. I would hope it be from the US, but if not I'll still buy it. When I get tired of playing, I give it a rest for a few days and return with renewed interest. Plus I build models of WWI aircraft and have four books shelves devoted to the subject, I just can't get enough, and haven't since I was 8 years old. And I'm 59 now!

[Tom_Cervo]

. . . from 16 color Red Baron, I have a few thoughts to add to your insightful posts.
1. Why can't it be fun?
The great thing about WW1 sims is the ability to get off the ground and start shooting in 5 minutes. (Mission critical controls that can be mapped entirely to one joystick. And written down on a 3x5 card.) And yet take a long time to master. No other sims so reward intuition, flying by the seat of your pants--so why do we make it so hard? Why do I have to manage a flight or a squadron--I know some people like it, and they make a lot of noise, but they aren't the ones not buying the sims. The majority of fighter pilots on the Western Front went up with a rough idea of the course of the flight and a few map references handed to them and orders to follow their #1. Leave management as an option.
2. My money's on TK
Look at the fan support for Third Wire efforts, and EAW before it. By creating a solid base for modding, these sims are good right out of the box and can be tailored to include aircraft, theatres and campaigns.

[totoroman]

I used to love playing Red Baron 3d. I joined a great squad that fizzled out, and them moved on to an even better squadron that also fizzled out. the first one croaked because we were all in different time zones, and they just got on with their lives. the second croaked because we spent so much time modding the game and developing rules and skins and making a big production out of everything that people got bored and left! we had guys trying to make a better, more realistic flight model. the problem was. the guy was making a flight-model that worked best for HIS computer with a high-end joystick and a set of rudder pedals. the rest of us, or the newbies, couldn't adapt to his increasingly more difficult flight models. a lot of folks don't like to work for their victories--and so while I greatly enjoyed the more difficult damage models we worked with (because I've become a pretty good shot over the years and years) a lot of other folks HATED it because they didn't have the time to practice... or knew the technical matters of how damage models are done in RB.

I also got fed up with Baron von Helton and his egomania. always telling everybody about his newest mods, condemning others for not appreciating his work... and failing to see that it is communities and groups of people that get more accomplished! it takes a whole team of people to make a flight-sim work... and at least that many to make it better. and while it's probably unfair to make a singular case out of this guy--he exemplifies a lot of what has gone wrong with sim-modders. all of these guys thinking "I could do it better" instead of settling down with what we already had and learning to have fun.

modders are invariably purists. and the problem with that is that newbies want to have fun! online play is already a cut-throat business... with competitive people who cheat to win, griefers out there to simply piss everybody off. or simply honest, hard-flying and hard-fighting people who hate to lose and never give up the advantage to help newbies learn and improve. I've met all kinds... and I've never gotten a spectacular kill ratio because I'd rather help others learn and have fun. unfortunately there aren't that many people left out there that are willing to do that. hell, I haven't flown online in almost two years!

and the other pain in the ass about modding games is that people ALWAYS bitch. somebody always wants their favorite plane to be unbeatable! I always loved flying two-seaters and fighting to stay alive and bombing crap--so I had no illusions that a Rumpler C.IV or a Halberstadt C.II was going to be defeating everything in the sky!

I'm reminded of the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovitch who was once critized about some problems in a piece of music he wrote--and asked he didn't correct it. his apparently cavalier response actually contains some genuine professional wisdom, "I'll fix those problems in the next composition." sometimes we have to leave "well enough" alone. and while I agree that Red Baron 3d actually NEEDED some modifications... I don't think it really needs any more.

I've never played CFS derivatives online... just because it moves too quickly for me. and I can't afford to pay to play!

[FlyXwire]

Hey, this is turning out to be a very interesting thread.......looks like I'll be spending more time here afterall (instead of gaming that is).

I think we can probably agree (or see) that modding is not always a positive ingredient for organizing multiplayer gaming (as totoroman illustrated above), whereas it can be an exciting enhancement to the single-player experience as explained by stoney and Tom. To a degree this contrast mirrors the difference between Third Wire's approach to game design (having an "open architecture" structure which encourages modding), and the IL-2 sim's "steep curve" approach of controlling the process when it comes to allowing new content to be added to their sim(s). Third Wire's approach promotes modders to add more content to their games, and allows for substantial tweaking of the sim's aircraft performance and weapon's parameters, while the IL-2 series of games has much of this hard-coded and placed beyond the reach of modders. Perhaps the interesting effect of this approach can be seen in the vibrance of the respective sim communities, one has modded content becoming available "all" the time, while the other sim supports an extremely active online community, but with much less content available beyond official releases (and things like user-created skins, etc). I guess in this regards the contrast might be summed up as "you choose your weapon", and by doing so you've also got to accept the pros and cons that come with that choice.

Perhaps like a lot of you guys I've been on both sides of the fence here, having enjoyed participating in adding content to open sims, as well as flying online in more controlled sim enviroments.......and I like both. Here's what's bugging me though, and that is......I don't buy a sim because I'm wanting to mod it, but to be able to enjoy flying it! Sure, modding can add content (and enhance enjoyment too), but it can also "kill" multiplayer playability by adding confusion, create compatibility issues, and encourage "factionalism" (just my personal observations).

Now this discussion about adding content played out to a degree here recently with the WWI mod to CFS3 (OFF), where some parties wanted to be able to add content easily to the sim, whereas the mod's design team wished to maintain some degree of control over this. I'm certainly not wanting to revisit the specifics of that debate here, but only want to touch on it from a "generic" basis, in mentioning that it almost reflects the same issue we're discussing now between mod-ability vs. play-ability (especially in regards to multiplayer functionality).

Lastly, before I relinquish the floor here, I've got to agree with John way up there near the beginning of this thread, and perhaps contrary to what impressions I might have made in my first posting, I believe that products must compete on their quality and uselfullness first, and perhaps only then should where they're made be of consideration. I believe in having the right as a consumer to be able to pick the best tool for the job (which can really only be left to one's personal decision weighing afterall). It's up to the designers and producers of a product to make sure it's competitive in the market place, and to recognize that this competive "playing field" is constantly changing.

(oh yeah, I did mention at the beginning of this thread two WWI sims being designed concurrently didn't I).............

[Tim West]

Dave,

I agree, modding may have killed the flight sim as a whole. Online play isn't as fun as it used to be for the reasons you mentioned. I guess mods are cool, eventually they turn into a big hassle which degrades the whole experience.

Outsourcing of titles, doesn't bother me too much. I just want fun games. If I worked for a game house, then I would surely feel differently about this.

In the big picture, I want a game that is fluid from start to finish and a relative FM across all ac types. Oh, and a great single player campaign as I don't really plan of doing much in the way of online play. I have no time or desire anymore.

Actually I play more console games with my kids, than on my PC. PC games require a lot more time to fully enjoy all they have to offer. I do like the new Civ though.

In the end, I am not going to lose sleep over any of this. When I can finally buy a boxed WWI sim that is more than crimson skies, then I will am there.