It looks great! I will not buy it. After putting together this expensive rig only to realize it’s just as easy to be bored at 90 FPS as it is at 15, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of the Game. I am not creative enough to build upon a compelling sandbox, no matter how beautiful. Give me a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It can be the DC in Falcon, a triggered script like the Georgia Oil War in Black Shark, the Career in Stalingrad/Moscow, or any compelling multiplayer map (which can be a real challenge to find). For sandboxing I go to X-Plane. It has a real-world function in my life so I forgive it for its lack of gameplay. I can practice new airports before I fly them for real or get a taste for a new type of plane as I did with the Pitts. And it pretty much taught me how to fly helicopters.
There are phrases that get tossed about with tones of insult: “sim-lite”, “air-quake”, “bubble”, etc. I find that I am happiest in those realms that hard-core flight sim enthusiasts demean. 35 years and countless thousands of hours playing and writing about flight simulations has oddly enough made me a sim-lite kind of player. I want a story. And a Vietnam era helicopter flying through a deserted 1944 British countryside isn’t it.
Sorry to be such a curmudgeon. It really is stunning.
Indeed, everything looks pretty, but it lacks atmosphere. I think one of the few campaigns that actually manage this are those by Baltic Dragon. Now a UH-1H campaign by him would be something I’m willing to pay for!
The DCS sandbox is incredible! Really!
But, the sandbox need more players. And I don’t mean flightsimmers, although they are important too!
DCS needs more playable content. More missions and campaigns. But someone has to make them, and since DCS is in a more or less eternal development cycle, I think external developer are reluctant to invest resources in what is bound to be a long period of patching and upgrading of their DLC, to keep up with the development of the core. X-Plane saw the same lack of interest before they restructured their development of the core software.
That said, developing software like DCS is impossible without fixing bugs and adding features along the line, so I fail to see how they can do better.
I do hope, however, that 2.5 (or what they will call the unified branch) will bring some stability to DCS and external developers will flock to the scene.
One thing that I really look forward to, and that I think will bring fantastic play-value to DCS WWII Normandy is Wags and Bunyaps Spitfire campaign. I mean…have you seen Bunyaps “Four months in the life of a Spitfire wing” series on Youtube? The level of research is incredible!
Yeah - I think the Great Unification will be a huge relief to everyone and will allow a lot of people to perhaps start some projects that they have otherwise been sitting on.
It was intended to showcase the map, not a fully fleshed out mission or campaign… I mean seriously, it seems like people are trying to find things to pick at… You reference a campaign by Baltic Dragon… so that sort of contradicts you right there, its EDs job to give us all the tools (and a few of their own missions and campaigns) and for us, and others to make the game come to life…
I dont know why you continue to contribute to this thread when you clearly only intend to tell people about how you dont want it, perhaps you are trying to convince others they dont want it as well? I dont know…
Can we just agree that none of us have all of the information to make broad determinations about certain aspects of this sim and leave it at that? We don’t need to downgrade this discussion into arguments and counter arguments about things we can not resolve?
Why not wait until the product, missions, and campaigns come out before labeling it? I mean, the purpose of the flight was to just show you what it looked like, not what people will do with it. It’d be the same thing as flying a drone over a closed and deserted Disney World.
A closed and deserted disneyland would be the perfect time for me to visit
I dunno each to their own but I am genuinely excited by the new map. When the camera panned around those tanks at the end of the livestream and there was a view down the hill with the countryside just laid out was georgeous. I am excited by both the iconic area for 1944 and the possibilities for more modern day scenario’s I can see a great opportunity for a soviet invasion of Southern England Cold War stylee and also rewritting history and see what happens when the Axis powers attempt a landing in Kent
My point was that very few campaigns achieve it well, heck I love DCS otherwise I wouldn’t be so opinionated about it. You seem to tolerate no critique of it .besides I already have bought it… You seem to be very aggressive in your commenting.
I suspect the Normandy map will be successful if compelling gameplay in the form of interesting missions and campaigns are created for it. That (to me) seems like an endeavor split among four parties: ED, aircraft module makers, payware mission/campaign makers, and community members. What ratio that split is remains to be seen, but I think it is mostly in ED and module makers interest to create material that draws users in - that sells more stuff, and for module makers it sells their content. We’ve already seen compelling campaigns by all four parties - so it I don’t think it will be difficult to have that happen. The hard part for module makers (aircraft/helo type) is that they would have to write missions and/or a campaign for both the free DCS World environment (Black Sea) and their era specific DLC that matches up with their platform. So it will not only have to be good, it will have to be good enough that people will buy Normany too.
I’m not really a WW2 fan, but I’m guessing that if you are into WW2 platforms (Mustangs, Spitfires, Messerschmidts), you are also going to be fairly well interested in Normandy too, so it is probably not as hard a sell. Judging from what I saw in the video, for us helo types it won’t be too hard of a sell either.
One interesting aspect is that there is a good bit of competition in this “battle space” for ED. I don’t know enough about WW2 sims to make any observations about that now, nor likely in the future, but I’m sure there will be plenty of opinions about it…
So where is the thread about the Hornet and Hormuz?..that is much more in my comfort zone…
The video that serves as the ad for Normandy on the DCS website is a much better sell. They deserve a lot of credit, Vegas fell apart and ED gave us NTTR a few years later. The original Maddox-endorsed WWII thing was a disaster but instead of just walking away, they have served up something gorgeous. In retrospect, I regret some of my negativity above because common sense would argue that after so much time, manpower and money, the content needed to make it a living environment simply must follow or it won’t recoup. I have arrived at middle-age with nearly 25 years of ED baggage. Some of it I would sooner forget but most has been unmatched by anything else I’ve played.
As someone who has made missions for the WW 2 content, I am confident the Normandy release will spur a large amount of content in a short order. When trying to make missions now there is something akin to writers block that sets in immediately due to the effort required to justify 1944 era units on a cold war map.
When setting out to design a mission, in many cases the map is your canvas. Sometimes you will have an idea for what will happen and you will look at the map to see where that might fit, but most of the time you will look at the map and maybe say, Ohh, I could have a train bringing 2nd Panzer to the front here, and have it protected by Doras and attacked by Mustangs! That creative pallet just isn’t there with the current maps. Trust me you are going to get like 50 “Attack the B-17’s” missions in the first week alone!
I also have a feeling that the Caucasus airfields with their thousands of feet of concrete runway have probably taught some very bad habits. Taking off won’t be that different but you may want to start working on shortening your roll outs now…
