IL-2 Great Battles Dev News

Flight Sims
1249

First off, I could never buy the AAA vehicles DLC. I’ve killed too many of their kind to ever be accepted into their ranks.

Second off, and related very much to the first, AAA even to this day is very much a numbers game; fill the sky with as many high velocity bad-things as possible, and hope a plane bumbles into them. SAMs changed that up entirely, but the artillery side hasn’t changed all that much. Being a lone gunner in a sim like this seems like a recipe for boredom at best, frustration at worst.

Third, as a AAA operator, you’re more often than not, not the target, so you’re in more of an annoying ‘escort mode’ against circumstance you can’t really affect all that much on a 1:1 basis. Again, boredom and frustration.

It would make more sense (especially at this price…) to give us, say, a ship bristling with AAA, as there you’re potentially both the target and the opposition, wielding a wide range of flak and AAA options, so there’s strategy in employment.

4 Likes
1250

That analogy only works if the video card, joystick, rudder etc only works with one game and one game only.

For instance, a $100 PPV Boxing or MMA card has zero to do with the price of your TV. Doesn’t make sense to say you shouldn’t take issue with the price of a PPV because you own a $1000 TV does it?

2 Likes
1251

I’d not say it’s ‘the end of the world’, but very much a question of relative value. The $1000 Video card (still more than I’d pay, btw) or high end flight controller will offer me many, many, many hours of enjoyment, especially the controllers which can last for decades if well maintained (see: TM Cougars still floating around).

Conversely, personally the vehicles likely won’t offer that same return. I’d toss them maybe $5 for the hour or so tops I’d give it a go, if it were on sale.

In the same breath, I’ll acknowledge that it’s not cheap to create these modules, so $5 might be unrealistic, but from my side of the market, it’s what this is worth to me. $5 is the “eh, what the hell, let’s give it a go!” price point for me.

On top of all that, they feel like an answer to a question no ones asking and/or way to upcycle existing assets.

Let’s also not forget this is more ground content in a game built for a flight experience. Once at ground level, things start to feel very ‘last gen’ to me. If they want to give it a go, have at! but I’ll stick to the sky here.

That said, I’ve pre-ordered EVERY flight modules that they’ve put out since launch, at the collectors ed. level, without hesitation. I feel they are fairly priced as well, and wish they’d offer more WWII aircraft so they can take more of my money and I can fly more of their planes. Conversely I’m not interested in WWI kites, or tanks, so I’ve ‘invested’ in neither. All they need to do as a business is run a back-end webstore analysis of their customer base (which SHOULD be easy, if they did their homework; I do this sort of thing for a living), and segment out who’s acting like and being a 'WWII loyalist" versus who’s buying ‘everything’, and the market signals will be pretty clear, however they shake out.

long winded way of saying: I have zero guilt saying the recently announced vehicles are over priced :slight_smile:

1 Like
1252

Buy it, do not buy it, no sweat, but the angst I see over $30 dollars is just unreal to me. Always has been since this complaint about overpricing is nothing new and taking into consideration what most everything else in life costs these days is still throw away money for most people. Couple fewer happy meals or cups of coffee at the coffee shop of your preference and you have covered the costs of these modules. One less dinner and a movie with your significant other, when such a thing is normal again, and you will likely have covered the cost for both modules at full price twice over.

Wheels

2 Likes
1253

Meh.

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1254

In my opinion, the planes in the Great Battles series don’t feel worth the price. I’m sure they in fact are - I know they put a lot of effort into the flight model and the meshes are great, even though I suspect there is something funky with the world scale in VR that makes the dimensions seem off for me.

But with a DCS plane I can learn what every switch and lever in the cockpit does. It feels like I’m interacting with a real piece of machinery. In IL2:BoX I just bind “start engine 3” to a key or button and then have to try to remember what I bound it to. It feels less involved, even though they probably spent almost as much time developing it. That’s perhaps why some of us aren’t taking to the “single airplane” DLCs for BoX so well…

1255

Hi, my name is Maico. Can I speak to your marketing director. YOU ARE FIRED!
Worse marketing decision I’ve seen them do since the game started.

1256

That’s assuming that they don’t. 777 seem pretty confident in their marketing and pricing processes and don’t hesitate in employing aggressive sales discounts. Since we have no sales data, I wouldn’t presume that they are acting blindly. Besides, they may be on to something here. For the ground-pounders, getting a high fidelity AAA weapon may make them all tingly. Now they have a stick to swat the mosquitos and horseflies with.

2 Likes
1257

Yeah, crewable flak guns have been a long standing request.

1258

Ahhhh the plot thickens!!! So there are ground pounders in il2? Makes sense now.

1259

Missed Tank Crew? It’s pretty nice, actually.

1 Like
1260

Quite frankly at this time I find the Tank Crew module more enjoyable than any of the aircraft. :sunglasses:

Wheels

1 Like
1261

I’m enjoying Tank Crew as well. Fly by view is cool :slight_smile:

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1262

I love tank crew. Guess I didn’t play it enough. I had no idea people just play w the tanks.

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1263

And I’m the exact opposite. I just don’t care about cranking levers or twisting knobs or monitoring a pressure gauge.
My prime interest is to fight in these birds, and my distant secondary interest is to fly in them. If my primary interest was to fly, I’d have MSFS or Xplane or whatever where that’s the main thing (only thing) to do.

As far as I’m concerned, they can just have the entire startup be no more involved than starting my car in the morning because I find all that stuff as irrelevant to the experience as I do taking the pilot to the mess for breakfast or visiting the head before takeoff. Just because the real pilots did it doesn’t mean it’s automatically equally interesting.

2 Likes
1264

It you want some Online tank action look for the Action Dogfight and Tanks server in Multiplayer @Maico.

Stats page for the server.
http://il2action.ddns.net/en/tankmans/

Wheels

2 Likes
1265

Jedi, I think we’re blessed to live in a time where we both have such great sims to scratch our virtual fighter pilot itch in exactly the way we want :sunglasses::+1:t3:

1266

True enough. I keep saying that I still get giddy grabbing the tail wires, shoving her out of the hanger, strapping in and cranking. The feeling is a cross between an endorphin hit and karma. Same with doing the overhead flow in the jet. Same with getting it going in the sim. I NEED these precursors to flight in order to enjoy the flights just as I NEED the landing in order to enjoy the combat. We are an odd group of nerds whether virtual, real or both.

5 Likes
1267

Actually, most of what pilots do is pretty mundane and quite repetitive. The interesting part of flying is the strategic and tactical decision making, where no two flights are quite the same. Problem solving and risk management is the cool stuff IMHO. I’d still like clickable pits in IL2 though, mainly because I have a hard time remembering how I mapped everything out on my HOTAS.

2 Likes
1268

Il-2 is still a lot easier than DCS in that regard! At least Il-2 has unified controls for planes.
If your plane has control X, you can map this switch to it and it will be there for all of them.

DCS makes it so each plane is like a separate sim…

1 Like