True. I grew up on AF bases; knew (and still do a little) what the jet was just by the sound before I was 12. Cape Kennedy launches nearby at some point - that’s a physical experience (esp. the Shuttle) even from miles away.
Think you’re onto something.
Look how poorly HAWX and ace combat sold against fortnite or Minecraft. Kids don’t want to be the jet pilot anymore. That dream is dying.
I watched my granddaughter play this - I didn’t get it. Still don’t. Guess I need to steal the controller from here next time and take a deep dive into its 'system’s 
I don’t get it either. I kind of want to…but I don’t. The only positive I can say is at least they are creating things. Worlds even. Creativity has changed into something else from when we were young. It should be valued for what it is not the format. But I agree. Its gibberish to me. Lol
Its very interesting isn’t it, this whole discussion. I think we are moving so fast to a purely digitally based entertainment society that in 20 or 30 years time things like paintball, karting and other outdoor pursuits will be so heavily regulated by the environmental impact that kids will have to be purely digital to get an endorphin release. We are possibly the last generation to ever do these things.
Less over-powered, more by not having a game. Go back to the 90’s era sims; why did we play them? Fleet Defender doesn’t have anywhere near the fidelity of the Heatblur F-14. Strike Commander has laughable realism compared to even the WIP ED F-16C. Yet we play (and still play) these titles because they couldn’t squeeze the same level of fidelity into the software back then that we could now, so they made up for it by having gameplay. You may as well ask why BMS remains a hardcore modern sim with a much smaller audience than DCS; it’s simply a more complex, stringent experience that requires much more dedication.
DCS’ failure isn’t a dynamic campaign or too much fidelity; it’s simply not having an experience outside of learning all the switches and procedures. It’s a sandbox that offers limited tools to tailor the experience outside of individual aircraft operations. Even within ArmA2, we were able to build a relatively complex experience in the AH-64D and wrap it into a compelling narrative that got a lot of attention, and we did that by simply following the model of the old Jane’s Longbow games. You have to get people emotionally invested in the experience and you can’t do that with procedures and switch flipping alone.
Point of contention: Fortnite doesn’t “sell”; it’s a free to play game with paid cosmetic items. Same is true of a lot of other popular titles.
As I never played H.A.W.X or Ace Combat, I’m not sure if I’d consider them on the same level of older 90’s era games/sims. Raptor: Call of the Shadows depicted arcade flight (really just a top down shooter), but it wasn’t hugely successful in an era where sim games were selling like hot cakes. That doesn’t mean people didn’t want to fly or play a flight game.
I also really feel the need to stress the fact that sims require a decent chunk of upfront investment if the goal is to learn a complicated simulation of a real-world machine. A simple 4 button joystick with twist and hat just doesn’t cut it for aircraft designed for HOTAS + pedals and using your head to look around rather than your thumb. That is going to put a lot of younger folks right out of the market from the start – especially nowadays with as difficult as it is to get a job that pays enough to yield both the free time and the finances for it.
Agreed, I mean more of a popularity phenomenon rather than actual copies sold. More of a “don’t get advertised at on YouTube for Ace Combat” lol
Agree. The flight sim I (a small team of 4) I tried to write in the early 90’s that I’ve eluded to here - I had the idea that we needed an option: [ x ] Re-format Harddrive on Crash/Death/Ejection. And I was serious. Too serious of course, but, we did hear from some that is was actually a good idea. Kinda removed the “game” aspect somewhat.
Yeah, VTOL VR is looking more and more like a good intro for kids (assuming you have a VR kit of course).
I find it curious though: the game “Pong” came to our B&W TV when I was a teenager (1970-72-ish); seems equivalent to the ‘twitch’ games they have now. I recall thinking it as kinda neat. Played it a little, then went back outside.
Not sure how that relates however. Then as they progressed I would play more of them (still on the TV screen). But they were still not as interesting as; playing football (American) across the neighbors yards; shooting my friends with BB guns in the woods (we did have ‘rules’ and minimal ‘safety’ gear); or fishing.
I wonder how much of a couch-potato I’d be if I was a 12 y.o. today? Not sure I’d do any better.
They upped it quite a bit in recent decades. Being former military and barely qualified is about equal to highly qualified and no military. If the veteran actually is qualified for the job, there is no way the civilian will get it. Between points handed over (which I think was up to 30 back in 2011 when I was trying to convert from contractor to civilian) and then veteran’s preference (so even if you manage to score the same the veteran gets it), a perfect 100-scoring civilian will lose to the mid-80s ranked vet every time.
I watched as I and all my coworkers were replaced by others with little to no experience because the GS-13 running the show wanted more civilians and less contractors to justify his post getting bumped to GS-14 before he retired. 
Yeah, my impression was it started to change in the early 90’s (after the first PG war). But not sure exactly as this was after my experience. It was kinda shocking, in a good way though IMO, to see the change in american’s attitudes towards military members after that one ‘event’. People are fickle.
I do recall many people I worked with, in the military, were very hesitant to make the leap since it was felt there was no going back and they got little credit for their service. I was too but I just decided I was going to do whatever it took. Change is scary.
HAWX was also flawed, in that you had to fly with a very on-rails feeling for the first few missions. Once you got passed that and could do silly loops whilst flinging off quad-missiles with an SR-71 it got interesting!
For those of you confused about Minecraft. Think of it as LEGO, without having to invest a million euro’s into the physical bricks(they are fun but expensive) and a world that you can share, create and explorer with your friends in the evening when they are at home! It has a redstone system that allows you to create Boolean logic gates, effectively a transistor system inside of a computer. People have done some seriously impressive things with that!
Righto! Minecraft should be seen as a source of respect for young players. It is a game that is intentionally graphically limited, placing the players’ focus on materials, crafting, construction and decision-making. It is mind-blowing what can be done with it.
I saw someone built an 8086 inside Minecraft. Because they have a LOT more free time than I do!
I think DCS’ debriefing screen nicely highlights this general problem. Even in the simplest flight game, when ending a mission you would get some kind of acknowlegdment of what you just achieved. A simple text such as “Congratulations, you destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor. The world is safe now.”. Not in DCS, where if you end a mission all you get is a log of game events. Unit X hit Unit Y with Weapon Z. There just is no game.
I don’t know what is more depressing though. That ED in 25 years of development has never added debriefings to missions, that ED has never stated the intention of adding debriefings to missions in the future or that the community is not constantly nagging about it. It seems as if such features have totally slipped from the collective consciousness.
They are not? Maybe not as much as wanting AA missiles for the BS, but i do think that people complain about the game aspect missing.
Yes that is true in a general sense. But specifically about the Debriefing, when was the last time you remember someone mention that (other than me)?
This is something that Il-2 BoX has improved upon since its release, although it is still relatively sterile.
Maybe it’s rose-colored glasses of nostalgia but I always loved the old MPS’ debriefs, especially F-19. You got the map, then like watching Indiana Jones you would see the line of your flight path with pop ups for events like take off, detected by SAM, MiG fired, dropped bomb, destroyed SAM, landed, etc.
BoX now has a static map with flight path (in SP, not MP) and little squares you can click on to see the events, which is a decent second place.
ED’s sims, starting with Flanker and through DCS World, have always been more like the home version of a commercial sim than a home entertainment product like the old MPS sims.
Ironically, this was an area even Falcon 4 missed out on. I might have played it more if there was more that happened at the end of a mission than just going back to the campaign screen and watching things continuing to happen.
Why do so many games have loot boxes? Because games do better with rewards. Obviously throwing a medal at you for every single mission is over the top, but you do need something like MBot has mentioned. Attaboys, perhaps something as gamey as XP towards a promotion, but a feeling like your efforts mattered to the overall effort. Winning the war by yourself is highly unrealistic, but achieving primary or secondary objectives should be noted and appreciated.
It actively hurts the sim too, being just the log with errors and information messages filtered out.
Run a long scenario or one that contains a lot of firing and it may be near impossible to get to that screen.
I had a just for fun WWII test mission - a few flights of four fighters per side, a large formation of B-17s carpet bombing an airfield, and said airfield covered with about a dozen batteries of 88s (each has 4 guns and a sight) as well as a smaller number of batteries of 20mm guns.
Let that run through and you can’t go to the debriefing as there are thousands of “shot” entries. Sometimes it hangs, else I am impatient - terminate and restart is faster.
I know that is an extreme example, but I believe it does help illustrate that raw data is not only boring but performance reducing.
If it instead counted as the sim ran and came back with “12 B-17s were lost to AAA (88mm)” and the like in a summary - well, we’d be at least a couple steps ahead.
Basic accuracy and stats maybe?:
“You flew 5 sorties with an overall weapons delivery accuracy of 56%: < insert breakdown by ordinance type not specific weapon >”
Pilot injuries & healing time, aircraft damage with repair time and cost? Total fuel burned? Value of ordinance used or targets destroyed? Collateral damage caused?
In Multiplayer we get nothing - no debrief either. Just the scoreboard and I think that aids too much with number chasing - kills or score, which takes away from things. Personally, I have been trying to reduce that and instead work on keeping deaths/losses at zero. Has improved my flying considerably!
The other area that detracts from modern sims is how they control the front door in multiplayer. To recap what I was raised on: first you had the game. You completed the game. You won the war. You played the other side. You won again–or not, still fun. Now with all those newly honed skills and deep familiarity with the map, it was time to size yourself up with other players or to enjoy some human co-op action. If you go back 15 years, in each of what I consider to be the big three (Flanker/DCS, Falcon and IL2) you would probably have first connected through Hyperlobby. Hyperlobby was much like Discord but it also had direct access to whichever games you gave it permission to point to. The centerpiece was the chat bar. Here you could learn a little about a server before committing to it. You could see which sim and which server your friends were on. Joining today is a crap-shoot. Back then, you knew exactly what you were getting in to.
Now is any of that germane to this specific topic? Probably not. But the lack of a social aspect to multiplayer is, to me, yet another example of the sterilization of the relationship between the player and the product. Just like @MBot’s, @Wes’ and @JediMaster’s critique of the debrief, what was once a less lonely and more artful experience is now dry and far too rational.
While I agree with your sentiment on Hyperlobby - we do have that somewhat with Discord now. I turned it off for other friends bugging me about “playing that boring flying game” but it can show what game you are playing to others. The other problem is that there is fragmentation as groups go to their own discord servers (guilty here - we didn’t want to horde the Mudspike one).
Then from other games platforms the same problem - Discord, Steam, Epic Games, etc. Discord is at least close to “universal”. It would be cool if we could add the discord server to a public search list and tag it by the games we “support” and allow people to find us. Would that help? I am not sure.