War Thunder, my latest distraction
I haven't always played many simulation games in any sensible way. Sims like IL-2 or FS9, after a few sorties, or a couple circuits and ramming into buildings, I readily bounced off of. The exception to all of this, and the origin of my increasing interest in sims was when two years ago I bought Take On Helicopters and enjoyed flying the campaign. Take On Helicopters did a great job recreating Seattle in the most convincing way I've ever seen a city rendered in a videogame. Though it might seem superficial to say that it took a detailed environment for me to become interested, I think it's difficult if you aren't a pilot to be motivated to play a simulator given the reputation newer flight sims have. In any case, environments have always been a defining feature of flight sims so I really shouldn't feel too bad!
Free-to-play has been a fantastic way to keep me flying lately. I found a friend in Microsoft's free-to-play game Flight. Flight does a decent thing and lets you get on with the thing that's important with flight sims - flying. There are few barriers to getting it set up and going with others. It also happened to have the lush environments that Take On Helicopters had recently treated me with. As it was MS Flight got greedy with its DLC but I got a significant bang for my initial zero bucks from it. It's too bad it died before having a proper chance to prove its worth. Though I am also in love with sims like Falcon 4.0 BMS and appreciate that the engine it uses is ancient and so its faults are forgivable, it's not simple to get playing with many friends. My latest fling with free-to-play has been War Thunder, a WWII dogfighting game that hardcore simmers might immediately turn their nose up at and ignore - to their real loss!
I think their error lies in ignoring the amateur simmers of today, assuming simulation is only about modelling complex electronic weapons systems, and forgetting that today's hardcore simmers once grew up on simpler sims with better documentation. It is one of the sadder things happening in a genre which absolutely needs to adapt to preserve itself, and could do with attracting bigger audiences and budgets. The barriers to entry for sims gets higher and higher and the gap between simulation and arcade widens. War Thunder is a game confidently conquering the middle ground and bringing up a new generation of flight simmers with it, including yours truly.
War Thunder caters to several difficulty settings depending on player confidence. Since it is a multiplayer game it couldn't possibly allow for a full set of realism settings in which players would pick and choose and yet have matches remain competitive. It's compromise is presenting only three settings: Arcade, Historical and Full Real. I play the game in a first person perspective with a joystick as I prefer the immersion and challenge. In order to fly with others with a similar configurations I must choose to play the Full Real difficulty which enforces those same restrictions mentioned. Unfortunately the Full Real servers are underpopulated, and I often play with bots in a less satisfying game. Unless more hardcore simmers give this game a chance, I'm left wishing for one of two things. Either acknowledgement with points scored for those pilots flying with a restricted view in Historical battles, or the creation of a Historical battles plus mode enforcing a first person perspective only, to help shallow the learning curve and encourage already good pilots to play with a joystick. Happily this is the only criticism I have of the difficulty settings, as otherwise the game does a good job of catering according to what you might expect from a particular setting. This is even the case with the Full Real setting, which is more-or-less multiplayer IL-2 without a clickable cockpit. I'd happily trade the AI pilots or limited scenarios that came with IL-2 1946 for a large varied community of pilots.
The game reminds me of an old sim I played years ago called Aces High, which featured dogfighting in short matches with a similar player count. I'm grateful to War Thunder for bringing back the same experiences I had with Aces High now in 2013 in a more refined way. I spent a lot of time trying to get friends to join me in sim games in the past but the risk, now eliminated by the convenience of free-to-play, is no longer a factor.
There's probably more I could talk about like the fantastic encyclopaedia common to a lot of other sims but few arcade games, the friendly banter in the in-game chat, and the happy graphical pleasures that the developers Gaijin have brought into a flight simulation. But I'm afraid I might be missing out in helping with the aerial defense of Malta.
Free-to-play has been a fantastic way to keep me flying lately. I found a friend in Microsoft's free-to-play game Flight. Flight does a decent thing and lets you get on with the thing that's important with flight sims - flying. There are few barriers to getting it set up and going with others. It also happened to have the lush environments that Take On Helicopters had recently treated me with. As it was MS Flight got greedy with its DLC but I got a significant bang for my initial zero bucks from it. It's too bad it died before having a proper chance to prove its worth. Though I am also in love with sims like Falcon 4.0 BMS and appreciate that the engine it uses is ancient and so its faults are forgivable, it's not simple to get playing with many friends. My latest fling with free-to-play has been War Thunder, a WWII dogfighting game that hardcore simmers might immediately turn their nose up at and ignore - to their real loss!
I think their error lies in ignoring the amateur simmers of today, assuming simulation is only about modelling complex electronic weapons systems, and forgetting that today's hardcore simmers once grew up on simpler sims with better documentation. It is one of the sadder things happening in a genre which absolutely needs to adapt to preserve itself, and could do with attracting bigger audiences and budgets. The barriers to entry for sims gets higher and higher and the gap between simulation and arcade widens. War Thunder is a game confidently conquering the middle ground and bringing up a new generation of flight simmers with it, including yours truly.
War Thunder caters to several difficulty settings depending on player confidence. Since it is a multiplayer game it couldn't possibly allow for a full set of realism settings in which players would pick and choose and yet have matches remain competitive. It's compromise is presenting only three settings: Arcade, Historical and Full Real. I play the game in a first person perspective with a joystick as I prefer the immersion and challenge. In order to fly with others with a similar configurations I must choose to play the Full Real difficulty which enforces those same restrictions mentioned. Unfortunately the Full Real servers are underpopulated, and I often play with bots in a less satisfying game. Unless more hardcore simmers give this game a chance, I'm left wishing for one of two things. Either acknowledgement with points scored for those pilots flying with a restricted view in Historical battles, or the creation of a Historical battles plus mode enforcing a first person perspective only, to help shallow the learning curve and encourage already good pilots to play with a joystick. Happily this is the only criticism I have of the difficulty settings, as otherwise the game does a good job of catering according to what you might expect from a particular setting. This is even the case with the Full Real setting, which is more-or-less multiplayer IL-2 without a clickable cockpit. I'd happily trade the AI pilots or limited scenarios that came with IL-2 1946 for a large varied community of pilots.
The game reminds me of an old sim I played years ago called Aces High, which featured dogfighting in short matches with a similar player count. I'm grateful to War Thunder for bringing back the same experiences I had with Aces High now in 2013 in a more refined way. I spent a lot of time trying to get friends to join me in sim games in the past but the risk, now eliminated by the convenience of free-to-play, is no longer a factor.
There's probably more I could talk about like the fantastic encyclopaedia common to a lot of other sims but few arcade games, the friendly banter in the in-game chat, and the happy graphical pleasures that the developers Gaijin have brought into a flight simulation. But I'm afraid I might be missing out in helping with the aerial defense of Malta.
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