The Ad-Hoc Flight Simulator
Flying in games which are not designed from the bottom up as flight sims will inherently be cartoony. I've previously wondered why Battlefield and ARMA didn't make an effort to make the flying portions of their game at least replicate the feeling of flying in a more realistic way, often assuming it was a conscious decision to not implement rigorous physics. The reason they don't is quite simple: their maps sizes are way too small to allow for anything close to realism. The diagonal distance across a typical Battlefield 2: Project Reality map will be something like 5.7 km (4 km width & height), and the for the Limnos island in ARMA 3 is something like 35 km (25 km width & height). For infantry and land-based warfare, these numbers really aren't bad and are on the order of what you'd expect the scale of a conflict would be at (though tanks actually also fight each other over several kilometers), but here is a minimal argument for why planes cannot work at th