Flight Sim Rant...

[JediMaster 451]

I don't think I've seen anyone who started simming in the 21st century complain about how few flight sims there are now. It's only those who started in the late 90s or earlier who ever knew a different market.

 

I also don't understand how a game can't be made for less than a few million dollars. Other than art assets, the rest of game coding isn't that much different from the way it used to be. Maybe the fact that most games have a credit list longer than a 1970s film should be a clue. It should not cost $10 million to make a pretty game that you can learn to play in 5 minutes and finish playing in 5 hours.

[+Julhelm 266]

Marketing alone can be over $10 million. And to put costs in perspective: The original Counter Strike characters could easily be modelled and textured in a couple days by a skilled artist. A Call of Duty character can easily take a month of work since you have to do hipoly sculpts, advanced facial rigging, various texture maps etc. Then as far as programming goes everything is more advanced and therefore more expensive now. AI, sound systems, rendering engines, you name it.

[+Stary 2,427]

Julhelm is right again (sorry!)

 

I was thinking the other day doing some 3D that amount of work it takes to do single say cockpit now with current standards of visual fidelity used to make whole fleet of air and ground targets 10 years ago. Do we really want it or we could agree <1K shaded planes are so awesome?

[JediMaster 451]

What's the point of wonderful eye candy if the thing works like crap? The reason old games keep getting played despite graphics that are poor by current standards is because they're enjoyable. Then modders come along and devote time and effort to making better pictures because that's something that doesn't require coding.

 

After all, 3rd party modders have made planes and weapons and ships and improvements to TK's stock terrains for years, all looking far better than TK could manage on his limited budget and schedule. But all those mods required the code base to be there to support them. That's what developers should concentrate on. I mean, look at Minecraft! Worst graphics EVER, since before Quake anyway, and it's a big hit because you can do stuff with it.

No one argues Call of Duty's latest doesn't look great, but the gameplay hasn't changed. If anything, it's more simplistic to play than CoD1 was all those years ago. Probably why people STILL play CoD1.

[+Julhelm 266]

Except most of the old games really aren't very playable by today's standards. Load up pretty much any 90's flightsim and most if not all are bogged down by s**t UI's that severely detract from the gaming experience. Personally I think eyecandy is important to a flight game since it directly helps suspension of disbelief. Why do people pay $200 for ORBX addons for FSX if eyecandy doesn't matter? I mean, I remember back when I first played Strike Commander and was like "OMFG THIS LOOKS REAL" but if I boot it up today, while it remains playable it looks so cartoony and old that it severely detracts from the gaming experience. Rose-tinted glasses FTW.

 

Also the last thing the big publishers want is a game with a solid, healthy modding community. They want a franchise that they can monetize the f*** out of on a yearly basis, and noone can argue the CoD model hasn't been a massive success, and they've locked down their content so that they don't have to compete against mods.

[JediMaster 451]

I don't understand CoD at all. Each successive release I find less and less interesting, and the MP holds no allure for me whatsoever. I played COD4 once, took me 4 MASSIVE hours to finish it, and that's all I did with it. I suppose some day I might go back and play it again for another 4 WHOPPING hours. I won't be buying any more of the CODs.

[+Julhelm 266]

I don't understand CoD at all. Each successive release I find less and less interesting, and the MP holds no allure for me whatsoever. I played COD4 once, took me 4 MASSIVE hours to finish it, and that's all I did with it. I suppose some day I might go back and play it again for another 4 WHOPPING hours. I won't be buying any more of the CODs.

CoD is hyperpopular because it taps into both the male gun fetishism culture thing, post-9/11 patriotism AND american soldier-worshiping and packages it all in a sleek, streamlined, accessible Michael Bay-like package. In fact, CoD is exactly what you would get if you made a Michael Bay movie interactive.

[JediMaster 451]

What I would go for would be a series titled Call of Booty.

[+matt milne 5]

Yea, flight sims are a tough niche market to develop for. Ideally there should be a wide selection of planes, flight physics, a campaign with a fully immersive world, with multi-player. All planned in a clear gameplay and developmental direction. Those are the basics.

But each developer has different ideas and not all these essential features are included in the initial release.

Every gamer has a particular list of things they want and expect from a game, and not everything on that list will be in every game. Also some things that one person thinks are essential, other people might dislike in their game, so the developer has a hard time picking and choosing the right things to develop. Also, haphazard and rushed development with a lack of testing time, causes a lot of bugs.

 

If the industry was in a better shape, developers could afford to spend 8 years designing and testing every aspect of their game, gradually evolving it into the product they want before releasing. There's too much debt and too much of a rush to make those repayments. It's a downward spiral consisting of borrowing, to work, to pay off debt, to borrow, to work, to pay off more debt, resulting in even more debt. It's just not good.

[+Julhelm 266]

Devs and simmers themselves also tend to forget that the best-selling sims always were the lite surveysims like Fighter Bomber, Jetfighter or Jane's ATF/USAF. Whereas the audience for study sims shrinks exponentially as you increase the complexity. My theory is that the audience that bought a lot of the "lite" sims bought the first super-hardcore sims like Janes F-15, Fleet Defender etc, causing these to be comparatively big sellers, only to get frustrated with the huge complexity and learning curve involved, and shelved the games after a few tries. So when the next wave of super-hardcore sims hit the market, they bombed. Conversely, the crowd that bought the lite survey sims aren't interested in arcade shooters like HAWX, so we're left with this idea that "flight sims do not sell" when the answer is probably that the devs are making the wrong kind of sims.