By Tim Stone on July 21st, 2010 at 11:07 am.
I was up at Farnborough International Airshow yesterday, and, while having a crafty fag round the back of the Fuel-Air Weapons Marquee, was lucky enough to run into one of gaming’s most elusive genres. Dishevelled and smelling slightly of wet ferrets, Flight Simulation was in a surprisingly talkative mood. During the course of an hour-long chat we covered numerous topics, none more fascinating than the changing fortunes of the gent himself.
RPS: You realise some people think you’re dead?
[Laughs] Those people need to have a shufti at DCS: Black Shark, Rise of Flight or the latest update of Battle of Britain II. I’m fighting-fit dear boy. Never felt better.
RPS: That’s good to hear, but you can understand the misconception. There was a time when you worked with all the big publishers and developers, appeared on magazine covers, topped charts… Today – well – things are very different aren’t they. Do you ever wonder why that is?
Every bally day! For years I put it down to the ‘The Icarus Effect’. Back in the late Nineties I started doing a lot of speed, and airflow calculations, and reading a lot of heavyweight history. Realism became a bit of an obsession. As a result the sims got bigger… denser… chillier. Without realising it, I think I alienated a lot of fans.
RPS: But that period produced some great combat sims – Falcon 4.0, Rowan’s stuff, the Razorworks chopper games, the Janes titles…
It did. A core of serious simmers and influential reviewers seemed to love what I was doing, so naturally I kept doing it. However, what I failed to understand during that scramble for aeronautical authenticity, was that I was building an ivory control tower.
RPS: Metaphor?
Yes.
RPS: So you think it was your taste for complexity that eventually pushed you out of the limelight?
That’s what I used to think, yes. Now I actually believe it’s a little more complicated than that. Let me ask you something: when you started playing games like Fighter Pilot or Red Baron all those years ago, what was it that drew you to them?
RPS: Um. I guess the sensation of flight was attractive. The thrill and challenge of combat in three dimensions. Back then most shooty games were top-down, side-on or isometric.
Precisely. Perhaps my early popularity and subsequent side-lining have less to do with decisions I made than changes in the wider world of gaming. For years, if a person wanted the visceral frisson of first-person violence, he fired-up a flight-sim. That was the only option. With the growth of the FPS, cloud-couched combat with its tricky gunnery, dot-sized targets, and lethal floors, suddenly didn’t seem so appealing any more. Perhaps my slow swan-dive into relative obscurity was written in the stars.
RPS: But running down a corridor with a Sten Gun or a BFG isn’t quite the same thing as dancing round the firmament in a Spit or F-16.
True, but increasingly those two thugs, the FPS and third-person action game, are spreading their wings and stealing my thunder. When I started out in the business, I was the go-to guy for jets, helicopters, biplanes, turret fun etc. Now you can get airborne in any number of tin-pot soldier sandboxes. The realism isn’t there of course, but as I’ve explained, I don’t believe that was ever at the root of my popularity.
RPS: This is all sounding rather bleak. Do you think there’s a way back? Will we ever see a flight sim generating BioShock or Half-Life levels of interest?
[Smiles mysteriously] Let me tell you a story. A few years ago I was flying back from a sim convention in Mali when the Fairchild C-119 I was travelling in crash-landed in the Sahara Desert. The plane was a total write-off; no-one knew where we were; things looked desperate, but we refused to give in. Under my guidance the eight survivors slaved day and night for two long, hot weeks constructing a new plane out of the intact sections of the wreck. Incredibly that jerry-built aircraft flew and, clinging to its wings, we eventually reached the safety of an oil-drilling camp.
RPS: Wow. That’s very similar to what happened in Robert Aldrich’s 1965 triumph-against-the-odds movie The Flight of the Phoenix.
Ah. Now I come to think about it, it was actually a movie. But the point still stands. Sometimes, cutting your plane up and radically re-arranging the bits is the sensible thing to do.
RPS: Fruit pastille?
Thanks.
[Glances around nervously] Just between you and me, the chaps I’ve been working with for the last decade – Oleg Maddox, Matt Wagner, Tsuyoshi Kawahito… are all splendid fellows , talented and totally devoted to me, but none of them have the balls, the vision, or the inclination to build The Phoenix.
The person who will drag aerial entertainment out of the comfortable, convincing ghetto in which it currently dwells won’t do it by modelling every switch in an A-10C or letting us fly obscure Regia Aeronautica warbirds (as noble as those goals are). He or she will… [Looks skyward in search of inspiration]… go back to roguish classics like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Crimson Skies, and Air Power for inspiration, They’ll borrow from other genres in the way that other genres have borrowed from me. They’ll give flight sim multiplayer the rocket up the arse it so desperately needs.
How is it possible that in July 2010, the genre that went massively multiplayer before almost any other still doesn’t have a decent populist MMO to its name? How is that possible? For heaven’s sake, it looks like we’re going to get a people’s tank sim before we get a people’s flight sim.
RPS: So you’d like to see sim devs taking a few more risks – thinking bigger?
I’d give my right aileron to see that. There’s no good reason why a flight sim shouldn’t be as tactically engaging as Combat Mission, as amusing as Time Gentleman, Please, as quirky as King’s Bounty, or as thought-provoking as The Void. On which of the Sacred Tablets of Games Design is it written ‘Aerial entertainment may not combine realistic dogfighting with doomed love, moving reflections on mortality, and porcine pilots.’?
In the games that flit like busy Pipistrelles through the courtyards of my dreams, I can stroll around aerodromes, I can design aircraft, I can pore over recon photos that are still tacky to the touch. I’m flying and fighting but I’m also worrying about where the next contract will come from, where to get replacement tyres for my Warhawks, or how to explain yet another pranged kite to my firebrand of a squadron leader.
Hell, just this morning watching the countryside roll by from the train, I saw a kestrel hovering above a pasture, and thought ‘Why are the only falcons I see in sims, of the General Dynamics variety?’.
RPS: So why aren’t devs – even indies - sticking their necks out?
I’m not sure. Maybe it’s indifference. Maybe it’s fear of your profession. Do you remember a game called Eurofighter Typhoon? It came out in 2001. That was one of the last sims I can remember that tried anything even remotely risky. Rage attempted to create a living, breathing airbase. Between dynamically-generated sorties you killed time in the mess, dozed on your bunk, stroked the squadron mascot… It dared to be different but you guys shot it down in flames.
RPS: As I recall, there were some pretty serious flaws in Eurofighter Typhoon. The lulls between sorties sometimes lasted twenty mind-numbing minutes. I do take your point about the role of the reviewers though. Writing about a sim it’s all-too easy to fixate on the realism and campaign structure, and not address bigger, broader issues, like ‘Why is this sim basically just a more detailed version of the seven hundred that have gone before it?’. Most sites and mags assign the flight reviews to so-called specialists, which just exacerbates the problem. Maybe if we’d been less tolerant of realism-as-a-religion back in the Nineties – not placed the fruits of that approach the top of our Must Buy lists – then the genre would be in a healthier state today.
[Gazes wistfully at an empty packet of Wotsits wafted aloft by the slipstream of a low-flying Harrier] Do you know what I’ve always wanted to do? Get a huge group of bright, eloquent PC gamers together in one room (real or virtual) and ask them why they aren’t interested in winged warfare any more. I can theorize about my decline in popularity until the cows come home, but at the end of the day it’s all speculation. If flight simulation is to rise again we need to hear from the émigrés – the people that have drifted away over the years.
RPS: You know what, I might be able to help you there.
21/07/2010 at 11:18 Tei says:
Serius strongs truths and high letality nostalgia on this article.
“It did. A core of serious simmers and influential reviewers seemed to love what I was doing, so naturally I kept doing it. However, what I failed to understand during that scramble for aeronautical authenticity, was that I was building an ivory control tower.”
I was about to say something insigtifull about this, but the whole article has nuked me. All I can say now is.. bravo, and …he.. if this happends, and sim simulators are again on the menu… will be glorious.
21/07/2010 at 11:27 P7uen says:
Sim Simulator goes gold, world implodes.
21/07/2010 at 11:21 Will says:
There is a relatively recent flight-sim, apparently it’s great fun – my flatmate is always raving on about it. Perhaps someone can remember it’s name? … wait… ACE Online!
21/07/2010 at 11:23 Will says:
Apologies for double post. I have more to add! It has customisable craft (i.e. borrowing from other genres), it has the MMO stuff, it has a walk-around-a-city bit (but all the actual *game* is flying), it seems fairly brave!
21/07/2010 at 11:24 DJ Phantoon says:
Flying is scary.
Demons and Japan? Not so much.
21/07/2010 at 11:26 Schaulustiger says:
The accompanying images are absolutely hilarious. Bravo!
21/07/2010 at 11:36 Rosti says:
Seriously: Tim Stone, you magnificent bastard. I’ve never actually done the out-loud laughing thing this many time on RPS.
21/07/2010 at 12:18 Wilson says:
Yep, great article and funny pictures. Good stuff.
21/07/2010 at 12:53 airtekh says:
Yeah, Tim’s writing has always been awesome.
He should be a full time comrade of RPS, not the obligatory-sim-article-of-the-week guy.
Oh, and Quinns too. Quinns is great.
21/07/2010 at 13:34 milko says:
Please count me in the approving crowd for the article, and in the giggling folk for the screenshots!
21/07/2010 at 13:40 phlebas says:
The pictures make me sad because I really want to play that game.
21/07/2010 at 14:00 Webster says:
Lucky anvil, ahaha!
But seriously, if the bombing of the kitten sanctuaries doesn’t show you the horrors of warfare and the desperate lengths both sides went to in the pursuit of victory, nothing will.
21/07/2010 at 21:45 apa says:
<3 as they say in the internet, great stuff :) And the pics, they are beyond excellent. I'd buy a beer for whoever did those!
The F-19 mission seems fun… I got only to fly over Sodanklya (every Finn remembers that spelling error) and take pics of some boring bunker in Novaja Zemlja.
21/07/2010 at 11:31 robrob says:
I would love to play something like Blackshark but I just don’t have the time to invest in it. It’s not just learning to play the game, the serious sims seem to require a lot of esoteric knowledge on aviation to understand them fully. I’m not advocating arcade style stuff like Clancy’s HAWES but I did a lot of flying in Op Flash and ArmA which seemed to balance realism and accessibility quite sensibly.
21/07/2010 at 19:05 drcancerman says:
Actually, in blackshark you can fly in arcade mode. I don’t own Blackshark because it is “Starforced”, and that, for me is a big pass….
23/07/2010 at 23:34 Santiago says:
Buy BlackShark on Steam, no Starforce.
21/07/2010 at 11:32 P7uen says:
Combat Flight Sim was the closest I got, it seemed to walk the line between “I have no idea which button to press” and “this is essentially an on-rails arcade thing”.
Perhaps more things should walk this line, I can’t remember anyone marketing a flighty-bang at me in this way recently, it’s been all arcade or all sim.
Also: the crunch of bullets puncturing a wooden airframe is undoubtedly a good thing.
21/07/2010 at 11:36 Tinus says:
Great article Tim, I couldn’t agree more! Sim-y-ness has never been the appeal of simulation games for me. Sure, simulating flight in great detail yields complex and deep mechanics, but many sims these days completely fail to explore those mechanics as a game.
I’m thinking much along those lines in designing my Wingsuit flight-sim, Volo. First and foremost that game will be about the joy of gliding through the air and swooping past mountain ridges, and not so much about making sure the aerodynamics on your left toe are accurate. I’m incorporating gameplay elements from platforming games in terms of giving you something to DO in the air, and perhaps even borrowing mechanics from Portal to greatly extend your flighttime. Multiplayer is also at the forefront.
I’m in the early, early stages right now, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnqfF0gDOJ8. As soon as I’m in playable alpha stages I’ll leave a message.
21/07/2010 at 11:38 Chiron says:
Nice to see Crimson Skies mentioned, I love that game a hell of a lot. Derring do and implausible flying antics abound but its fun as hell
Lets compare it to IL2 now I want to love that game, I really do, its wonderful and the site of a heavily damaged plane limping home to base is fantastic but… its just not all that fun, the AI is a little retarded and for all its touting of realism dogfights end up with everyone on one side dead which isnt actually how they worked. Then theres the 5-10 minute (with time acceleration) haul to the target site.
Compared to Crimson Skies oozing out witty banter and straight into the action missions it cant compare
21/07/2010 at 11:38 timmy says:
I was at Farnborough and had the honour of seeing the interview taking place. Tim originally offered Flight Simulation a Twirl but was curtly told to put his chocs away.
21/07/2010 at 12:25 SanguineAngel says:
I laughed and I laughed hard. bravo
21/07/2010 at 12:51 Luke says:
You Sir, win one hundred Internets.
21/07/2010 at 11:39 Gothnak says:
I loved the WW1 and WW2 flight sims on my Amiga, especially ones with campaigns where you felt as if you were holding back the hun every kill at a time…
Aces of the Pacific was best though. It really helped that the japanese painted big red targets on their planes or i’d have continually shot down the american planes instead.
21/07/2010 at 11:39 Arsewisely says:
To be honest, I simply prefer helicopters. That said, I did like Airfix Dogfighter. Excellent article, by the way.
21/07/2010 at 11:39 Rosti says:
It is my eternal shame that the closest thing to a flight sim I ever got wholly immersed in was X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. The hours I whittled away on the game with my brother, taking turns to fly whilst the other operated the astromech controls manically to keep us in the sky.
(Finding out that all your laser energy has been dumped by your ‘droid – stopping you make a kill -is irksome. Realising that they dumped it into shields, saving your life? That’s forgiveable.)
21/07/2010 at 11:42 Scythe says:
I grew up playing SWOTL, Mechwarrior 2 and other simmish games. Nowdays I’ve moved on to ArmA, ArmA2 and IL2 Sturmovik, neither of which warrant a mention in your article.
My chief problem with flight sims is the fairly expensive investment in time of getting my joystick out and plugging it in, followed by wrestling with drivers to get it working again. Compound this with awful, awful menu interfaces and engines of, let’s face it, niche, second-rate entertainment products and it all ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. If there was a flight sim with a wide range of aircraft, across many eras, with a fluid interface, decent mouse-flying performance (for the casuals) and a bloody server browser, I’d say it would have a good chance of hitting it big.
While we have to plug IPs into little partitioned boxes, or configure a civilised resolutions in an INI file, or toggle gigantic faux-switches to adjust realism settings I think we are going to number few.
21/07/2010 at 11:44 Cooper says:
I bloody love the “Realism Panel”
I’m wondering if, as well as the drive-for-realism being alienating, that a similar situation has hit the space-combat-sim. We haven’t seen a decent space combat game for years. But they’ve never striven for realism (in some cases, they’ve striven for faithfullness to source material, but that’s not quite the same as realism)
One thing that gets held up against the space sim, which I think applies to an extent to the flight sim, is that wide, open spaces a few hundred feet or a few hundred thousand kilometers from the ground are difficult to make visually interesting.
Which might make for another comparison to the FPS. The flight sim also lost out to the FPS with the drive for graphical fidelity.
The 90s were the perfect technological time for flight and space sims. 3D graphics were coming out of infancy, but computers were not fantastically graphically powerful. Rendering blue sky and low res ground, or a star field and low res nebula/planet is incredibly less demanding than fully 3d environments. The space/flight sim makers could then go about filling this space with high-res explosions, detailed craft models, details cockpits etc. Making some stunningly gorgeous games.
As graphical fidelity increased, the environments of space and flight sims started to seem vast and empty compared to the burgeoning FPS genre, which had fully 3D, interactive environments.
Take the most recent “pop flight-sim” H.A.W.X. gets away with immaculately detailed rendering of Mexico. But it still looks visually paultry compared to something like (the usual out-of-the-bag reference here) Bioshock. It may well have stood up by lieu of the fact that few screenshots of games included a horizon in recent years…
Maybe publishers are unwilling to take many risks on games which, whilst they may build upon exciting, interesting gameplay, are difficult to create exciting, interesting screenshots from. One thing many publishers have got good at in the 00s is hiding boring, insipid games behind fancy visual fidelity. With a space or flight sim, you can’t easily do that, the game itself has to be spot on or you have no fall back.
21/07/2010 at 11:46 Dinger says:
I dunno. One of the major issues I suspect is that the sector of the market disposed to like flight simulators is also one of the sectors that adopted PCs early. So the market peaked early.
Also, the graphics cards out there have been designed for corridors, and not for huge draw-distance terrain-a-thons.
For that matter, too, if you spend a lot of time looking close up at an airframe, you’re playing the airport level of a corridor shooter. So the other games got a lot shinier with technological improvements, but flight sims just allowed for higher-resolution images of the horizon and more detailed and complex instrument panels.
Also, about realism: people want to believe they’re flying. Realistic physics gives that feel. Switchology, on the other hand, is the realm of nerds.
The screenshots earn the award for Finest Thing on RPS Today.
21/07/2010 at 11:50 Javaguy says:
I dunno, I played Red Baron very recently and still loved it. The combination of short, fairly accessible dogfights and a dynamic campaign is something that I miss in games like IL2 when each mission is bookended by hours of flight to and from the aerodrome.
The Red Baron campaign really made you feel like quite an ace when you were finally allowed to paint your plane and lead flights, after years of buzzing around in monoplanes and, uh, crashing tactically when critically injured to avoid death. >.>
21/07/2010 at 11:53 Willard says:
Hmmm,
I think the genre was clearly splitting about the time Strike Commander/Wing Commander 3/ Xwing came out. Incidentally, all of those games are amazing – both are still fun now.
If memory serves, that was when things like aces of the pacific & Gunship were starting to get really nerdy; reading the manual cover to cover was becoming mandatory.
Games like F19 tried successfully to balance arcade fun with sim thrills… ultimately delivering neither.
I think the perception is, you have to go with one or the other – but there’s no reason a flight sim can’t have a cool storyline & characters… is there?
21/07/2010 at 13:40 Chris says:
^ This. So many times I wished they’d fleshed out IL2 more with characters and a plot, not just, Open File>Start Mission. I really wanted to get stuck into IL2, but the over-simulated aspect and the lifeless atmosphere really put me off.
21/07/2010 at 11:56 LionsPhil says:
I love the “screenshots” for this article, despite the extent of my flight simmage largely being tormenting the “Pull up! Pull up!” computer voice in Falcon for the Atari ST and managing to fly the transport plane in Rigs of Rods without breaking anything on landing.
21/07/2010 at 11:57 Alabaster Crippens says:
Joysticks. Nobody has proper joysticks these days. I think that’s the problem. You’ve lost that immediate obviously flighty connection to the medium.
So what we need is free joysticks for all.
Ahem.
21/07/2010 at 13:44 Ezhar says:
Well, actually last time I tried a flight sim, I found that my trusty old joystick with throttle was insufficient and it demanded me to have pedals in order to properly play it (sure, you can map something else to it or use a key, but that just doesn’t work very well). So I went to play a shooter instead. Which doesn’t even need a joystick.
21/07/2010 at 12:00 BooleanBob says:
This is the best goddamn thing on the internet since the last thing Tim Stone wrote.
21/07/2010 at 12:05 Garg says:
I love how that, even though I have zero interest in the sim genre, I still find Tim’s articles brilliant.
I think the point you make about the shift of the adrenaline junkies to the FPS is strong, as not only did flight sims decline at this time but also the “space sim” (TIE fighter, Freespace). However the old style top-down space shooter is still going strong, as that can’t be satisfied anywhere else.
21/07/2010 at 13:16 Archonsod says:
Space sims are still going strong, they just don’t get AAA treatment anymore; although the same applies to pretty much anything that’s not an FPS / 3rd person shooter / The Sims these days. There’s still the X series, Spaceforce, Dark Void and similar.
I think the diversification was the key though. The drive for realism uber alles means most flight sims consist of around five minutes of interesting action for every fifty five minutes of flying to or from the mission area, which for all but the hardcore pilots quickly gets boring. Space sims on the other hand either branched out towards Elite territory, or stuck with the mission based format that dumped you right into the combat in the same manner as Freespace.
In fact considering the more arcade dogfighters are still going strong I think it’s pretty much down to the market. People want to be flying through a swarm of Luftwaffe with machine guns blazing rather than attempting to work out just how rich they need to make the fuel mixture to ascend.
21/07/2010 at 12:05 c-Row says:
For me an FPS has more appeal than a flight sim for several reasons. The first and most obvious flaw is the setting. A shooter can have great architecture, impressive outdoor areas, challenging level layouts and everything to please my eye, whereas a flight sim only offers bleak sky, clouds in different sizes and/or a bit of weather. Not the most engaging setting in my opinion.
Story usually seems to be on the lower end of the developer’s list of things to include, too. “Hey, we got this great sim, you can push every button and turn all the knobs just like in the real thing. We don’t need no bloody story!” Yes, you do. I don’t want to spend my time on a game where nothing happens most of the time without even knowing why I do it.
Give me a steampunk-ish trading sim, make it a cross between Elite and Crimson Skies, with propeller driven planes that move slow enough to let me gaze at the magnificent landscape you created, the canyons I have to pass, the huge flying airbases (like the one in Sky Captain) and put some MMO cream on top of it, and you get my attention.
21/07/2010 at 12:12 bill says:
this. but with the joystick problem mentioned below.
21/07/2010 at 12:21 Richard Clayton says:
C-Row – I think you have a good point here.
I have played and owned most of the Microsoft Flight SImulator titles on various machines (ver 2.0 in Atari ST was the first) and am a big aviation fan. I love the challenge of flying and navigating.
However it is the limitations of many games in this genre that hold it back from being played more often by me.
Indeed, apart from the flying, there is often very little to do. Very little rewards, very little motivation and therefore very little “game” (read: fun).
Those games that do attempt to have goals tend to be arcadey and when MS builds “challenges” and “checkrides” into their simulators they are often difficult to complete due to unclear instructions or a refusal by the sim to register what you have done.
Combat too is rarely visceral or exciting. Missions tend to lack any atmosphere, tension or purpose.
I suspect that those skilled in making 100% faithful sims, modelling every switch etc are probably entirely the wrong people to develop the rest of the package (i.e. the fun bit). Allow Maddox to make IL-2 but then hand the engine over to a scripting studio to add the dramatic bells and whistles and the stuff that makes you “feel”.
21/07/2010 at 13:16 user@example.com says:
“steampunk-ish trading sim, make it a cross between Elite and Crimson Skies, with propeller driven planes that move slow enough to let me gaze at the magnificent landscape you created, the canyons I have to pass, the huge flying airbases”
:o
I would play that even with MMO cream on top.
21/07/2010 at 12:10 bill says:
Fun article. I think you mostly nailed it when you said that other genres now provide that feeling of “being there” that previously only flight sims could provide.
Back when everything was 2d or side scrolling, flight sims were about the only things that could be rendered in 3d. And even in the days of doom and quake, the flight sim had more “reality” with it’s cockpit views than a 10 polygon nail gin did.
But now all the FPS games have the feeling of being there, looking over the sights of your meticulously modelled gun.
Of course the other problems were:
flight sims got repetitive, because while you can make billions of different landscapes, corridors, rooms and buildings for FPS games, you can really only make one sky, or one space. In all honesty there often wasn’t much difference between different flight sim games. It was essentially replaying the same game over and over with minor tweaks that only enthusiasts noticed.
consoles got big and flight sims don’t really work well on a console gamepad. And that same “gamepad accessibility culture” has also included PC games for the past few years.
To be honest, I’ve actually bought a couple of old (abstractly) flight sims off GOG recently (freespace, i76, etc..), but I think the way people play games has changed. When I was a kid I had my PC set up with a big desk, a good chair, and a big soild joystick suckered to the desk. Immersive and ideal for flight sims. These days I play mostly on a laptop, I lounge around more, I don’t have a joystick and haven’t found a single store in tokyo that sells PC joysticks. They don’t feel the same on a gamepad.
Even if I could buy a joystick, I don’t know if I or my wife would want a big messy looking joystick hanging around the apartment when people come to visit. To be totally honest (and this is probably just my hang up), I might feel a little embarrassed sitting here wiggling a joystick with others in the room… it strikes me that I should be shouting “rwarrrr!” and making jet noises. *
*why is it that any sentence containing the work joystick always sounds dodgy to me?
21/07/2010 at 12:15 TCHe says:
Man, I flew a lot of stuff when I was a teen. Choppers, Jets … (I also loved my 688(i)-Sim).
The problem is that I got older, had less time at hands. A decent simulation requires a certain degree of realism, something most sims back in the days managed quite well (I still think the Jane’s series was on of the best ever).
However, the more time you have to invest to learn how to play, the less interesting it becomes. Take the Valve games, for example. You just start to play. At the beginning you’ll learn how to do things and off you are. That’s not going to happen in a sim.
IMHO another aspect is the fact that we’ve grown to see games as entertainment, expecting stories and puzzles and the like(as well as some immediate violence). Sims are a totally different thing, they’re more akin to work.
There’s some great ideas in that article that could make sims more interesting. And we’d need better joysticks, as well. I second that.
21/07/2010 at 12:16 Picacodigos says:
My first online gaming at all was in Crimson Skies, and I became quite involved in the community. The fact that every player had to connect to the same “games lobby” (a Microsoft provided service I don’t remember the name of) really helped build that sense of community: all pilots had a common window to chat, brag, defy each other, organise in squadrons (clans) and so on.
I LOVED Crimson Skies for that, and gave me then the things that later I’d take for granted: voice comms, socialising with people in far away countries with the same interests, and so on…
And I came from a pretty heavy and realistic flight sim background, having played all the classics and having worn out a Falcon 4.0 flight manual to shreds, but nothing more “realistic” beat connecting to your pals for flying lessons to newbies, or training, or combat against other squads or any of the various more-or-less organized and scheduled activities we had. It was amazingly fun.
An MMO based on the Crimson Skies license? Crimson Skies started as a table-top strategy and roleplaying game. As with all FASA licenses (see Battletech) the background, the backstory, was full and rich: an alternate not-so-United States which fell in love with Zeppelins and aeroplanes instead of trucks, cars and highways. Cargo gets transported by air, so there are air pirates, and so there are air security companies. You have the story, you have the visuals, we only need a courageous company to develop it. Volunteers?
21/07/2010 at 12:17 milko says:
Hmm. I wonder if some clever person could combine Crimson Skies style aero play with some Uncharted-style (or FPS, whatever) adventuring to take over enemy Zeppelins from the inside, or rescuing damsels from villain’s castles. Followed by daring aerial escapes and whatnot.
Feels a bit close to my ten-year-old-self’s epic game designs when you’d have one level like Spy Hunter and the next would be like Target: Renegade and then a shoot’em up one and and and. On the Spectrum 48K.
21/07/2010 at 12:27 Richard Clayton says:
@milko: Do you know, I’d buy that!
21/07/2010 at 12:20 Risingson says:
The problem with flight simulator games was hinted here: lack of… accesibility? I think it relates more to “details”. Details like the scared face of the pilot while picking difficulty level in LHX, details like the final picture after a mission that you recovered in this interview, those kind of things that made you remember that flight simulators were, above it all, *fun*.
Fans were also to blame of that. I remember some years ago in a discussion board… let me google it.
[time passes]
Hm, better not to put a link there because I was very rude, but yes, people told me that flight simulators were not games and were not supposed to be. That was a common thought some years back and, obviously, it alienated players.
I suppose that’s why some games have tried to bring back the “flight simulation with story” or “flight simulation with epic feeling” like the Blazing Angels or HAWX games, but they are designed much poorly than these classic games like Their Finest Hour, F-19 and so on. I don’t know exactly what is lacking for a mass appeal. Maybe some feedback from the game (and not in the shape of achievements, please!). Maybe some sense of background, where things happened around you (something magical that Apache Longbow and F19 had). Maybe some sense of progression. Maybe that magical cyberpunk atmosphere that those DID games had. Whatever.
21/07/2010 at 12:34 Richard Beer says:
F19, Apache Longbow… man I’d forgotten I’d even played all those games. Hellfire missile! Good times.
21/07/2010 at 12:24 Bullwinkle says:
Congratulations on buying Operation: Spearhead, the most advanced, most realistic WWII FPS yet designed! We think you’ll agree that we’ve put a lot of effort and passion into our game.
I know you’re probably excited to get out there and shoot the enemy, but, before we begin, let’s take some time to learn how to play the game. First, you’re going to have to walk. Years of experience have probably conditioned you to think walking is easy, but remember that it takes babies months to learn how to walk properly! This may seem difficult at first, but with practice, you’ll be strolling across the grass in no time.
The muscles and ligaments in your left leg are controlled by the keys A, S, D, F, Z, X, C, and V. Right leg is H, J, K, L, B, N, M, and the comma key. (Proper locomotion also requires you to swing your arms (Q, W, E, R, and U, I, O, P) with the correct timing, but for now, let’s just concentrate on your legs.) Begin by raising your left knee (press S, then D, then hold S)…
…Fantastic! You can now walk. Let’s go shoot the enemy. From war movies, you may think that the enemy is always a short distance away, but, historically, opposing forces had to travel hundreds of miles to encounter each other. Begin by walking (careful–if you fall down, you’ll have to start the mission again) towards the green marker on the hill, 11 miles away. If you wish to speed up this process, press the plus key until you’ve reached the maximum 4x time comprFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU–
21/07/2010 at 12:32 Armyofnone says:
Heheh, thanks for the laugh Bullwinkle.
21/07/2010 at 13:37 Jason Lefkowitz says:
Reminds me of this Old Man Murray piece, which is still funny ten years later…
21/07/2010 at 13:50 Chris says:
You’re talking about complexity, but god damn I hate tutorials that tell me how to move forward back and “DERP YOU CAN MOVE DA MOUSE TO LOOK AROUND”. Developers who do this must have high hopes that their game is going to attract droves of new players to the genre or even the format, when in reality the people playing are the ones who have seen and done it all before.
21/07/2010 at 12:24 bill says:
As for how to make flight sims interesting again. Pure sims, i don’t really think you can – they’re too hardcore and repetitive for any except enthusiasts.
But making sims with a decent story, with decent characters, with unique settings, interesting level design, and new tasks to accomplish would be a big step forward. I personally didn’t like Crimson Skies (no idea why), but I think it’s probably the right track. Of course, these wouldn’t really be “sims” and enthusiasts probably wouldn’t like them.
Take the best parts of the space sims (which usually had a better story, more variation in machines, etc..) and put them on land based levels that allow more variation in terms of levels.
Why don’t we have more online mutliplayer flight-sim games? Descent was mad popular as a deathmatch game. Allegiance had some awesome ideas. Mix descent, allegiance, tie fighter, with modern physics, lighting and AI and you could have something special. Zipping in and out of different buildings and tunnels for cover. TF2 different roles such as repair, recon, sniper, etc..
Heck, we should now be able to render the treelines that would make helicopter combat as fun as it should be.
Interstate 76 and mechwarrior also show the way to go. But in the end I think you run up against the same fundamental problem. The fun in sim games is in the controls, which means the controls must be complex. Which means innaccessible. Simplify the controls to make them accessible (i82, later mechwarrior games, star wars games after X-wing alliance) and the sim loses it’s magic.
21/07/2010 at 12:29 Richard Beer says:
This is a great read, Tim, and very insightful. It never occurred to me that the whole first-person-perspective thing was exclusively for flight sims until you mentioned it, but your theory makes a lot of sense. Which basically leads to the conclusion that it wasn’t not the accurate simulation that people loved about flight sims (except for true propellerheads) it was the immersion and the fun.
I have very strong, happy memories of playing Wings on my Amiga and metaphorically reliving the life of a pilot in WWI, distraught at the euphemistically chipper way the deaths of the young men around me were described with traumatic regularity. Of playing Red Baron and changing the war, seeing myself above von Richtofen on the kills list. Of playing Strike Commander and choosing my missions to keep my mercenary company afloat.
Where is the story now? Where are the characters? Where is the historical context outside of the cockpit? I loved Falcon 4.0 on my friends Atari ST, but I wouldn’t go back and play a straight sim if it came out today. In my memory, Falcon 4.0 looked stunning, so playing a new version of the same straight F16 sim would be nothing new.
‘Fun’ doesn’t have to mean bright colours and humour (although there’s obviously a place for that): I want story, context, characters and immersion.
I used to LOVE those games, but I can’t ever remember the last time I played a flight sim. The closest I get these days is BFBC2.
21/07/2010 at 14:12 safetydank says:
Ah Wings, I wasted many an hour on that. The campaign kept me playing even after the gameplay got a bit samey. My favourite Cinemaware game, though it’s a close call with “it came from the desert”.
21/07/2010 at 12:36 Picacodigos says:
Then again, for people like these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOGRm5f7HK8 flight sims are probably NOT a game.
21/07/2010 at 12:44 Flameberge says:
Good stuff Mr. Stone.
Along with Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix, my earliest gaming memories are with MS Flight SImulator; played to death on my Dad’s Amiga / Atari / whatever it was he actually had.
As you yourself mentioned, the key word is ‘realism’. It is both a huge turn on, and a huge turn off for different audiences. It is the same with racing games – I much prefer my GTRs. Grand Prix 4s and NASCAR Racing 2003s to the Need for Speeds and Blurs of the gaming world. However, give the average purchaser of, say, DiRT or GRID, GTR Evolution, and they’ll wait 5 minutes before declaring the game is rubbish, because there is too much to learn before any enjoyment can be had. Most people want a game to live out a fantasy – they want to be Nigel Mansell, they want to be Maverick from Top Gun. They want to be as awesome as these people right out of the box, barrel rolling and powersliding as appropriate. They don’t want an experience that simply points out to them how difficult motor racing and flying actually are.
Indeed, that point relates back to what John Walker mentions occasionally – he wasnts games to be fantasy, to be an escape; not replications of real life. Hence why for many, ARMA is something that they will just not be interested in.
I don’t think so much its an ivory tower, as much as sims being unapproachable for the newbie. The perfect example of a sim showing this does not need to be the case are Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix games, as the driver aids therein meant you can happily drive your 700hp Formula 1 car using nothing but the keyboard with a key to accelerate and keys for left and right. The driving aids stretched all the way from steering help, to more obvious ones like automatic gears, the racing line and more minor ones like a suggested gear indicator. Made his GP games playable by anyone. Especially when dricing aids could be toggled with the F-keys during a race, allowing you to really tailor what exactly you needed. If more sims were that approachable again, maybe they’d pick up popularity.
Also, bring back Crimson Skies. Not exactly a ‘sim’, but most fun I’ve ever had in a flight game, whether online or offline. They took the Crimson Skies universe and really presented it well. Shame they commited a cardinal sin that when you patched the game, your save games no longer worked.
21/07/2010 at 12:45 Paul says:
RED BARON WAS MY FIRST VIDEO GAME I EVER PLAYED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! props for putting it up!!!
21/07/2010 at 12:50 Hellfire257 says:
I think its the way devs advertise their products. I NEVER see an advert for a new Flight Sim like the ones the mainstream games get.
I think its also down to the way young peoples play style has become. All action, don’t want any skill required, I just wanna pick up the game, and play. This is why games like Ace combat and HAWX are more successful in sales. You can just pick up and play. If we compare these to games like Lock On, you actually need to think; “That missile launched from 10Km away, if I turn sharp enough and climb I may be able to escape, but I will need to make sure that he doesn’t fire another at the same time. I need to beam the missile and then launch upon him”. Beaming is a technique that has to be practiced, learned, and perfected. The average gamer doesn’t want to have to do that.
If we look away from the modern genre and into games such is Il-2, you still need to be able to master things like Yo-Yos, Scissors, Stall turns, and learn about each aircraft so you can fly it to its maximum potential. Again, this isn’t what the average gamer doesn’t want to do.
This effect of the “dumbing down” of games will only get worse as the strangle-hold of the console gets greater. I cannot think of one single console game where you need as much skill, practice, and patience as you do for PC Simulators.
To sum up, most people see a simulation game as boring because you have to a) get to the fight, b) win the fight, c) survive. The only way you are going to do this is to learn new skills.
Soon enough, people will be bored with the repetitive gameplay such games offer (you can see it growing, especially with the Call of Duty series which is just about running out of steam imo). The time for time consuming games has gone, the time for simple “retard-proof” games is going, and then the cycle will start again.
21/07/2010 at 12:53 Clovis says:
I really enjoyed some flight sims as a kid, like Aces Over Europe and Tie Fighter. But I never felt that I was really good at them. I just can’t handle the whole 3d thing. So a dofight for me was really just turning left or right until I could get behind the other plane and then trying to stay behind them. If they could turn faster I was pretty much screwed. I could never understand any other aspect of dogfighting.
So, I can’t play those games now. I just know I’m doing it wrong. Plus, as noted in the article and comments, the environment is pretty boring.
However, I remember one part of the flight sims that I really liked and would still really love: getting shot apart and seeing things get shot apart. I think modern graphics/physics could make this better. The best missions in those games, as someone noted above, were the ones where you knew your plane was just about to fall apart. The windows were cracked, you were losing fuel, you lost an engine, and then you managed to crash land at the home base and survive with a broken leg. Awesome!
So, a modern flight sim I could enjoy would involve an AI that is dumb enough to let me win by simply flying in circles, but not before I get shot a lot. I think the future stuff (not nec. in space though) works better too, since you get to spend time diverting power to shields, deciding what the nanobots should fix first, etc. Those are game actions I can understand. Managing (and SEEing) damage just seems really interesting to me. Real dogfighting doesn’t, because I don’t understand it at all.
21/07/2010 at 12:54 wedge says:
As a pilot and gamer who has played many flight sims starting on windows 3.1 with the original microsoft flight simulator. I can tell you EXACTLY why I have not played an new games except Dogfighter(on Steam) which did not live up to it’s expectations.
IL2 is one of the most recent simulators and I hate it. Why? Too realistic for fun by a normal gamer. You want to do well in IL2? Plan to spend many hours playing the game.
The absolute best Flight simulator EVER was Air Warrior 1, 2, and 3
Why? Two play modes of Full Realism (For the hardcore) and Relaxed Realism (for normal gamers). End result was you could pickup the game and just play it, get some kills, have some fun, and go to bed happy. But, the best part was as your pilot skills made a difference in Relaxed Realism. If you knew what you were doing you could rip off 10+ kills with the right setup and tactics. Oh and if you didn’t land, the kills did not count(AWESOME!!)
Play mode was pretty much only online with certain bases providing certain planes and upon base damage of a certain percentage, the plane options would degrade.
The game had enough to provide very complex and fun dogfights(5+ minutes if two really good pilots went at it) and with just guns and bombs, you had get in really close to have fun. Controls were identical to a real plane(very good as arcade controls ruin flight sims beyond a few plays) and missions took time. Especially bomb runs. 1 hour bombs runs were common but it you made it back on the bomb run the reward point wise was huge.
Anyways, that was a winning formula and nothing since then has come close.
21/07/2010 at 13:01 oceanclub says:
Give me two things in a flight-sim:
(a) A good story: Flight sims (and city building sims) are stuck in the Doom/Serious Sam era where story was unimportable. Give me a reason _why_ I’m flying and give me an overarching drama.
(b) A learning curve: I hate that flight-sims up front give you a binary choice of “idiot” vs “muscular airman”. Give me a tutorial that teaches me how to fly.
P (has a joystick at home and is willing to use it)
21/07/2010 at 13:06 Item! says:
Best flight “sim” ever has to be Strike Commander.
Fun, narrative-driven game-play, cinematic/RPG presentation, optional load-outs and varied missions.
Also, good moustaches.
Done by the Wing-Commander team I believe…it was essentially Wing Commander: Privateer in a “real life” setting.
21/07/2010 at 15:29 Nick says:
Yup, only Flight Sim I ever bought and it was great. Same voice for the main character as privateer too, wasn’t it?
21/07/2010 at 13:09 Schmung says:
great article and really interesting comments as well.
As many have pointed out, in this age of immediacy a proper flight sim just takes a bit too much time. I’ve never been that keen on the likes of HAWX or Ace Combat either though. The most fun I have in flight sims is always in the slightly slower aircraft that are closer to the floor – I used to love the stunt challenges in the old MS flight sims and I think something that harnesses that sort precision flying as well as combat would be ace
Stick your flight game in a big city, make the terrain artificially bonkers, slow the planes down enough so that this is feasible, but make them acrobatic enough to have major fun. Make missiles of dubious use instead of 30 mile insta death. Imagine something like that Sky Captain film (but not shit obviously) with a bit more levity and fun injected into things. Make Desert Strike again but from the pilots perspective. Leverage all the splendid destruction tech that exists and the graphical power of modern PCs to let me fly my futuro craft around the skyscapers of a neon drenched cityscape dodging the other air traffic and the monorail lines and skywalks and blowing chunks out of buildings with 30mm cannons. Allow me to take control of a seagull and fly around a seaside town shitting on people, eating their icecreams and terrorising dogs. Let me be an eagle soaring around the mountains attacking Yaks and screeching at things.
There is so much you can do by letting people fly something. Why are devs still constraining themselves to painfully accurate simulations of high end military kit the thrill of which you can’t really capture whilst sat in a comfy office chair?
Blethering over. Does anyone know of a decent open source flying game engine? I want to make my seagull game…
Off to Farnborough tomorrow, I’ll keep my eye out for Mr Flight Sim.
21/07/2010 at 13:26 Colthor says:
The problem I have with realistic sims (not just flight, also driving): I suck. Which is fine, because they’re tricky things to get good at. But what they don’t do, that they really should, is tell me *why* I suck.
If I knew where I was going wrong and why I was rubbish I’d be a lot more inclined to persevere.
It’s a pity, as I have fond memories of spending hours with F15 Strike Eagle II and Their Finest Hour when I was a kid.
21/07/2010 at 13:58 Hellfire257 says:
My advice to you would be to find a friend who plays the game too. You will find you will bounce off each other and learn from each others mistakes.
21/07/2010 at 13:34 DavidK says:
I reckon a far more interesting question is: why doesn’t Tim Stone write more stuff?
21/07/2010 at 13:46 Ezhar says:
It probably took him a month to edit all these pictures. Which are brilliant and worth waiting a month for.
21/07/2010 at 13:40 BigJonno says:
Great article, I can’t say that I’ve given much thought to Mr Flight Sim for years. What would I need to play a flight sim today? Hmmm…..
1) A joystick, definitely. It’s not standard PC gaming equipment any more and hasn’t been for some time. Joypads are more common these days, but they don’t feel right. A flight sim without a joystick is like Guitar Hero without a guitar. I’d go so far as to say that any game serious about changing the fortunes of Mr Flight Sim would need to come packaged with a cheap but serviceable stick.
2) Narrative. I have the attention span of a gnat these days. If a game doesn’t have an interesting story to follow or a steady drip feed of new stuff happening, I get bored pretty quickly. It doesn’t have to be a linear, overarching story, I’m quite happy with something like Oblivion or Fallout 3 where the narrative is one that I create by piecing together my character’s exploits.
3) Structure. As mentioned in the article, a string of missions just doesn’t cut it. Some kind of management stuff in between would do nicely. The suggestion above about being able to get out of your plane to hijack others or fight on foot around giant zeppelins would make the game an instabuy for me. It adds an element of character that I find purely vehicle based games lack. It also sounds like the perfect opportunity for GRAPPLING HOOKS!
4) Setting. I don’t want to refight WW2 again. Or any other 20th or 21st century conflict. Purely realistic settings (even if the game isn’t particularly sim-like) are an instant turn-off for me that can only be overcome by truly amazing games. Give me air pirates or something, and I’m there.
21/07/2010 at 17:06 bill says:
you said everything I tried to say, but coherently. good show!
In this era of packaging peripherals with everything, maybe a flight sim with a packed-in joystick isn’t as unreasonable as it once was. Unless Tony Hawk Ride killed that idea…
21/07/2010 at 13:44 airtekh says:
This is quite a timely article for me to read, because I was just reading some old articles by Tim on flight sims and was getting re-interested in the genre.
There are few things stopping me from fully committing though.
1) The learning curve. I read that in the likes of Black Shark there are like a bazillion switches you have to hit to keep the damn thing in the air. While I appreciate that there has to be realism in a flight sim, asking me to actually become a Russian Air Force pilot is a bit too much.
2) The games. I don’t know which are good and which are bad. I suppose I could read a few old reviews.
3) The equipment. I wouldn’t know what kind of a joystick to buy. I have an ancient Microsoft Sidewinder which might be a bit simplistic for a modern flight sim (how old you ask? It plugs in via a serial port, rather than USB)
4) The everlasting-mountain-of-games-to-be-played (TM). I just have so many other games to which I haven’t gotten around to yet. If I ever get the it whittled down, I could maybe add a flight sim to it.
What I really need is a damn time machine.
21/07/2010 at 13:45 Madjack says:
Regards space sims, my fondest memory was X-Wing Alliance.
A big part of that was the padlock view feature – it really helped give the impression of being in a craft’s cockpit. It was brilliant when flying past other bigger ships – really gave the impression you were taking a gander out the side window.
But this feature appears to be too challenging for today’s space sims and isn’t usually included. This often has the effect of reducing combat to an exercise in screen scrolling in response to little directional arrows. Great.
21/07/2010 at 14:00 Flimgoblin says:
How about we ditch “Flight Simulator” – as Bullwinkle brilliantly illustrated above we don’t play “man shooting simulator”s or “crime-ridden city simulator” or “space flying simulators” (or “space economic simulators” – actually scrub that last one, hi EVE!)
Bring back the flying game… first-person-aerial shooter? FPS with planes! (ok so you’re sat in the seat most of the time…)
I remember playing Red Baron back in the day (or at least trying to get a shot on my brother’s computer, so probably more watching than playing) – it had a story behind it (which went on with or without you if you ended up in hospital/PoW camp) and missions which involved more than just shooting things (the deathmatch of Flight games)
Remake that, with shiny graphics, and remember that for most people it’s about the fun of flying (which is always bloody difficult, but you can probably make difficulty options to make things like landing that bit more forgiving).
Oh and don’t market it as a flight sim, ever.
21/07/2010 at 14:05 Hmm-Hmm. says:
There are flight sims and games in which you fly. Are the two the same? I suspect not. The flying game I enjoyed most was X-Wing but I’m not certain that could be called a flight sim.
Anyway, what could revive interest in games where you fly? I am not entirely certain as I haven’t paid attention to recent flight sims (other than that they’re quite realistic or very arcadey like HAWX). But I’ll give it a shot.
1) A good start: Make the game relatively easy to get into. This is complicated if you’re going for a very realistic game unless a lot of the button-pressing and the like can be automated or bypassed or otherwise made optional. Tutorials, missions where you can muck about trying to get a feel for the game, things like that.
2) A solid background: Make it exciting. Stimulate the player (and not just to perform 1001 tricks in the air). A good, engaging campaign, for one. And you know what, if you’re not insisting on the realistic, don’t be afraid to make stuff up. Fictional conflicts, fictional settings, fictional airplanes, even. All these can be used (if consistent and well-thought out) to encourage people to try out the game, buy it and play it. Also, don’t do achievements, but ribbons/medals and the like are often appropriate and give a sense of accomplishment. Do be careful with those, though, and don’t trivialise them by handing them out for every little thing.
3) A solid flying experience. This can vary a lot, but personally, I prefer a middle ground between the very realistic and the arcade type of games. Games where you can start off relatively easily but there is definitely skill involved mastering the flying craft involved.
4) Multiplayer. Implement it and at least try to make it as easy to get into and bug free as possible.
Most of all.. make it fun.
21/07/2010 at 14:09 Risingson says:
Though most of you people are asking for a narrative, I realized some later that what we need is an enviroment, something that tells us that we have changed the course of war or affected the next battle.
It’s also kind of terrifying to install F19 again, under Dosbox, and see that it is an addictive experience.
21/07/2010 at 14:27 golden_worm says:
Anyone remember Evasive Action? 4 time periods, 1 on 1 dog fights, split screen mode ? loved that game.
21/07/2010 at 15:11 Horatius says:
Yes! I played the hell out of the Evasive Action demo as a kid but never found the full game. To me it was covering all those aspects of “a flight sim must be fun first”, yet that was likely what got it ignored by the critics. If I recall it came out around the same general time of Falcon 4. Falcon 4 had a BINDER for the manual… ugh
I loved how Evasive Action encouraged you to do stunts even when you were on a search and destroy mission.
21/07/2010 at 14:38 Gareth says:
Yes, absolutely, to steam-punky, Elite-esque, tactically and strategically immersive flight sim (and preferably one not requiring pedals and joystick – perhaps a cheap joypad will do!).
And get someone like Cherie Priest or Joe R. Landsdale to write the script, or advise, or something.
Must contain pilotable Zeppelins.
Should probably go and play Dark Void. Or watch The Rocketeer.
21/07/2010 at 14:47 Adam Whitehead says:
Or Chris Wooding as well. His TALES OF THE KETTY JAY books are basically CRIMSON SKIES + FIREFLY + steampunk anyway.
21/07/2010 at 17:42 user@example.com says:
BookS? I thought there was only one! I found it a bit bland and flat and a bit too blatantly Firefly in parts, but it was still good enough to read more of. The steampunk isn’t really my thing anyway, but I don’t dislike it, so I’ll probably be buying the second book when I see it.
22/07/2010 at 07:13 c-Row says:
Those books sound funny, and anything remotely connected to Steampunk and Firefly can’t be all bad.
21/07/2010 at 14:41 Sam Dodsworth says:
Derring do and implausible flying antics abound but its fun as hell
Wondering why hardly anyone plays flight sims any more? That ‘but’ is the reason.
21/07/2010 at 14:42 Richard Clayton says:
What a lot of people are asking for, it seems to me, is for a developer to do with flight sims what Slightly Mad Studios did with Need For Speed: Shift.
SM managed to add drama and excitement, a real sense of place to an otherwise dry experience (for those of us who are not hardcore fans). The result is playable, fun and as challenging as you want it to be.
21/07/2010 at 14:46 Richard Clayton says:
@me: of course Sim Racers would argue strongly that NFS:Shift is not a simulation. But has there been an equivalent for flight sims? One that looks like a sim, sounds like a sim but where you feel like a gifted fighter pilot and not the noob you really are?
Like modern art, I suspect, that if the modern flight sim were indeed accessible then it would not make it a sim…
21/07/2010 at 14:45 Adam Whitehead says:
I remember loving flight sims on the Amiga. F/A18 Interceptor was awesome, MiG-29 Fulcrum was cool, F-19 Stealth Fighter was a bit meh but okay, but eventually the fun of them wore off. I only ever bought one ‘proper’ flight sim for my PC (F-22 Total Air War; take out the ‘Air’ and they could have had CA scrambling around for another title for Shogun) and it was a bit dreary. Having this amazing graphical powerhouse of a machine and being reduced to shooting dots on the horizon just wasn’t fun any more. Crimson Skies, which had more in common with TIE Fighter mechanics than a realistic flight sim, was great fun.
Something I did enjoy more on the Amiga were the helicopter sims. Thunderhawk was excellent, and Gunship 2000 (with its camels that were invulnerable to hellfire missiles) was superb. I tried a bunch of demos for PC helicopter sims and never really found one that satisfied. Disappointing, as a helicopter sim combines the aerial combat appeal of flight sims with the more graphical and detail-based approach of ground combat titles.
On the space combat front, I’m still not sure why it suddenly fell from grace. Go right up to 1998 and you have great, very well-selling games like X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, Freespace 1, I-War and so on. Then in 1999-2000 you have X-Wing Alliance, Freespace 2, Tachyon and Starlancer, all top games and pretty much all of which bombed massively. At the same time a number of other in-development space combat sims were cancelled (like the Babylon 5 one which looked like it was going to be pretty good). Unlike the normal flight sim which went into a slow decline, space combat sims just seemed to disappear overnight, so a lot of the normal explanations (people needing joysticks and so forth) don’t really explain it. People just seemed to fall out of love with the genre.
21/07/2010 at 14:46 Berzee says:
Why have flight simulators declined? Taking a hint from LHX Attack Chopper, I will say that the most important thing is to be able to blast camels with Stinger missiles. FILTHY CAMELS, you are my true enemy! ::explosion mouth noises::
21/07/2010 at 14:59 Michael says:
Great article.
FWIW, there are plenty of joysticks around but they’re not cheap and not worth the investment until there’s a decent flight sim around to play.
Among the sims I’ve played, Strike Commander did a good job of keeping the pace of gameplay up and building an engaging context. F19 Stealth Fighter gave you more to do than just fire missiles at targets you couldn’t see – you had to manage your radar profile and slip unseen, deep behind enemy lines. Hind gave you an amazing workhorse of a Russian helicopter to control, meaning missions were varied, and most of the combat was against ground forces and at low level. Finally, there was Flight Unlimited, which encouraged experimenting with the shear joy aerobatics. I would spend hours finding new ways to test the limits of my glider’s wings – the creaking noise that told me they were about to rip off as I pulled, desperately out of a nose dive made, what could have been mundane, as gripping as any dogfight.
I tried a couple of flight sim demos on the PS3 recently – Hawks and some WW2 thing – but they were just silly. Hawks gave you limitless air-to-air missiles and insisted on some crazy camera angles. Combat in both these games was always close range, target rich, arcade stuff. There was none of the intelligence involved in trying to outmanoeuvre one or two opponents. None of the slowly, slowly, catchy Jerry that made dogfighting so engrossing in the old days. It was closer to being a bad remake of Afterburner.
I don’t think it’s a choice between realism and fun. I think flight sims need realism to exist. Without it, they become shoot-em-ups. But they also need something more than just flying and shooting. Any battle of Britain veteran will tell you that straight-up aerial combat is not, in and of itself, fun.
21/07/2010 at 15:01 GregP says:
As others have said here, “flight sim” is probably not what we’re talking about here. For many years now, flight sims have mostly been high-fidelity ultra-realistic simulators that really do require you to learn buttons, avionics, and combat maneuvers. A big chunk of the flight sim fanbase WANTS to learn these things, and they’re very happy to encourage any further development of these kinds of sims, even more so because of their perpetual feeling that ALL games are being increasingly dumbed-down for the “console kiddie” generation as time goes on.
That being said, yes, it is a shame that the flying games that so many of us fondly remember from childhood just about don’t exist anymore. My take on it is that publishers see the market for games somewhat polarized, along the lines of what I said above: the ultra-hardcore crowd on one end, and the console-kiddie instant-gratification A.D.D. crowd on the other end. Neither of those groups would seem to like the kind of flying game we used to play.
It’s quite simple: no perceptible demand = no game development.
21/07/2010 at 15:51 Rob Zacny says:
I think I-War and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter both took some risks with complexity that started turning people off. For one thing, do you remember how X-Wing vs. TIE did not ship with a campaign, just a few single player missions and a skirmish mode? Or how suddenly we had to worry about electronic countermeasures, and the how the Star Wars space battle started to look less like 12 O’clock High and more like Red Storm Rising?
Suddenly there were missile locks everywhere, and the battles were bigger and more complicated. The more those games started to look like The Battle of Endor, the harder and more arbitrary they got. Alliance was unspeakably brutal, for instance. Capital ships everywhere, sheets of laser fire that could swat you out of the sky, concussion missiles zigging here and zagging there… The games were spectacular, but incoherent next to the nicely balanced scenarios of the earlier games.
And I-War and Alliance both embraced The Endless Space Mission. “You’re going to jump to the Wait For the Convoy system. Then you’re going to escort the SS Fragility and SS Breakable to Pirate Attack Station, at which point you’re going to jump to the I Think We’ll Be Safe Here system. There, you will be rescued by the HMS Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal… or will you? The whole thing should only take about 45 minutes if you don’t die.” And because these games loved to put a brutal difficulty spike right there at the end of a mission, you could look forward to playing the first half hour a mission many, many times.
I-War was magnificent, but I do wonder if the addition of more ship systems and Newtonian physics was yet another bridge too far. It was like the entire genre kept layering little bits of complexity onto the successful framework established by TIE Fighter. About the only game from that last generation I’d say was perfect was Freespace 2, and that’s because it deviated the least from the classic formula. I suspect that one did so poorly simply because it lacked a sexy license.
21/07/2010 at 16:21 Tei says:
“You’re going to jump to the Wait For the Convoy system. Then you’re going to escort the SS Fragility and SS Breakable to Pirate Attack Station, at which point you’re going to jump to the I Think We’ll Be Safe Here system. There, you will be rescued by the HMS Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal… or will you? The whole thing should only take about 45 minutes if you don’t die.”
Photosensitive epilepsy is when seizures can sometimes be triggered by flashing or flickering lights, or by certain geometric shapes or patterns. It can also happends reading scort mission descriptions, as recently was found reading the RPS blog.
21/07/2010 at 16:00 Bluebreaker says:
The problem of flying games is simple.
You either get an idiotic arcade, or a “use 3 keyboards to take-off”.
Give me a hardcore simulator with arcade controls and a story and I will buy it.
21/07/2010 at 21:45 sinister agent says:
Exactly this, to be honest. Anything somewhere in the middle would do for now, to be honest.
Perhaps you could even have a flight sim about a war between arcade fighters and simulation fighters, just to rub it in.
Obviously the arcaders would win, because their planes would go invisible and launch unerringly accurate homing napalm missiles while the simmers were still trying to revive the hung over ground crew so they could start their engines, but still.
21/07/2010 at 16:25 R3D says:
Oleg Maddox was the refrance to il2, i loved the game and it deserved a better referance tho
21/07/2010 at 16:40 R3D says:
yes and no i play IL2 and am in no way a pro simer i do own a good joystick but its not esential its just becaus i was playing alot and felt like ild like to splash out and get a good one, before that i had a $20 one for years.
the problem i find is that people take a flight sim throw it on high to midhigh setings dont read any of the controles and just jump in and try to do it,
i say this because thats how i did it and all my mates.
it ends up tho that i like the settings at aroundabout 70% realistic when avalable and often tone it back to 50% when playing at a lan with my mates who only use keyboards and are just as good as i am.
i think there is a bigger stigma of hardcore than in required because people feel like they arnt doing it right if they only enjoy the game at lower difficulties.
21/07/2010 at 16:45 Walsh says:
Blackshark isn’t that bad. It’s not a significant time investment to understand the 5 things you need to do to fly and shoot things.
It took me an hour of fumbling around to understand some of the functions and the more ‘advanced’ stuff actually make flying and shooting much easier, for example there’s an option in the black shark where you move your camera doohicky on to an enemy tank and press lock on, then you click one button and your helicopter will automatically turn towards the enemy and keep it centered so you can concentrate on blasting it. But you don’t need to use that feature ever.
It takes a greater time invesment if you want to know how to start the helicopter from a cold state (there’s a hotkey to do all that for you) and understand every system. I think part of it is, while there are excellent tutorial videos from Eagle, is they present so many key commands that it’s overwhelming. They need to do a better job of here’s the buttons you really care about to shoot things.
Actually, Lock On is a decent example of appeasing the hardcore and wanna be hardcore sim fans. There’s not much switchology and you can ignore 50% of the functions. It just needs a more thrilling story.
I miss Strike Commander.
One thing to remember is there are tons of sim forums with fans eager to bring newbies into the fold. You won’t be on your own trying to figure stuff out with super sim nerds thumbing their noses at you.
21/07/2010 at 16:54 Walsh says:
There is a decent ‘light’ flight sim series out there, the Strike Fightersseries by Third Wire Productions, also known as the Wings over Vietnam, Europe, etc games .
They aren’t that complex at all, I’d argue they are less complex than the old F-19 Stealth Fighter games. The games are inexpensive (~$20 USD) and have a large mod community supporting them. Also the developer is Indie so street cred.
21/07/2010 at 17:53 oceanclub says:
Might give Strike Fighters a go, especially as you can fly a Warthog! Doesn’t appear to be a demo though?
P.
21/07/2010 at 17:16 bill says:
I think the future of “flight sims” is probably more something like Battlefield. Something that integrates flight into a wider range of experiences, and closer to the ground.
though I’d kill for single player tie-fighter meets mechwarrior mercs based battlefield game where I can move smoothly between the cockpit, the interior, and first person boarding actions.
21/07/2010 at 17:38 Switch says:
“Why they aren’t interested in winged warfare any more”
=> I can’t find any real story or entertaining atmosphere anymore in any games. Even the “dynamic campaigns” are like cold steel.
Remember Red Baron, Crimson Skies, Gunship 2000, theF16 fighting falcon or B-17.
You could feel your pilot improving, the situation going worse or better, the world living around you, and you got motivated to start the next mission.
Story telling over cold dynamic campaign, that’s the point.
21/07/2010 at 18:00 jRides says:
RE point 1:
Left Windows Key + Home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaNnpIdYWY&feature=related
:)
But I do agree with your point, I bought Apache vs Havoc and Comanche vs Hokum at the weekend in gogs sale, but I’ve not even attempted to download them.. Not with Alien Swarm out this week, I’m in a middle of the Titan Quest IT campaign with a couple mates, on the second mission in Officers and I’ve finally broke the back of Harad as Gondor in the middle earth mod for ME2:TW – when the hell am I going to find time to effectively learn to fly these helis so that the game actually becomes [i]fun[/i]?
21/07/2010 at 18:04 jRides says:
gah the reply fail monster got me – this was in reply to airtekhs comment about DCS a page back about it being a nightmare to even start the thing.
21/07/2010 at 18:07 Man Raised By Puffins says:
Lovely stuff, keep fighting the good fight Tim.
22/07/2010 at 00:16 Warduke says:
Indeed, rock on Tim Stone, rock on..
21/07/2010 at 21:41 sinister agent says:
Funnily enough, I just recently got a major hankering for flight sims, and have found very slim pickings indeed. The few non-ancient examples I’ve found were highly rated, and I’ve managed to eke some little enjoyment out of them, but it’s been vastly outweighed by frustration and boredom as learning to control them effectively is akin to taking actual flying lessons.
It’s fine that these sort of games exist, and I can enjoy such things when I have time (hell, I even got into dwarf fortress after months of putting it off). But there seems to be no real middle ground between the ultra-realistic switch-flicking sims like IL2k Sturmovic that require two weeks of practice at landing (with no dedicated tutorial/practice mode, natch), and the ultra-simplified arcade shooters like the Battle Stations series. Both are perfectly valid approaches, but I find neither really hits home.
Also, I want to play the game in these screenshots. Make this game please, thanks.
21/07/2010 at 22:00 Rugged Malone says:
I blame the internet.
Just like the internet has changed how I read articles (so many words!) and reply to email (that email looks a lot like an article…), I think it’s changed how willingly I face games that feel like they have a lot of inertia, like flight sims.
I used to be an airplane nut, I own a full CH HOTAS setup (joystick, throttle, rudder pedals), and I own a bunch of sims that I keep meaning to play. But whenever I think of diving into one, it means sitting down and figuring out how I want to program the seven thousand buttons on my controllers, and then learning some complicated take-off procedure, and spending hours getting used to the brutally modeled throttle yaw effects.
I want to fly, really I do, but it just seems so much like work. I actually feel guilty about it.
My latest excuse is that I’m waiting until after I get my FreeTrack rig setup. Ah, sweet excuses.
21/07/2010 at 22:01 Microcystin says:
I think the sweet spot for mass appeal is what the Battle Field 1942 mod, Desert Combat did with it’s planes. Yes it was arcadey but you could fly with a keyboard or get serious with a joystick and if you weren’t up to flying yet then you could man the AA gun’s or sit in the back seat of an F15. Reasonably detailed physics, a first person view (i.e. you don’t need to look at the panel), and constant action are what would draw in a crowd. I had so many fun moments playing just the all aircraft maps. Nothing like getting shot up only to parachute out at the last minute, steering your chute into another fighter take off and shoot down your antagonist. I want to like hardcore sims I keep trying to make them fun but 30 minutes of flying to get to the engagement then getting shot down and having to go do it again just isn’t fun. I will say that 3rdWire’s Wings Over Israel has been working for me of late, mostly because of a complete fluke. I was flying a bombing mission and after expending all bombs I was bugging out when I heard my wingman call for help. I was just going to run for home but for some reason in that split second I decided I couldn’t just leave a friendly to get slaughtered so I pull into a 180 turn and spot the Mig climbing for altitude on my wingman’s six. Somehow I get the perfect gun shot and take out the Mig seconds before he lines up a shot. If there were more moments like that I think flight sim’s would be incredibly popular. You just have to make people care about what is going on without making the situations contrived.
21/07/2010 at 22:07 Rugged Malone says:
Oh, one other thing: where are the “middle difficulty” flight sims?
It seems like we have to choose between dumbed-down console flight games that make it feel like an arcade game, and hardcore niche sims that make it all feel like work.
What happened to sims like European Air War, Gunship 2000, and F-18 Interceptor on the Amiga?
I want a sim that gives me “realistic” flight and combat without burdening me with over-the-top details.
21/07/2010 at 22:37 Waltorious says:
I just wanted to add a couple of things:
People are complaining about not being able to buy joysticks these days, but actually it is easy to buy a joystick if you order it online, and they’re not that expensive. I bought a Saitek Cyborg Evo a few years back, and it’s great, has plenty of buttons, is customizable (even in terms of adjusting the angles of the buttons to fit your hand, or use left-handed), programmable and wasn’t very expensive. Now, you can buy the wireless version for only $40. And Saitek make nicer, bigger, more expensive ones as well if you’re serious about your sims.
Now, about the games. I was always a Space Sim fan. One of the first games I really got into was the original Tie Fighter, which I later upgraded to the CD version (gasp!). From there, I played the rest of the X-wing series and the Freespace series and I loved them. I think that these types of “space sims” do a good job of balancing complexity with fun. Clearly they’re not “realistic”, but they have enough depth where I felt in control, in that I’m managing the energy diverted to my weapons and shields, evading missile locks, getting into some fun close-quarters dogfights with cannons, and making sure I’m where I need to be to complete the mission. There were a lot of controls, but not TOO many controls. They also generally had good campaigns and storylines, especially the Freespace games. Contrast this with more arcadey games, where it’s basically just steer-and-shoot, and too simple to really be fun for me.
Why did I never play any aircraft sims? Precisely because they were TOO complex. The “three keyboards to take off” problem people have mentioned. There was none of that in the space sims.
So what would I need sims to do to for me to play them today? Find this same balance again. There are some solutions available now, in fact… the Freespace 2 Open Source project thingie means we can keep playing Freespace 2 with new shinier graphics and a plethora of new missions. The Evochron games which have been mentioned here before get a LITTLE more complex but aren’t too bad, have combat that’s quite different, and can be fun to just explore around in.
New games need to get this right though. I would have no problem playing an aircraft sim if it got the level of complexity right, although I find I prefer more fantastical settings. A steampunk-ish prop-plane game with air piracy against zeppelins sounds awesome. A more modern jetfighter sim that’s all about missiles sounds less fun. But maybe we’re fighting against aliens and eventually start fitting some crazy alien tech to our jetfighters? Sound fun again. As long as it FEELS kind of realistic without actually being overwhelmingly realistic, I’m good.
Long-winded, but my main point is that while many of you say that we either had stuff that was very simple and arcade-like or we had super-detailed very hard to learn flight sims, I disagree. I think the space sim games walked a nice line between the two, and if people started modeling more sims on that model I’d be very happy. Hopefully other people would too.
But yeah, they’d need to buy a joystick first.
21/07/2010 at 22:53 scharmers says:
Having written a fairly-popular flight sim column (the Follies) many moons ago and having been immersed in the whole sim-fandom scene since my Amiga departure days (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim 4 lyfe!), I’ve seen the “Why did sims die?” arguments over and over and over again. Congrats to Tim for clearly spelling out the old chestnuts (sims complexed themselves), but also clearly spelling some of the less obvious stuff (sims once led the way in 3d tech, they don’t anymore).
What he didn’t touch on was this: sims were most popular when the Reagan babies of the 80′s — cold warriors, all — were hitting our majorities. We were raised on Top Gun and Tom Clancy. Now us 80s kids & teens are pretty much packing grey now, and the industry focus has moved to the Halo generation.
21/07/2010 at 22:58 Bureaucromancer says:
It seems to me that there’s a lot of truth to that. In fact, I would guess that the next big breakthrough MMO will be something that does exactly that, along the lines of Battlefield 2 online. Frankly I’m surprised we haven’t heard of something along these lines already, what publisher could resist “Modern Warfare with a monthly fee”? Which leads nicely into my concern, that such a game would do air combat as at best an afterthought that is rushed, and never really feels right as any combination of realistic, arcade or middle ground (as, IMO, is the case most of the time in the battlefield games).
22/07/2010 at 00:31 Duoae says:
I just want my space flight sims back. The last decent one that i played was Starlancer and that had so many crash-bugs in it that it makes it hard to play for long these days :/
22/07/2010 at 02:22 TeeJay says:
I’ve just racked up 45 hours playing Just Cause 2 a lot of which was spent flying through the air free-falling, zip-lining, para-sailing or in a plane or helicopter. The most satisfying bit was steering the parachute and finaly earning how to get myself airbourne, gaining elevation, skimming the treetops, towing behind a vehicle gaining speed to execute a slick insertion onto a guard tower followed by a sling-shot over a rooftop to tumble into a machine-gun lit roll behind cover.
Ironically compared with this the attack helicopters were an anti-climax and I was so useless at steering airplanes that I was unable to complete a single “race track” and ended up using them as guided missiles which I aimed and jumped out of at the last minute. Although I have completed the storyline I am only on “35% complete” meaning I need to learn how to fly. JC2 is my flying “gateway”…
I am a self-confessed flying “lightweight”. I do enjoy the crazy sensation of being launched into the air but all my “flying” over the last few years has been in the following decidely ‘non-flight-sim’ games:
Far Cry 2 (glider), UT2k4, disasterous rocket jumps in TF2, going into mini-orbits with robot ninjas in Plain Sight, 3d swinging, jumping and parktouring around in Tomb Raider, Dead Space & Mirror’s Edge, flying model helicopters in GTA:VC … I’m even going to include flapping desperately in Messiah, catching stupid air in Offroad Velociraptor Safari and Tony Hawke and the turn-based air warfare strategy in Alpha Centauri.
My point is that getting airbourne is still a highly popular aspects of many games, but it seems developers are still working out how to make it as fun as possible. It’s not just that FPS stole ‘action fans’, but you can tell that many of these FPS developers still *want* to have air combat aspects somewhere…
My preference would be for a further refinement of the “Just Cause 2″ model (or GTA/Battlefield/Arma/etc model if you prefer) – ideally with a ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ option… somehow accomodating the full range from gymnastic on-foot jumping around, through ground vehicles, base-jumping, jet-packs, zip-lines and parachutes, through to helicopters and jet planes … of course there are certain gameplay balance problems that arise and maybe it’s often pointless trying to be all things to all people – however it’s via games like these that you can get a big audience and player-base and therefore have a suitable context to hit this mid-market “sweet spot” – by making the arcade elements more “serious”, having harder options and offering ‘stretch targets’ – maybe via achievements or just opportunities to gain respect in multiplayer games – which will motivate people to hone their flying skills – maybe by turning off the ‘flight computers’ / ‘co-pilots’ / navigator / automatic weapons you’ll start stalling and side-slipping, getting lost, have far more buttons to press, bad weather and be more likely to crash – but you’ll also be able to achieve more and get more credit.
22/07/2010 at 03:46 Frye says:
Unfortunately, in most games flying a helicopter just isn’t much fun. DCS Black Shark is, but it’s quite hard and probably near impossible to play without the right gear, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The helicopter flight model of Desert Combat mod for Battlefield was a nice mix between realism and arcade; It took a few days to learn to control them, but once you did, you really felt like flying a heli. At least the moves you could make were kind of similar to what real life helicopters can do.
The original choppers for Arma and BF feel like flying a log.
22/07/2010 at 10:04 Risingson says:
The mentioned LHX, Apache Longbow and Gunship 2000 were really fun, believe me. What is funny is that the Comanche games, more arcade-oriented, weren’t not that half fun.
22/07/2010 at 08:14 Corbeau says:
Someone mentioned ACE Online. As a gamer who began gaming with Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat way back in the day, I played ACE Online heavily when it was called SCO and run by gpotato. While I quit due to the MMO grind, I’ve never found a game that managed to revitalize the thrill of air combat like SCO. It worked. It really worked.
Why did it work? Because it dropped the entire farce of realism in procedure in favor of realism of emotion. Simulation went completely out the hatch in SCO, with the exception of gravity and the resulting tactics of potential energy, but it captured the compelling feeling of air combat sims that made me love them back in the day. The feeling of being a bird of prey, swooping down upon hopelessly outclassed prey. The feeling of riding a rocket through fire and debris, of being the survivor whose adaptation to the sky is triumphantly tested. The feeling of teamwork and mutual reliance between wingmen when caught unawares by the enemy. The adrenaline-pumping feeling of racing through canyons and between skyscrapers, risking death from the tiniest error for the sake of that minuscule edge that will earn victory. The visceral feeling of power and freedom that follows militarized flight, and the personalities that it shapes. SCO did it all with it’s starfox-esque, pvp-central, player-skill-central MMO. Despite the hateful MMO grind, I dearly loved that game.
I remain mystified as to why no one has copied the starfox-esque model and executed it better. There is incredible room for improvement, yet no one seems to have even tried. Even as an MMO, it was a fantastic game. I’d regularly beat the daylights out of pilots 10 levels higher simply because I practiced as a player rather than as a character – skill, both dexterity and understanding the dynamics of dogfighting, deeply mattered. And the entire game was focused on factional warring between players – you could even level up from shooting down players from the opposing nation! Pity about the grind, the dubious balance, and the many niggling technical flaws… but all of them could be corrected. The fundamental model was, and is, solid as a rock.
22/07/2010 at 08:30 Corbeau says:
A trailer (fan-made, I believe) that gives a decent short impression of gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAlgFqW11bk
22/07/2010 at 10:29 bill says:
While no shops round here have PC joysticks, I guess I could reasonably easily order one online.
But TBH it’s not simply that I have to order one, it’s that I then have to find somewhere to put it. Either I have to keep it plugged in on the desk, looking messy, or I have to get it out and plug it in every time i want to play a flight game, and then put it away when I’m finished.
I have been tempted to try a fold-up one I found on amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Saitek-ST90-Joystick-PC/dp/B0000AW9RQ as it seemed more convenient, and someone mentioned a wireless one, that might be more convenient too.
But still, look at these things: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Saitek-Cyborg-EVO-Wireless-Joystick/dp/B00030GSJE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1279790845&sr=1-1 they hardly fit in with the living room furniture – they look way too bulky and hardcore. And they need a solid desk.
23/07/2010 at 21:58 Waltorious says:
I must come to the defense of the Saitek sticks… they really aren’t that bulky (at least, the Cyborg Evo isn’t, that’s the one I have) and since it’s USB it’s easy to plug it into a front USB port on your computer or laptop when you want to use it, and then unplug it and put it away when you’re done. I’ve just been putting mine behind my monitor when not in use. And now they’re selling a wireless version so you don’t even need to plug it in anymore! But yes, you will want a solid desk to use it.
Other advantages include customizable shape (you can angle the buttons and such to fit your hand), works right- or left-handed, and it comes with programming software that lets you bind things to the buttons even if the game doesn’t. You can even bind keys to the hat switch and stuff, it’s quite thorough.
I will grant that the look of the stick is probably not to some people’s tastes. I don’t mind it, but it is certainly… unique. With a stick I care more about performance than looks though, and you can always hide it away when you’re not playing.
22/07/2010 at 13:32 Mark Lucas says:
Absolutely spot on interview. I laughed, I cried, I checked http://www.fighterops.com/ for more updates. Beyond the steady withering of th genre, what the heck happened to MS Flight Simulator?
22/07/2010 at 14:21 alh_p says:
What I’d really love to see is a flight “sim” based on the 1st world war, maybe a remake of Knights of the Sky (Microprose) or Chocks away. I’m afraid the realism of fly by wire and afterburners does bore me.
I agree with others here that IL2 was good but oddly un-fun too. What is fun about FPS’ is that you don’t spend ages driving around not killing stuff in the face and you don’t have to worry about your safety catch (in most games) -for example.
I can totally see myself enjoying a War of Tanks-like War of Planes, earning xp and credits to get new planes and climb a tech ladder.
22/07/2010 at 15:48 Richard Clayton says:
Having been thinking about this for a bit I remembered “Wings of Prey”.
What was the response to “Wings of Prey”?
I seem to recall a luke warm review from Tim in PC Gamer UK.
Was this not trying to bridge the gap or was it mere watering down for the console market?
Did anybody play it? I’ve found a demo on Steam and so am downloading to have a look.
22/07/2010 at 16:26 Richard Clayton says:
Apologies in advance for linking to metacritic but http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/wingsofprey = favourable 78%. Agree? Disagree?
22/07/2010 at 22:11 stahlwerk says:
Wings of prey is a gorgeous game, and you can set it in three steps from arcade to simulation.
Setting realism is really an old staple of this genre, but it makes so much sense, and it’s one they got right pretty much from the start (Dynamix especially). I wonder where that was lost… maybe when the “value” of a flightsim began to correspond with the quality of the rubber subsystem of the landing gear simulation… No one will buy black shark to fly it with a Xb360 pad (ha! well I would!).
Haven’t played WoP beyond the tutorial mission over England since buying it, but it’s slowly creeping up on my list. Looking forward to it.
23/07/2010 at 15:17 oceanclub says:
Installed the demo from Steam. Plugged in my Saitek Cyborg Evo Wireless – hardly a rare joystick. Found the controls were all fubared up. Asked on Steam forum but no response. So, not a very impressive first impression (it does _look_ very nice though, at least before I hit the ground).
P.
22/07/2010 at 19:48 Guhndahb says:
I want the switches. Take the realism out of flight simming and you lose me. You might be better off without me, but I’ll be glum.
Oh, and the screenshots were absolutely precious.
22/07/2010 at 20:38 jimbob says:
May i point the flight sim lovers to a nice indie flight sim? Besides planes you have also boats, ships, heliopters, etc. This Vehicle Simulator is like a giant sandbox.
You can find it here:
http://www.qualitysimulations.com
23/07/2010 at 07:18 Jabberwocky says:
Haha, I totally misread this bit of the article:
RPS: Today – well – things are very different aren’t they. Do you ever wonder why that is?
Mr. Flight Simulation: Back in the late Nineties I started doing a lot of speed…
———-
Space flight games are reasonably popular among indie and small studio devs. I watch the genre fairly closely, as my game-in-progress has some space flight in it. You just need to dig a little deeper to find them, and sometimes be a little more forgiving in production value.
23/07/2010 at 07:21 Jabberwocky says:
Oh, and add me to the chorus of fanboys to Tim’s hilarity.
24/07/2010 at 03:05 Jason Moyer says:
I don’t have the time/inclination to do hardcore flight simming anymore (I barely have time to do hardcore simracing anymore) but if someone did something with the simplicity and polish of HAWX with more realism in terms of the flight model/weapons/fuel/etc I’d probably go for it. Really, I wish we’d get Mig Alley 2, because the original managed to couple a deep campaign and extreme realism with easy-to-learn controls/tactics and the era of air combat that is the most visceral and exciting – 100′s of jets fighting with guns and unguided munitions.
02/08/2010 at 19:00 Triggerhappy says:
Thank you for this article, it brought back a lot of warm memories.
Yes, flight sims got killed by their own fanbois. There were those of us that saw it coming, though. I remember having huge arguments about this very topic in the late 90s: That flight sims would lose their appeal to the mass market if they continued on their path towards more and more realism while neglecting most aspects that make a game a game and ultimately fun to play. Because that’s the difference between gamers and flight sim fanbois: for “normal” people, realism does not equal fun. Never mind the fact, that most simmers simply lack the knowledge and the experience to actually evaluate what’s realistic, and what’s not. Or the fact that you will never achieve full realism anyway (and why would you want to?).
Thank you for also pointing towards first person shooters and other games that may have been “stealing the thunder” of flight sims. I had not considered that. But you are right: If it was only for realism, at least space sims should still be doing fine – and they’re far from it.
I really do hope that one day, a phoenix will rise and restore flight sims to their full glory. However, I do not see that game coming any time soon. A flight sim of that scale would be very expensive to make, and I don’t see any publisher willing to take the risk to create a Strike Commander 2, a Eurofighter Typhoon 2, a Comanche 5, a new Crimson Skies …
And if, one day, there will be such a game, I know exactly what the simmers will say … :-/