We’ve waited a long time for this and now the day has arrived. A new trailer, a beta release and the auspicious beginnings of the future of DCS are all starting today with the launch of DCS World 2.5 beta.

The launch

Coming one day before the expected launch date, DCS World 2.5 beta is now available to players to download and test out ahead of the stable release coming in a week or two. Players currently on the 1.5 beta release will get an update notification that will begin installing DCS World 2.5.

If you have DCS World 2.2 alpha installed it will also pull data and modules from that area as well and bring that into the merged 2.5 installation too. This is a benefit for folks on a constrained or limited connection as it won’t download more than you need.

If you want more on how the merge is going to happen, I talked about that last week in this post.

Glowing Amraam’s amazing trailer

If you needed a little help getting amped up about everything that DCS World 2.5 is and will be in the near future then look no further than the launch trailer. Glowing Amraam, long a fixture in the DCS World community as a creator of many famed cinematics, has put together a launch trailer for Eagle Dynamics that covers the breadth of what DCS World 2.5 represents.

From the new trees moving in the wind to epic air combat and atmospheric battlefields and carrier decks, this trailer has something from everything that this new start to the series represents.

Initial reaction

So far the initial reaction from most of the Facebook and forum posts on the Eagle Dynamics website have been overwhelmingly positive. Here are some comments that I pulled from Facebook:

2.5 looks refreshing and beautiful…

And this:

Yes, the new engine finally does justice to Caucasus.

Also this:

Looks 10x nicer than 1.5 and performance is much better.

So far the initial reports suggest what Eagle Dynamics has been telling us all along – Performance under 2.5 should be the same as or better on most systems and along with much improved visuals and fidelity.

We’ve seen some visual bugs from some aircraft like the MiG-21 that seem to not have been fully updated with the new physics based renderer. The other negative posts so far seem to surround issues either with custom graphics settings causing issues with DCS World 2.5’s settings (its recommended that you reset your graphics settings) or with actually getting the download to complete.

Just the beginning

This is just the beginning. A new start for the DCS simulator series with all of its content all in one place under a single unified game engine. It may be some time before all issues are sorted out but this does appear to be a fairly smooth launch so far and that is really good news for eager fans.

This is all still happening on the beta channel so I’m expecting that the full launch for all DCS World 1.5 users will come sometime soon – Word filtering through the community is that we’ll see it in one or two weeks at the most.

Stay tuned folks for much more content coming from me in the weeks to come including a ton of screenshots.