The title for Team Fusion Simulations North Africa expansion based on the IL-2: Cliffs of Dover engine has been announced! Introducing ‘Desert Wings – Tobruk!’ This is now the official title for the new project that we’ve been calling TFS 5.0 or the North Africa expansion for Cliffs of Dover. We have an official name, new release details, and pricing information so let’s have a look!
A title announcement plus release details
This is obviously a big moment in the launch of the series so let’s go through some of the details of this launch so you’re all up to date.
First, we have some key details for TFS 5.0 or ‘Desert Wings – Tobruk’ and I think everyone will find this interesting. First, the map is a 385 x 385 km area centered around Tobruk which was a key location in the desert war. The map includes multiple landmarks, towns, and 75 airfields.
The aircraft list, which I put together not that long ago, is also finalized and it has everything from Martlet’s to Tomahawks to Bf109F series and a whole bunch of different versions of the Ju88. It looks like one of the crown jewels is the Wellington bomber which is fully flyable. There are also 25 new tanks, artillery and vehicles as well as 17 new ships including battleships, trawlers, and everything in between.
Team Fusion also touts their multiple capabilities of the title with over 100 aircraft possible in servers. I know several organized groups have put that to the test over the years and have succeeded in having those large scale battles.
Single player also gets a mention with note of a campaign but at the moment we don’t know much more. I have reached out to the developers and they have told me that they have plenty of single player content planned for launch so I’m looking forward to that.
Now, without any further delay, here’s the action packed launch title trailer.
Release details
The big question that everyone has had for a long time now was when we’d see the launch of the desert add-on to Cliffs of Dover. Team Fusion have taken their time to build this product and it takes a while to build this many different planes, a map, an all of the scenery objects, cars, trucks, tanks and ships to make this all come together. Fortunately the wait for this launch is coming to an end with launch coming this summer. Yes that’s right, summer 2020!
The release will be available on Steam for $69.99 USD with a 15% discount at launch. It’ll also be available for purchase through the il2sturmovik.com webstore.
Find more information about the development of IL-2 Sturmovik: Desert Wings – Tobruk, you can follow them on Facebook, Twitter and/or YouTube.
Stormbirds 
I’ll see what the reviews are like, but the last time I played Cliffs of Dover I couldn’t get past the tin can sounding MGs and returned it.
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Future Cliffs of Dover and Desert Wings reviews likely incoming to a Stormbirds near you. I’ll keep those items in mind!
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Agreed, definitely waiting for in-depth reviews, Stormbirds’ included, before buying in! Especially considering the price point. There are a lot of things I love about CloD, even above IL2 in places, but there are still so many interface obstacles and latent bugs it’s got me feeling real cautious. No matter how excited I am at the prospect of getting into the left seat of a modern simulation of a Wimpy…which is really, really excited.
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Looking forward to them.
From the trailer and plane list I’m moderately interested, especially if they are able to add VR support, but $70 USD right now feels a bit steep. I’ll have to see the reviews to know if it’s really worth it sans VR.
But, I’ll probably buy it anyways, just to have it on hand if they are able to add solid VR support in the future. I pretty much exclusively fly in that mode these days, so it’s hard to go back to not having it, especially since I can’t use TrackIR.
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Still not actually got a date then…I wouldn’t hold my breath about Summer 2020. It may finally happen, but they’ve missed their own dates by a long way so many times that it doesn’t hold much water.
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It’s now content complete and in beta testing so with some luck things will work out well enough that summer 2020 rings true. I think we’ll find out soon how that pans out.
Technically they could release in September and still be inside the summer 2020 timeframe 🙂
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They could, but I’m just not filled with confidence. When they released Blitz it broke the game, multiplayer didn’t work at all, it wouldn’t recognise USB controllers, and support seemed practically non-existent. That was meant to be feature complete. If I remember right they’d used the wrong version of the source code or something along those lines and it broke things.
I wish them luck, but I won’t be buying this. As much as I want the North Africa theatre it looks very dated, the trailer looked amateur and it’s not looking like a slick product. I really do say this as someone that really enjoyed playing Cliffs with the Team Fusion patches; I just think it’s well last it’s sell by date and it’s a mistake to not include VR support.
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I want to be excited, but… I had such a bad experience with Cliffs of Dover, I’m hesitant to hop on board, especially for that price point. Which kills me, because the Battle of Britain and North Africa are the campaigns that interest me the most! Will it have VR support like the Great Battles series?
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No VR support for now. That’d require some engine updates which I think they would still like to make and they have talked about.
When did you last play Cliffs of Dover? I gave it a pass altogether years ago but I will be revisiting it very soon.
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Blitz made some things better, performance improved (for me at least), and the additional flyables were nice. But a bunch of bugs remained, and the interface was unchanged as far as my experience went, which is to say it stayed as obtuse and unfriendly as ever.
I think the real problem for me (and apparently many others) is that the original TF patch was a free mod, and Blitz was free if you already purchased vanilla CloD. So the things that weren’t great, or stayed not great from the original, were easier to excuse because it was a free thing from a volunteer team.
This new product is a full-price expansion on the order of something like Bodenplatte for Great Battles, and that’s making me a lot more wary since CloD (and Blitz) are my only other frame of reference for the team. It certainly means it’s going to be judged more harshly, and I hope it can stand up to the scrutiny. Just have to wait and see!
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Any word on VR for this title?
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So far as I know, VR is not yet in but it may be a feature in the future.
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It was stated today that VR would hopefully come in the New Year.
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Good info. Thanks Novice!
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waiting for BON no desert for me will sent my cat
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I’m in as soon as they offer VR
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Re VR, this is a project we are looking at post release. The new weather integration, which we are very excited about as well, is a priority.
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Thanks for adding in some information on this. Should be exciting!
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Still shocked by that hefty price tag – clearly 1C had a say there
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I was at first but then when you look at the number of new aircraft, the new map, and all of the assets developed (including the recently announced 6 campaigns) the price begins to make much more sense.
All of that stuff is expensive to make.
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Just my 2 cents – I know that the community is very forgiving/price insensitive. 😉 I just don`t see it there as an enhancement of a 9 year old game engine. My prefered release would have been around 30-40 bucks in combination with a Team Fusion Sim only release. Then I`d knew they get their well deserved full share and I would not be left with that bad feeling that now – out of a sudden – 1C is so interested in it and take a cut out of it.
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Some interesting thoughts here. I do think part of the community is willing to pay full price while other parts of the community are indeed very price conscious – in some cases the sale/discount prices are the only ways that some can afford (which is a good part of the reason why I post on sales as often as I do).
I think, however, think that anything has changed with the business plan. The agreement and business plan between Team Fusion, 1C and Jason Williams supporting, was likely drawn up when the initial announcement was made a couple of years ago. Not much will likely have changed from there.
It is a bit of a challenge to market and sell this on an older engine although we know they have made updates. That is a very good point and could be a sticking point for some.
Do you think you’ll be buying day one or maybe waiting it out for a sale later on down the line?
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I for my part will wait it out for a sale later on down the line. I waited so long for it,these few months won`t make it worse 😉
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As someone who heavily invested his time in mission building with the old IL2 1946, I’m certainly interested in this. (the builder was much more user friendly). Unfortunately, my tech has moved on and my Track IR stored away. Price is not the issue, but VR is. Will await news on VR and only sensible option is to await confirmation on whether this will occur. Regards.
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I took the plunge, and bought ” Great Battles” for only £4.99 plus vat, it’s on sale on steam at the moment. I’m loving that in VR, have tuned in ( programmed) about 90 voice commands using Voice Attack. Please please please bring VR to this, then I will buy. Have a rift S and good gaming rig, so VR running s really sweet. Blown away by BOS in VR and DCS world also, but dlc for both is pretty steeply priced, in DCS,when you consider each model is faithfully recreated and takes about an hour to learn to start and fly, then not surprising. But I think IL series Ss hold be less maybe. If TCS are working for free and making it so much better.thank you for everything though, Great battles rocks. And at that price, idsayget say get on in before sale ends.
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Please please please VR then I would buy. Just bought ” Great Battles, BOS” for 4.99 plus vat. A real bargain. They are on sale now at a silly prices for a two week period. I have an Oculus rift s IL2 is excellent with VR but BOS has the better gfx engine. DCS world also rocks both games has a steep price for DXC but considering the detail in each Aircraft in DCS ,that’s not surprising, IL 2 doesn’t seem this way, maybe should lower pricing then get more sales online. I have some good kit to run VR Thermaltake Snow full size case, i9 9900k Aorus 390 motherboard, 32GB DDR4 Gskill RTX 2080 ti and a samsing evo1tb nvme ssd and 6 x SSDS in a RAID 0 with 24 TB mechanical hdd space and 2 x 27 inch and 1 x e2inch ilyama VM pro monitors overkill. But really built for fs2020which I’m not too impressed with so far. Prefer vr.
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