On Friday, Eagle Dynamics has tweeted and shared news on their social media feeds that they are working hard on their DCS World 2.7 release. What do we know about 2.7 and what does it mean for the series? Let’s have a look!

Full burner to 2.7

We’ve seen some big updates to DCS World over the years. DCS World 2.0 alpha was a staging ground for a lot of efforts that were underway for the DCS World engine and it together with 2.2 brought the whole series (including the still popular DCS 1.5) together under DCS World 2.5. We’ve been on iterations of DCS World 2.5 for a few years now but it looks like we’re moving forward with a couple of leaps as the core technologies behind DCS World evolve.

According to Eagle Dynamics in recent posts on social media, they are now working on ‘full burners’ to get DCS World 2.7 pushed out the door by the end of March.

Over the next coming weeks, a massive push is ongoing to prepare for the launch of DCS World 2.7. We are hoping to get there by the end of March and we are full burners on the job. pic.twitter.com/MTrtF9mfqL

— Eagle Dynamics (@eagledynamics) February 19, 2021

What is DCS World 2.7?

That sounds great but what is DCS World 2.7? It’s notable that we actually don’t know all that much about it. When writing this article I went digging through to see what has been said and there’s not too much.

When Eagle Dynamics released their roadmap for 2021, DCS World 2.7 was mentioned as a major update for the series and one that necessitated going from 2.5.6 and skipping 2.6 (which presumably exists as an internal build for the ED team) straight to 2.7. Also on the roadmap are the ‘volumetric’ clouds that we’ve seen more and more of recently.

There is content that’s expected to launch over the next few months as well including an update to the DCS: The Channel Map and the DCS: Mosquito FB.VI. But those aren’t things that necessitate a point update or two.

Usually a big point update means significant under the hood changes and just like DCS World 2.5 that dramatically improved the look of the series, introduced a new default Caucasus map, and unified the different maps and experiences under a single banner, I expect DCS World 2.7 to bring in some bigger changes too.

Volumetric clouds count but DCS World 2.7 is also likely to lay foundational work for other features that we already know are coming later in the year. The dynamic campaign system is finally supposed to be revealed in 2021, an update to how FLIR works in the engine is planned, and Vulkan API is expected by Eagle Dynamics to be revealed this year too. These are not likely to be part of the initial 2.7 offering but it may still be the stepping stone towards those features.

We should have a better sense of what is coming and planned over the next six weeks so stay tuned. It could be interesting!