If you were wondering what was next in queue for the IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles Series your questions will have been answered as we have a new roadmap from IL-2’s Executive Producer, Jason Williams. In a new post in his Ready Room thread, Jason talks about the challenges and accomplishments of the past year and also what they are planning for 2022. Let’s have a look!
Successes and challenges
Before we dig into the new stuff, Jason did a really nice job of summarizing what the team was able to accomplish over the last year. It has been a challenging year for all and the 1CGS team struggled with many of the challenges that are going to be familiar.
This was a very hard year for us, even more so than 2020 thanks to the prolonged pandemic and lingering half-open, half-closed nature of major cities and office environment coupled with our busy development schedule. In addition, we had several team members get sick and require time off, plus family members who got sick needed the attention of team members to aid in recovery. Also, doing remote work, which can have advantages, is not always ideal for our development work. Our office environment has always been one of our strengths where problems and discoveries can be easily shared and discussed much quicker and focus can be better maintained.
Jason Williams
At the end of the day, all flight sim developers that I cover have been dealing with these ongoing challenges and despite a string of successes this year, its important to remember the humans behind the software and that they too have struggled.
Despite that, they have released a bumper crop of aircraft and content including a couple of new campaigns, and about a dozen aircraft including many of the aircraft for Flying Circus Vol 2 and the vast majority of Normandy’s aircraft set too.
Jason does finish out his summary on a positive noting that the team has pushed to do more complex projects and that they intend to continue to push in 2022.
The road ahead
With all of that in mind, it’s good to know what the team is planning. And there’s quite a lot to be excited about. Jason notes that both Battle of Normandy and Flying Circus Vol 2 are intended to be finished up by summer of this year. That’s roughly 5 months left on both projects before they are completed and there are some big items on the list.
Here’s the list as published by Jason:
- Western Front WWI Map – Scheduled for Q1 2022, might slip to Q2 if quality issues. (Made by Ugra Media)
- Normandy Map – Scheduled for Q2 2022
- Sopwith Triplane – Scheduled for Q1 2022
- Ju 88 C-6 – Scheduled for Q1 2022
- Handley Page 0-400 – Scheduled for late Q1 2022
- Gotha G.V – Coming in Q1 2022
- C-47A – Scheduled for Q2 2022 (Made by Ugra Media)
- B-26 (AI) – Scheduled for late Q1 2022
- V-1 Cruise Missile – Scheduled for Q2 2022 (new engineering needed to make this to launch and fly right)
- Ar-234 – Scheduled for Q2 2022
- Mosquito FB Mk.VI – Scheduled for Q2 2022
- Me-410 – Scheduled for Q2 2022
- IAR – 80/81 – Second half of 2022 (Made by Ivan Shirshov)
- Churchill Mk.IV Tank – Summer 2022
- Stug III Mobile Assault Gun – Summer 2022
- Siemens & Schuckert D.IV – Scheduled for 2022 (Made by Ugra Media)
- Sopwith Snipe – Scheduled for 2022 (Made by Ugra Media)
- Li-2 – After C-47 (Made by Ugra Media)
The team has been busy pushing on a lot of these projects throughout last year and so I expect that the pace over the next 5 months to be relatively rapid. Major releases such as the Western Front WWI map and Normandy map are likely to arrive in the spring, over the next two months we should see the Ju88C-6, Sopwith Triplane, Handley Page 0-400, and Gotha G.V. Oh and the B-26 AI too.
The back half of the year is much more of a mystery as we know that some projects like the Churchill and StuG III tanks, the IAR-80/81 and potentially even the S&S D.IV and Snipe will come in before the year is over.
This of course begs the question what comes next. There we are offered few clues except this:
Our main goals are to release BON and FCII by the summertime and work to release the Collector Planes and Tanks we have previously announced. As we do that, we will begin planning for future titles and continue to try and beef up our personnel so we can have better options then we’ve had previously for parallel development and new technology.
Jason Williams
Parallel development is notable and it suggests to me that perhaps 1CGS is going to once again attempt to take on three projects at once, albeit with additional resources in place to support the projects. Ugra Media and other third party developers have played supporting roles in past projects and surely are gaining experience in their parts of the cycle.
Does that mean that we’ll see a new Tank Crew, Flying Circus (Vol 3 – which is all but confirmed at this point anyways) and WWII title in development at the same time? Exciting times are ahead for this series!
Stormbirds 
Thanks for the summary. That’s an ambitious timetable for BoN being essentially wrapped by September and the other items complete by end of year.
Saw a debate about future jets that devolved into the inevitable ‘where next’ postulation. Any forecasts from the esteemed Shamrock?
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It is an ambitious timetable. I suspect they will need to be wrapped even sooner than September – perhaps even June. So we’ll see how this goes!
Yeah that usually happens with those kinds of threads. I’ve been giving some thought to future products and I can take a guess at where things are going next. Article coming soon 🙂
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June? That would be a feat – I always read Q2 as de-facto end of August (ie July plus fixing plus ‘everyone’s on holiday so a bit of slippage’).
Anticipating your thoughts – any hints? Barring an engine re-working breakthrough, Europe or Korea would be likely the lowest risk. I know Jason is passionate for Pacific but the work-load and PnL appears currently beyond them.
Guadacanal – if people accepted this as an entry project – is possible. Okinawa or Midway with full CV modeling would be a massive step in to the unknown
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According to https://whatthequarter.com/ Q2 ends June 30, 2022. So if the schedule holds all of that content will be delivered by end of June. If … of course 😉
IMHO I think the safest options are Berlin and Italy which would both build off of existing aircraft sets. Jason’s mention of multiple products might mean that the team will be tackling multiple projects at once so we don’t know how that will play out either.
If they do go Pacific and they do have the resources they need to make it work, Guadalcanal and The Slot/Solomons campaign would be my preference. Again they could utilize and build off of established aircraft assets while expanding into the carrier aircraft range.
I’ll attempt to detail all of this more soon.
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I hope that one of the “multiple projects” mentioned can be Finland as there is a 3rd-party team working on a Finland map for the game and the Finnish plane set can give us planes which saw service in the Battle of France and Battle of Britain like the Hurricane Mk.I, Gladiator, G.50, Morko Morane, Morane 406, Blenheim, Do-17, and for the Soviet side we could get aircraft which would fit in with BoM like the I-153, and possibly another bomber, SB-2.
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I always enjoyed the Finnish Gulf missions and infact I even did a Hawk 75 campaign for the Team Daidalos folks back in the day. So a return there would be quite fun. I don’t know about how economically viable it is but maybe there are new ways forward for the series from here.
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Worth noting: UGRA is making the Normandy map and is expanding/updating their DCS Normandy this year as well. This can either benefit both maps (Shared resources in terms of planning etc) or degrade them (Too much on your plate with two ‘identical’ maps on separate game engines). Lets hope for the former.
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I’m not too worried. Ugra Media’s been doing some serious Flying Circus work while they were busy churning out DCS: Syria. Both seem to have gone along fairly well so it seems like they can handle it.
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When you have plotted and worked the basis for one engine it can only help you with a second. Wonder what the NDA / IP clauses were for the company.
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Hopefully it’s time to move beyond the ETO (far beyond)! 🙂
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Dude, come on! Everyone knows that ‘Q2’ means ‘I bill you end of June but finished product will be with you when you return from holiday in September’
Basic business 😀
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Haha well that might very well be! 🙂
I do get the sense, however, that there is a bit of a hard deadline coming up and that 1CGS will need to move forward. We’ll see how quickly this all comes to pass.
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👍
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Es wäre nicht schlecht wenn man ein DLC vom Luftkampf über die Krim 1943 -1944 machen würde im zweiten Weltkrieg. Oder ein DLC der Luftkampf über Polen 1944.
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Hi Norbert. Unfortunately I only understand every one out of a few dozen German words.
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I do see only new maps, new planes, but I do not see upgrading the game engine like DX12/Vulkan, multicore and optimizations for your (VR) hardware. Further as an VR user, this game is infected by all kind of irritating aspects like shimmering, dancing trees, lots of 2D objects (flat no-mans land in FC) and as you all can read on the forums the discussion on the FC plane quality. For the tank department the stugtank is a great addition to the game, only the whole environment is a bit sterile, no moving infantry as a sample.
Pity they are so focused on introducing new planes, while the new benchmark in flysims FS2020 does show for 1C an direction the eventually have to go for, before its to late.
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You must have missed the part about aiming to beef up the team so that they can do more parallel development and introduce new technologies.
Jason tends not to put tech upgrades on their roadmap. The aircraft and other content is a bit more predictable in that they know how many cycles it takes to build an airplane. Adding features is a bit more uncertain as there’s an element of trial and error involved.
Just this year we’ve already seen technology upgrades. The lighting system was given a partial overhaul and the cloud system was completely replaced. The skybox was also replaced with one using a physics based approach. And all of this for the cost of requiring 2GB of VRAM rather than 1GB as per the previous system requirements. IL-2 runs really well for most people across a wide range of systems as a result.
The series has its challenges but I think you’re underplaying some wins that its had in the core technology area. There’s lots of things that IL-2 does that Microsoft Flight Simulator does not.
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