You may recall last week when the IL-2 team put a podcast video out in Russian without a translation. Well this week they’ve put together a developer update that more or less covers everything that was in the podcast. It talks past, present and future of the series and is worth a read. Here’s a bit of a summary!
Past, present and future
Developer blog #359 is a recap of a recent podcast video put out last week. There are quite a few topics covered including some talk about the past decisions for the project as well as current and future efforts.
This is pretty wide ranging including providing some background story on why they decided that AI aircraft use the same flight model as human players and are so CPU intensive and why IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad launched with an unlock and player progression system. That takes me back to 2013 and 2014. Ten years ago!
There’s also quite a bit of talk about the next project including some clarification from last week about if Great Battles content will be migrating over to the new sim. While the answer is rooted in the idea that Rise of Flight content eventually made the transition over, its not something that would happen right away as the new sim is quite different.
New information about progress on the next sim include mention of content reaching between one third and half complete while a lot of development time has been focused on creating new technologies. There are also details about how the new damage model system will work in the new sim with less reliance on probabilities and more of a move towards direct hit detection.
Mini-Great Battles title release?
They expect to release the Odessa map for IL-2 Great Battles in 2025 with the mention of it being a new “module.” Further discussion on the forums raises the question that we might see this map release as part of some sort of bundle. Han’s cryptic answer doesn’t outright provide a “no.” A mini Great Battles release? That also seems to suggest that the future series title may be further out than 2025.
Further, we have this line from the developer update that provides some interesting insight.
An opportunity arose to make a map of Odessa and then the thought immediately arose — what if we complete it with aircraft? Like this. In Odessa, there are two episodes — the defense of Odessa in 1941 and its liberation later in the war. For the later episode, we are thinking of Yak-3 and La-7, right now we are in final negotiations with the contractor who will make the models, and I think they will be successful. In the same way, the early episode of Odessa will include I-153, which is now in the works. The most characteristic airplanes are selected, and there will be others.
Interesting to say the least.
For more…
There’s so much more than I can summarize here but if you’re interested I encourage you to read the latest developer blog here.
I want to say too that it’s good to both have the translation but also get a bit more clarity, even if its not a full reveal of the next gen, of where the future might be going. With the potential for more focused Great Battles content, it feels like the future of the current series is a bit more than just a few hold-over Collector Plane releases while we count down the clock. Hopefully something a little more definitive will emerge in the coming months but this is a good direction to see.
Stormbirds 
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