Eagle Dynamics creating and implementing a map covering Afghanistan seemed inevitable. The region’s outsized impact on world events over several decades including the Soviet Union’s interventions in the 1970s and 1980s and then the coalition forces intervening in the area in 2001. That together with the professional DCS version having a low detail version for clients to train on suggested both to me and to many speculating on the subject that eventually the sim would go in this direction. And here it is… or at least a third of it! Let’s look at and review the early access DCS: Afghanistan map.

Map overview

Eagle Dynamics are making DCS: Afghanistan into a rather large map. It’s 1.4 million square kilometres (almost 870,000 square miles for you folks using miles) in size and right now the south eastern section of the map has been detailed while two other sections of the map are going to be filled in later.

Though Eagle Dynamics have stated that Afghanistan is their focus, the map’s borders do take it out quite a bit further with Iran on the western side, Pakistan on the south eastern corner, and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the northern quadrant. These areas aren’t going to be detailed in full but they are there on the map’s edges.

Visual impressions

Afghanistan is Eagle Dynamics latest map and it’s clear to me that the team there continue to learn the lessons of previous maps and apply them as best as possible to the new one. This map has pulled in at least some of the small details that we saw the team put into the Marianas map though seemingly without the same kind of performance hit that we saw there. Some parts of this map look quite good and feature a lot of details that work all the way from street level up to high altitude.

Those rosey first impressions don’t hold up everywhere. DCS: Afghanistan feels quite uneven with some scenes matching DCS: Syria while others take on a less impressive quality that remind me more of the areas in Kola or South Atlantic that failed to impress. It’s a reminder that this is an early access project and even in the areas in the south west that are more complete, there are pieces that are obviously not yet.

Taking a step back from those direct observations, DCS: Afghanistan does have its own visual identity. That’s a good thing because as yet another desert map comes to the series, its important for each of them to not feel like you’re flying over the same patch of sand. There are four kinds of visuals that you’ll see on the Afghanistan map, often within view of each other.

The first is sprawling agriculture and in that way the country is not unlike many across the world where millions of farms, big and small, are growing a variety of crops for consumption and export. Quite a bit of Afghanistan has been this kind of land use. More than I would have imagined actually! In DCS World, these are a mix of trees, shrubs, grass, rocks, and then more dotted structures often with walls, parked vehicles, junk piles, generators, and all kinds of other doodads.

Next up straight desert. Afghanistan is a typically arid region and particularly in the south east where only 60 mm of rain falls annually on average. Here we have very little in the way of details aside from the desert, autogen rocks, grasses and a few shrubs and bushes, and not too much else.

We have plenty of mountains and ridges on this map. As you move into the central portion of the map there are mountains and hills all the way out to the horizon reinforcing the rugged appearance of the region.

Finally, we have cities of which there are a few with Kandahar being the largest currently detailed on the map. These are mostly a mix of low rise multi-storey buildings and then smaller dwellings, some light industrial zones, and various other kinds of landmarks. This isn’t a setup to be like Dubai on the DCS: Persian Gulf map with its various sky reaching landmarks and points of interest.

There’s actually a fifth kind of visual and that’s the small number of large coalition airbase. These currently include Camp Bastion, Kandahar airport, Dywer, Tarikot, Shindand and a few other small airports and bases. Bastion and Kandahar in particular are huge, sprawling centres of personnel, logistics and firepower. The bases are, as near as I can tell, accurately laid out and they have hundreds of detailed objects to represent the barracks, radar stations, cargo crates, parked cars, guard houses, and so forth. Seeing them represented in the map has educated me on the scale of these operations in a way that reading about them never really illuminated.

Night lighting is already in place with city lights rendering only a short distance out while airfield lights and bases are a little more prominent. Afghanistan is obviously not going to present in the same way that Persian Gulf’s various cities might so that part is not too much of a realism impediment.

Some of it is done, some not

Although Eagle Dynamics say they are delivering this map in three sections it seems like things are a bit more scattered than that and I’ve already mentioned the unevenness earlier in the review.

An area like Kandahar looks great with huge numbers of small buildings across a vast area. Travel further north and it becomes more of a mixed bag. I’ve found some spots seem to be detailed and others are not. You can see outlines on the satellite imagery for a compound, an example, with some buildings visible and some not.

The further north and east you go, the less detail you’ll see. As you work your way up towards Kabul, you’ll see that that whole area isn’t done yet. That I expected and of course it is in their roadmap to do but I wanted to illuminate on what we have and don’t have yet.

The terrain itself appears to be more or less complete with a fair bit of autogen shrubs, rocks, bushes, and so forth. Most of that looks really good and on par with top rated maps like DCS: Syria. That aids the low level appearance of the map in a way that DCS: Kola and DCS: South America haven’t quite mastered yet. Here they look great! Even in the low detail areas, it looks like the elevation mesh is complete and the satellite imagery blending with low level detail textures seems to be more or less done too. But the map does also suffer from having some of the same blending issues between cities and the surrounding terrain creating hard edges in sometimes awkward places. Other DCS maps have had this issue so its nothing new but on these maps it seems to stand out more than it did before.

The airbases that we’ve seen so far are very well done and match up to prior efforts from Eagle Dynamics. Airside buildings are high detail and there’s plenty of equipment and aviation miscellany scattered around. Even without building out the assets in a way that a mission builder would, this is already looking pretty good on the ramp. Apron, taxiway and runway textures are generally good and lighting is in place.

Other thoughts

DCS: Afghanistan is quite an interesting product for a number of ways. For one, Eagle Dynamics are offering this map in three different segments for sale which is a first. You can buy the whole thing, which I did, or you can buy just one specific area. This seems like an interesting experiment and while you save a few dollars with the cheaper segments, it seems like it just limits you to certain areas and if you find yourself in the low detail area you’ll see buildings and objects but they won’t be detailed in the same way. This method remains controversial, particularly from a multiplayer perspective, so we’ll have to see how it plays out.

From a historical point of view, its an area that has seen a lot of conflict (to put it mildly) and that gives it potential in a combat sim for recreating historical scenarios. On the other hand, it doesn’t have the kind of geopolitical conflict potential that you see from other maps so those looking for a hypothetical peer-on-peer conflict will have to use more fictional ideas to make the area that kind of space. That will matter to some and not to others.

Exploring the area and its various cities, villages, mountain passes, and sprawling military bases and outposts is an equally interesting experience too. Flying over Kandahar where Canadian troops were stationed as part of security and rebuilding efforts was equal parts interesting and also humbling for me knowing the difficulties faced by all in the region then and now. Its hard to separate that real world piece from the flight sim but it’s certainly there in the background. Others out there may have even more personal connections to the area and I’m sure that comes with mixed feelings too but its not the first time we’ve seen that with a DCS map either before or after it came out and that’s to be expected in modern combat simming.

Moving to more strictly flight sim issues, early access once again is a topic of discussion and the early access nature of the map is generally par for the course with DCS World. That said, this one does come feeling particularly unfinished and spotty. There are places where the map really looks great with lots of great little details and then you travel several kilometers and it stops looking that way. Its an ambitiously sized map and its not the first map to need significant updates to really come into its own – even the now highly praised DCS: Syria took years to really fill out. So if a complete experience is a personal requirement for your purchase, you’ll want to wait on this one for a while but if you’re tolerant to that build-up phase you can, of course, take advantage of the discounted price from $69.99 USD down to $55.99.

I do appreciate that this map, though once again taking us to a land of deserts and mountains, does offer a different set of visuals than the other maps we’ve seen. It has its own visual identity that, when sufficiently developed, really does look impressive. There are obvious issues to overcome and through a robust development cycle I think a lot of those will be. As the map fills out, spotty areas will hopefully be resolved and this will become a particularly impressive map to fly and engage in combat over.

DCS: Afghanistan is available now in early access for sale on both the DCS World e-Shop and on the Steam store.

Screenshots