Two developer updates in recent days have covered two key pieces for the future of the IL-2 series: one part is the single player career experience and the second is flight models. Let’s see what they are saying.
Career mode has become a squadron commander style experience
Combat Flight sims have struggled over the years to offer compelling gameplay experiences ontop of what has generally been very good simulation experiences. The flight and system models have been very good but the gameplay has been light. IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad was like that when it first came out for example, however, it did add a career mode and other methods of play that helped to build things up. Now we’re learning about Korea’s new career system and it does sound like quite a bit has been invested in making this a more compelling experience.
The blog takes us through the different types of single player experiences that they considered: linear narrative, dynamic campaign, and a career experience built on IL-2: Great Battles and Rise of Flight before that. They ultimately chose to further develop career experience making the point that it would over more variety of gameplay than a straight narrative while remaining more historically accurate than a dynamic campaign.
They have changed the system so that the player takes on more of a squadron management role. You’ll assign pilots and aircraft, manage maintenance, ammunition and fuel supplies, and assign your squadron/regiment missions based on the duties assigned for the day. They also say that enemy action, say a bomber raid, may interrupt the initial tasks assigned.
The career mode will cover a lengthy period of time, April 1951 to July 1953, and they say that combat days (i.e. days where you’ll perform missions) are focused around historical events so that you won’t have to play a career that lasts the full two years. Look forward to learning more about how that goes.
The flight model
Episode 29 of the long running “Brief Room” series on 1C Game Studios YouTube channel came out a few days ago and the focus of the episode was all about flight models.
The discussion starts off talking generally about the process of collecting data, what characteristics that they and others are looking for, the challenges of figuring out which test data is useful and which test data has issues with it that mark the test as an outlier and so on and so forth.
There’s also a discussion about how performance tests are done, about air pressure differences, Reynolds Numbers, error margins, and so forth. They report that their goal is to reduce the difference between data points and their flight model down a little more than with Great Battles.
One of the interesting points shared across the presentation is about testing reports and the problems that sometimes come with them. A P-38 report that they used initially had a small note in the testing paper that the aircraft in the test had engine problems (thus skewing the number). In another instance, they used a report on the Tempest that had instrumentation issues and it together with archival documentation dug up by the community was only revealed later. Stability testing for the Me262 at different speed ranges used a Soviet report except the aircraft had servo compensators that were locked. Interesting tidbits.
Listen to the full report in the YouTube video above to get the rest.
They also report at the end of the video that they are switching to a new video every three weeks rather than every two weeks as the team works towards the release of IL-2 Korea. The last we’ve heard, they are still targeting a release at the end of the year so we’ll have to see how quickly this new sim comes together.
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