The early access for IL-2 Series Korea is rolling out now with pre-load times expiring and the sim gradually coming online across the planet. We look at the updated launch pricing as well as a developer diary about the use of generative AI for the title. Let’s have a look.

Launching now, price increase

You may have already downloaded the installer and are already playing IL-2 Series Korea. The sim has been rolling out across the world over the last several hours with the pre-load system getting files installed and access opening up for people as the sim goes live.

It’s a big moment for the IL-2 Series and I’m excited to see it.

There has been a price increase of $10 on the Premium and $10 on the Founders Edition bringing the price up to $89.99 and $149.99 USD respectively. That was an expected increase but some folks seem to have been caught off guard.

VR early access trailer

A new trailer is showing off the VR system in action in an early access trailer. It looks pretty good!

Use of Gen AI with IL-2 Series Korea

1CGS have put together a rather long developer diary about the use of generative AI technologies in IL-2 Series Korea. The subject matter is contentious for people around the world with a myriad of issues. We’re not going to get into all of that here but I do want to point out where the developers have said that they have used the technology because it is specific and targeted.

The biggest change is the text to speech system. This isn’t all that new as this kind of tech has been around for quite some time. The lines have been recorded using their own employees and the text to speech system lets them do voice models in 11 different languages.

The developer of the technology employs not only programmers and AI specialists but also professional linguists, which has enabled us to create text-to-voice models in 11 languages, four of which will be used in Korea and five more in future projects in IL-2 Series. It’s important to note that the voice-over models we create are based on voices we’ve recorded ourselves, and we have signed relevant agreements with each voice actor. In fact, as with previous voice recordings, most of the recordings we made were of our own employees. It has become a tradition for a game to speak in the voices of its creators. However, with these technologies, we now have significantly more possibilities.

Here’s some examples in a video file.

I’m not fully convinced that this is all that great yet as I found the American lines in particular to be quite jarring and difficult to listen to at times. But we’ll see how it evolves over time.

They also used it on pilot photos in some of the UI elements creating over 400 variations so that you don’t see the same thing twice.

I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the old face system which generated some odd looking characters from time to time. But that’s what they’ve chosen to do.

You can read the whole thing here.