Il2 Battle of Stalingrad on Steam

[RyanE]

To me, they are trying to be all things to everyone, but will end up as nothing to anyone.  They want this hardcore sim at its heart, but want to capture the light crowd in the campaign experience.  Doing something like that pisses off your hardcore base, yet makes it still too much of a learning curve for the light base.  No one will be happy.  I am not sure I have ever seen this dual approach work in sims no matter how many times its been tried.  Just man up and decide what you want to be.

I kind of feel like they did the hardcore thing to draw in the early money.  Once they had enough, they lightened up the campaign piece to after the post-launch money.

I am not really complaining.  I almost never play campaigns or online.  I just play missions.  But it is interesting to watch.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

The latest update was released today and this one gives beta users access to the single-player campaign.  In order to access it, non-Steam users need to delete their current IL-2:BOS game and all settings folders, download the new installer from their profile page at the IL-2 website, and then download the ~3.8 GB game files.  The installer defaults to Russian so you have to change it to English.  There's a little drop down tab in the top right corner of the installer screen to do this.

I fiddled around with the campaign a little before I came to work and it pretty much lives up to the lowered expectations.  It's essentially a random mission builder and you need to grind XP to unlock new plane mods, airfields, and skins.  The first 4 missions are tutorials and there's no way to skip them.

You must fly an LaGG-3 on "normal" mode.  The first mission is simply following two waypoints and then pressing escape to finish the mission.  This brings you to a debriefing screen that looks like it'd be more at home on a Call of Duty or Battlefield server.  You get a series of full page screens flashing up to highlight your supposed achievements.  Mission complete!  +80XP!

New Pilot Award!
Young Pilot Award!
23mm cannon unlocked!

Once you complete the 4 tutorial missions, you can then open things up a bit and select from different aircraft.  You are stuck with either "normal" or "expert" difficulty levels with no options for customization at all.   You select a German or a Soviet airfield, select a plane, select from 1 of  up to 5 mission types (intercept, escort, ground attack, bombing, or ground support).  Some mission types aren't available for some planes so there are no intercept missions for He-111s for instance.

The mission briefings are full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and are sometimes lacking in important information.  For example, I tried an escort mission and was told to escort some bombers to target but I wasn't informed what type of bombers I was to meet or what altitude they'd be at.  I just flew up until I spotted some bombers and followed them until they bombed an airfield and then returned to base only to be informed that I'd failed the mission.  I assume I hooked up with the wrong bombers.

Not a fan of this XP grind system at all.  Even worse, you have to do it in order to unlock stuff for MP so if you want all the bells and whistles to choose from for online play, you'll have to grind all the planes in SP.  Based on the XP awards and the unlock trees, that's looking like 100-200 missions per plane. 

[Toonces]

^ I am really, really sorry to hear that SDR.  That sounds incredibly disheartening.

I don't know what else to say, honestly.   :(

[jomni]

Are the Random missions well-made? Like the ones from Thirdwire?

[Nefaro]

Are the Random missions well-made? Like the ones from Thirdwire?

I would think a career system, even like that in ROF, would be a big improvement.  Despite the missions being far too repetitive and there being no world outside the player "bubble". 

This one sounds more like they're trying to be War Thunder or World of Warplanes.  In a single-player environment.  And forcing you to choose between two realism presets! WTF?  :-\

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Are the Random missions well-made? Like the ones from Thirdwire?

I'm still getting a feel for them but from what I've seen so far, they're a little formulaic but not too bad provided you don't stray from the way-points.

Missions will give the illusion that the map is reasonably well populated with friendly and enemy units provided you stick to a 2-3 km wide corridor along each leg of the flight patch.  If you stray outside of that (something that's easy to do if you're flying "expert" mode and do your own navigation), the map becomes completely empty and you can just fly around for hours without seeing a single unit.  One guy at SimHQ did report stumbling onto a complete German airbase but the AI didn't react at all and he was able to repeatedly strafe it and then land with no reaction from the AI at all.  I haven't seen anything like this yet myself. 

Missions themselves are pretty generic.  Intercepts are always "fly here, shoot down at least 2 baddies (it's always 2), and RTB for XP."  There's no information on what type of enemy, expected strength, or altitude.  Again, kind of a problem if you're flying expert and don't have icons on as it's easy to miss them if you're a couple thousand metres too high or too low.

Also, I've noticed that every single mission I've flown so far uses the same flight path.  It's always a diamond formation.  Leave my airfield and head to a way-point either slightly north or slightly south of the target; turn and fly to target way-point, fly to a 3rd way point that's roughly the same east-west position as the 1st way-point but offset in the opposite north-south direction from the 1st way-point, turn and proceed to the 4th way-point which is my airfield.  A little more variety would be nice.  The distances are also very short so if you're flying a level bomber like a Pe-2 or and He-111, it's not easy to gain enough altitude while staying in formation with the AI.

[TacticalWargames]

WOFF set the benchmark for a campaign. Shame on the IL 2 devs. As with ROF they just don't seem to be bothered about single players.

[Jarhead0331]

What state of completion is the single player "campaign"?  Are they still adding features and making tweaks, or is this it?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

They said the campaign structure is pretty much finalized and the beta-release is mainly to find and quash bugs.  I wouldn't expect any significant changes to gameplay.  They're really digging their heels in and are repeatedly stating that there won't be any changes to the unlock system, the difficulty presets, or the campaign system. 

I have found a few bugs so far.  The fuel gauges on the IL-2 don't work properly.  The needle sometimes displays full tanks and sometimes shows a value somewhere between full and zero.  I have no idea if this is the actual fuel level or not.  Also, the custom paint schemes aren't unlocking even when you get enough XP to unlock them.  Pre-order users have access to all the aircraft from the start and therefore don't have to unlock them like post-release purchasers will be required to.   This seems to be causing some weird glitches with the campaign though as people starting with the He-111s or Pe-2s aren't getting bomb loads or the AI wingmen load fighter behaviour. 

If you do play with it, be very careful on the first 4 tutorial missions.  If you crash, you fail the mission, don't earn XP, and you can't progress or restart.  Unless you're very confident in your landing skills, just ESC out while still in the air and proceed to the next one.  A fair number of players are posting that they bent a wing on landing, got a fail result, and are now stuck.

Also, the campaign progress you make during the beta stage is temporary and will be wiped on release.  This is causing the MP crowd to go nuts as they'll have to play through all the planes in the SP campaign at least twice if they want the unlocks available for online play. 

[Nefaro]

Sounds like they used the far too repetitive random mission generator from ROF what with using mostly the exact same waypoints every mission, and having a limited "living" area outside of which is nothing.   :-\ 

It's obviously set in stone and on the fast track to being released soon as 'Battlefield: Flight Sim'.

[Skoop]

The campaign system could be alright if it gets more work, pretty bare bones.  I can tell already the best missions coming from this sim are going to be coming from the community.  I played an mp mission on this server called the eagle's nest and it was by far the best mission I've seen for this sim.  It was objective based, capture an airfield and the frontlines move forward.  Then you have to land an he111 with only supplies to make the airfield usable for your side.  So in one of these capture the airfield moves, I was told to support a panzer korps attack by taking out AT guns around the contested airfield.  It was impressive to see the battle going on below as about 30 panzers shot it out with at gun batteries.  Then I swooped in an pummeled the at guns, which allowed the panzers to promptly capture the airfield.  This was going on all over the main map,  messages of front lines moving forward, support needed here, intercept fighter there.  Great concept who ever made the mission. 

So the tools are there to do things with this sim, it's just not going to be a great sp campaign.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Shame that 777 shut down the Eagle's Nest server after the admin complained about MP players having to unlock content.

I gather that the locked content meant that nearly all his missions would be unplayable unless and until all players had unlocked every mod present in the missions.

[Skoop]

Yeah I just saw that, sounds like they may move the mission some where else.  The good news is that a good dynamic based mission can be done, just have to venture into the mp world.

[Nefaro]

The campaign system could be alright if it gets more work, pretty bare bones.  I can tell already the best missions coming from this sim are going to be coming from the community.  I played an mp mission on this server called the eagle's nest and it was by far the best mission I've seen for this sim.  It was objective based, capture an airfield and the frontlines move forward.  Then you have to land an he111 with only supplies to make the airfield usable for your side.  So in one of these capture the airfield moves, I was told to support a panzer korps attack by taking out AT guns around the contested airfield.  It was impressive to see the battle going on below as about 30 panzers shot it out with at gun batteries.  Then I swooped in an pummeled the at guns, which allowed the panzers to promptly capture the airfield.  This was going on all over the main map,  messages of front lines moving forward, support needed here, intercept fighter there.  Great concept who ever made the mission. 

So the tools are there to do things with this sim, it's just not going to be a great sp campaign.

That sounds exactly like some of the War Thunder Arcade battles where you have to land at an enemy airfield to cap it and start gainging win "tickets".  :-\

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

This is becoming fascinating.

So, the unlock system was released last Friday to heavily negative reaction.  By far the most vocal disapproval is coming from those who play solely multi-player.  They are upset that they have to grind their way through the single-player portion of the game in order to unlock all the plane modifications that they had access to in MP servers prior to the Friday update.  They vociferously let their feelings be known in the forums. 

During the general tumult, one of the MP crowd came up with a system to minimize the amount of time one would have to spend grinding equipment.  By putting the game in normal, throwing the plane in auto-pilot, and hitting 16x time compression, a player could blast through a mission in a few minutes and not have to actively participate.  If the mission was a success, they'd gain the XP and unlocks.  If they failed, no big deal as the only penalty for a failed mission is the time lost playing it. 

Well, the devs didn't care for this at all so what did they do?  Not listen to the complaints from the community and separate the grinding system from MP or make XP earned in MP count towards unlocks.  Nope.  Instead they released a new patch today which removed the autopilot feature from both normal and expert modes and limited time compression to 2x max.  Naturally, this is going down swimmingly with the community. 

I have to wonder just what the thought process is with the dev team right now.  Are they now in such an adversarial, siege mentality that they now see their customer base as the enemy and feel the need to punish them?  Is it a cultural thing?  I wonder what they'll do to shoot themselves in their feet next.