Another "Having great fun with the 'Campaign'" thread

[No601_Swallow]

I'm only "Level 8" in the Campaign, so maybe I'm not seeing impossible odds in my missions, but I have to say:

 

1) They're great practice. For level bombing, it's easy to spawn in (in the "short" mission option) on the final waypoint, pointing in the right direction, and then just jump into the bomb sight and handle the approach from there. Afterwards, you can jump back into the pilot's seat and try to take her home. On "Expert" mode, I'm having fun with navigation (that's 5 words I never thought I'd type in one sentence), although I'm slightly annoyed that the player icon can now be seen on the briefing map if you enable icons - and it's just too much temptation not to cheat if you're worried you've gone off course!). But in expert mode, even if you fly the "short" mission, you can still navigate back home and land. You're really just sacrificing the tedious climb to altitude. And you still get muchos puntos...   

 

2) Muchos puntos [excuse my non-Spanish!]. Much to my shame, I now find that after I've successfully completed a mission, I back out of campaign mode to check my "Profile" to see how close my "green bar" has crept to the next skin to be unlocked! It's game stuff in my sim and yet I find this game mechanic stuff great fun and a great incentive. I almost regret unlocking the "upgrades". Who'd have thought it?!

 

3) The hand-designed missions are just great. I've mostly played German in the campaign (it's somehow more swashbuckling, while the good ol' VVS always seems a bit 'Stalingrad Tractor Factory' somehow - you know: agricultural), but I've just gone back and flown a few of the hand-made soviet missions from campaign chapters I've already done. And they're just great. Really well designed, interesting, intelligently layered. And looking at them in the Mission Editor shows them to be works of beauty. Many thanks, Black Six (or whoever it is in Moscow who's done these missions!). And the machine-generated campaign missions continue to improve. I'm just really impressed.

 

4) Has spotting other aircraft got easier with the 2.003 patch? Could be placebo effect but I think I can see other aircraft quite a lot easier now, which makes the sim much less frustrating for me!

 

Anyway, kudos to the devs.  The game really feels like the finished object right now [to me, obviously: other opinions are also readily available - this being a 'combat-flight-sim' forum...!   )

Edited August 16, 2016 by No601_Swallow

[ShamrockOneFive]

I couldn't agree more Swallow. Single player has its issues to be sure but I'm still flying the campaign in much the same way that you are and I'm still having a lot of fun doing it.

[Lusekofte]

Offline flying is the only thing getting bader for every year that goes. Before all simulators was based on CD and offline playing, hence there was put a lot of effort in this feature.

This make the offline feature in this game a tad boring.

The features is all there , but you get a feeling they are just too lazy to do it properly. Where is the timeline, the story? To me it is like a preset QMB mission. nothing more.

I like offline, the AI fly like they are ordered to, they fly historically correct until they mess up. But they are not bad combat pilots when committed. For me this is a sort of escape from reality, I really do not need high end reality, but the campaign simply does not appeal to me

[No601_Swallow]

The features is all there , but you get a feeling they are just too lazy to do it properly... To me it is like a preset QMB mission. nothing more....

 

 

That's exactly the point. If you use it for what it is - a great way to have practice and to just "experience" the sim - then it's great. But it's not a story or "adventure". For that, we'd need to have more scripted (hand-built) missions, I suppose. I think, though, the main idea in my post was that I'm now having fun with the unlocks - the green bar that gets filled up in your "Profile" page. This is the "game" bit - absolutely not "sim"! But I'm surprised that I'm enjoying this "game" more and more.

 

I disagree that the devs have been lazy with the "campaign". It's been refined consistently with all the patches, and it now works very well, it seems to me. As you say, it's a sort of QMB+ tool, and as such I think it's quite an achievement. 

[ShamrockOneFive]

Recently I've been working my way through the aircraft and after playing on the Moscow map for a long time it was a great thing to take advantage of the recently released feature and fly aircraft like the Bf110 and MC.202 over Stalingrad after spending the last few months exclusively on the Moscow campaign. A change of scenery, the summer time set, and so forth and its been a really fun time. The Bf110 is so much fun conducting anti-shipping strikes!

[LeRocket]

 

 

To me it is like a preset QMB mission. nothing more.

 

I believe that's what they were intending, based on data from RoF.

 

while the in game campaign isn't what most people were expecting, PWCG is an amazing, and i mean truly amazing piece of software, especially now that Moscow is supported. I may be alone in this but IMO PWCG is just as good, or even better than 1946's campaigns.

[BlackSix]

3) The hand-designed missions are just great. I've mostly played German in the campaign (it's somehow more swashbuckling, while the good ol' VVS always seems a bit 'Stalingrad Tractor Factory' somehow - you know: agricultural), but I've just gone back and flown a few of the hand-made soviet missions from campaign chapters I've already done. And they're just great. Really well designed, interesting, intelligently layered. And looking at them in the Mission Editor shows them to be works of beauty. Many thanks, Black Six (or whoever it is in Moscow who's done these missions!). And the machine-generated campaign missions continue to improve. I'm just really impressed.

Thank you, Swallow!