Stark wrote:I think that's an important distinction - you don't really need a story to hook players in a game that is accessible or fun in its own right. The more you expect from players, the more you have to give back.
I agree with the later part, but plot isn't the only way to do it. I mean, when narrative and gameplay are closely combined it's great, but a lot of games put a glass wall between the two and sometimes (Halo 1...) it feels like you have to grind ten minutes of boring corridor to win ten seconds of cutscene. When the player is engaged, unlocking new parts of the gameplay experience can work well too.
Actually this is a major missed opportunity for AC & Hawx; unlocking new planes is supposed to be a major reward, but they are all very similar, even moreso than in real life. In both games you can shoot down F-22s with the A-10 and complete an air-to-ground mission with the F-15A. Most of the planes have no reason for you to use them. There is some variety in the weapons (moreso in AC with the fictional weapons) but that is still hobbled by the fact that a lot of the weapons just aren't worth using. Since realism is out the window in an arcade flight sim anyway, and there's no question of learning cockpit layouts and procedures like a realistic sim, the differences between the planes and weapons should be exagerrated not downplayed.
Your game is interesting in this context, I think, because while it's 'simhard' in that you have to have specific skills to play it and it's 'accurate bird piloting'
There are actually three distinct levels here. I have a 'simhard' mode that takes many, many hours to learn (realistic aerodynamics) and is provided as a curiosity free flight mode only. It is too frustrating to try and achieve any real objectives with it; sims that are unplayably complex fall into this category. The main mode is designed to have a moderate difficultly curve and to give the general feel of the simhard mode, without being immensely frustrating. I think the objective of a good combat flight sim should be this; you want enough game (or at least genre) specific low-level skill involved to allow you to think 'I am flying a vehicle'. The literal 'shooter with a flight sim skin' equates to 'I am pointing a virtual camera at dots and shooting missiles', which is pretty much what the flight segments in most FPSes (Halo...) are. In combat flight sims this should be mostly air combat maneuvering and energy management. Implementation of this is hit and miss; crap/cheating enemy AI defeats this, and going for a terrain dodging mechanic via canyon and city levels is a bit of a cop out. AC0 had surprisingly good enemy AI, AC6 had a good implementation of missile tracking (notoriously hard to get right), Hawx had good spatial awareness, putting it all together seems to be really hard.
For my game, I have had quite a lot of people tell me that they like the idea of a bird flight sim but they don't like the Pilotwings challenges and they hate the silly fantasy combat. This may be the kind of simhard forum denizens mentioned earlier. The fantasy combat is there because good gameplay consists of progressively learning a difficult skill, and then exercising that skill in interesting and varied ways. A few people would want to learn to fly flexible wing organic ornithopters as an isolated challenge, but I think a lot more people would enjoy using that skill to complete varied air combat and tower defence challenges. Various people asked for a realistic simulation of raptor hunting instead, but the simple fact is that this is not nearly as much fun for the vast majority of humans.
it's also relatively low-altitude and speed, so I think it avoids many of these storytelling problems the same was a space game does (where you fly 100m from the Space Battleship, and not 10,000m from the city).
I don't think that makes a difference. It just changes the scale of the structures, from cities and megastructures to individual buildings. You still can't hold the camera on individuals doing specific things (without going to a cutscene), so you're still essentially doing voice overs of things happening in sweeping landscapes. Looking at games like 'Flying Heroes', 'Lair' and even the Legend of the Guardians game, storytelling is still the cutscene / V.O. combination that Ace Combat, the X-Wing games etc use.
From your art it looks like the levels will have things 'going on' during missions, rather than being HAWX-style 'fly over here and destroy 5 tanks, MISSION COMPLETE'.
HAWX is just exceptionally bad in that respect. This is one of the reasons that I think AC5 is the best Ace Combat game. I played through AC4/5/0 again recently to try and get a sense of what worked well and what didn't, for my own game design. AC5 overwhelmingly has more and more varied interaction with other things in the environment; the mission where you chase terrorists through a city, the mission where you defend the space launch facility, the Arkbird mission with a strong sense of real enemies on the hijacked spaceplane etc. AC4 has a neat comic in it but the actual missions are just 'kill lots of dots', the campaign seemed great at the time but looking at it now the amount of allied / enemy chatter is much smaller than the later games. AC0 hangs on the 'clash of aces' dynamic and goes back to 'kill dots' for the rest of it.
Windhaven has as much environmental interaction as I could reasonably put in, but it's still essentially the same sort of thing as AC5/6 (attack and defend aerial and ground objects). I put in destructible terrain to make the enemies a more tangible threat, and fly-through-pylons-to-activate-tower-defence-elements to add some terrain interactivity. Being able to go down and perch on individual branches and splash around in streams is implemented but not really relevant to the story mode; I could add see-saw puzzles but they really wouldn't add anything to gameplay (in an FPS you often have to unlock doors / fix bridges etc to progress, but a flight game is inherently about free movement). I have tried to make the attacks as varied as possible in both graphics and play style, fortunately in fantasy there's more scope for that than HAWX 'missile, gun or bomb with X damage and Y tracking'.
in HAWX etc it's limited to radio chatter because hey, in the real world the Shivans can't spawn in next to you for a fight etc.
Some games care about that and some don't. AC4 spawns enemies right next to you all the time, AC5/0 are a little less blatant about it.
On the other hand, if you made a simhard flight game, and you knew all your forum guys would buy it and pretty much nobody else would, is there an incentive to compete with market prices?
As you said, those devs are locked into the niche and are basically a write off as regards making fun games instead of realistic sims. I guess the question is, is the lack of arcade flight combat
games a problem, and if it is what hope is there for reversing that. I do think we're overdosed on FPS and to a lesser extent driving games, so am I hopeful that air and space vehicle gameplay will become more popular again even if it isn't in the form of stand alone games. Plus hopefully the few devs making dedicated arcade flight games will get over the gritty pseudo-realism thing in a few years, and go back to making more fanciful games but keeping the gameplay innovations.
The 360 game Apache Air Assault is obviously a B-grade title, but still manages to look good and have both a simhard and a pew pew flight mode... but being helicopters it's always easier to be interesting, since you can actually see trees/tanks/etc rather than them being dots on a radar.
There is no fundamental reason why you can't have helicopters as a secondary mode in an AC type game. Even bombers can be interesting as a secondary mode done correctly (see ancient games such as B-1 Lancer). HAWX gave us two skins on point-cursor-and-shoot - the AC-130 gunships and the top-down UAV shooting - because apparently the devs thought that what flight sims need is to be more like an FPS. The variety was still nice, but come on guys, can't we have something a little more novel? Like a tactical dynamic where you could switch to the guy in the AWACS vectoring the fighters in for a few seconds at a time, and where you sent your allies actually made a difference in the big Bunker Shot style battle you're in?
The AC games of course try for narrative, but the only ones I've played still have the escort/strike/dogfight mission breakdown and the 'turn left launching missiles' combat which just doesn't stand up to the storytelling possible in other genres. Of course you can tell a story in a flight sim - but will it be as accessible or sell as well as the same story (or a significantly worse story) in a shooter? Can you rescue your girlfriend from hell, save the world from underground bugs, find the hidden clues or indulge in seesaw puzzles at 20,000 feet, where 'ground detail' is hills and a few buildings? Flight sims used to be at the top of the industry technology and graphics wise, and now anyone looking at one can see that it's just planes in the sky again.
