Longivity?

[Panzer76]

So, when I fisrt DLed the demo it was great and I played 4-5 hrs each day for 3 days straight.

Then.. the thrill sorta went away. It takes such a long time for the pilots (rotating and all) to gain some skills, and chances are they will die before long anyway.

When I first played the game I was certain I would order it, no.. Im no longer so sure.

[Dan Verssen]

What you've seen is a narrow slice of the game, as you might expect from a demo. You're right, the newness is going to wear off.

With the full game, 36 more aircraft open up, many skill combos become available, and you get to see the much different feel of low, medium, and high point value battles.

I'd say, take a break for a few days and give it another look. Also, with any luck we'll have the full game available soon.

If there are any aircraft, campaigns, or skills that you would like to see appear in the future, fire away with ideas...

[bartbert]

Well, everyone is going to have their own threshold for when they start getting bored with a game, of course. Keep in mind that we have intentionally limited what you can do in the demo game, though.

Flying the same aircraft every mission can get kind of dull. In the full version, your pilots start out flying the worst aircraft available for their nationality. As your pilot gains experience, he not only can purchase skills, he also unlocks better aircraft. It's always fun to get a newer, better aircraft for your pilot to try out.

When your pilot gets enough experience, he can also start flying escort missions instead of just the standard dogfight mission. Bombers can be tough, and they are worth a lot of points (undamaged bombers score points for the escort, damaged and destroyed bombers score points for the interceptors). Your tactical decisions may required a little modifications. As the interceptor, do you go after the escort first, and hope that you have enough time later to down the bomber, or do you ignore the escort and go straight for the bomber? As the escort, do you defend the bomber at all costs, or do you leave it to the wolves if things get tough? If you allow the bomber to get shot down, you may actually end up earning negative experience points!

Then there's the campaigns. The Dunkirk campaign is very small and short. Relatively speaking, there are only a few decisions to make when allocating your pilots to the map. The full version adds the Battle of Britain, Singapore, Solomons, and the massive Daylight '44 Bombing campaigns.

My personal favorite is still the Solomons campaign. Both sides have bombers, so both sides could be attacking some areas while defending other areas. There are 5 areas to cover and there are 4 turns. Neither side can cover every area on every turn, and your pilots will need rest somewhere in there, so there are some very tough decisions to make in terms of where to put your resources.

We haven't really mentioned anything about it because the plans have not been finalized, but I think there will also be some contests and tournaments sponsored by BFC to give your pilots even more reasons to jump into the cockpit.

Just food for thought.

[Moon]

LOL... when you say "it takes so long time for the pilots to get some skills", that makes me wonder if you're aware that there is a 100 XP cap in the beta demo. Meaning: you cannot gain any meaningful skills beside the few basic ones at all in the demo, no matter how long you fly

Martin

[Peterk]

Hi Guys,

I have to admit I was thinking much the same thing as Panzer76. The game is addictive and I enjoy playing it. It's nice and quick and lets me get off a quick battle before heading off to work in the morning which I love. But I was asking myself if I would play it fairly regularly, say 2 months from the time I purchased it.

From what I've seen in the demo, the main reasons for a player to keep going are

1. To get to the top or near the top of the leader boards. For most casual players though who only do 3-4 dogfights a night, they won't play enough for this to be a realistic goal against the guys who do 15-20 missions nightly, so some other reason has to be there as well.

2. To purchase new skills and get new planes for their personnel. This is well implemented, but I feel that over time the excitement of the new talents will wear off. This happened in Tiger Woods golf for me...good idea, worked for a few months but after that I just didn't care any more. The game became too repetitive to continue.

Campaigns are a great idea to extend the play time of a single session and make it more satisfying but because you can't fly your regular pilots I have a feeling more people will tend to do the single missions so they can move their usual pilots up. I would consider allowing the regular pilots to participate in campaigns even if there's a balance issue. I would consider linked/branching campaigns to extend matchups even further.

On the single-mission dogfight front, how about implementing a system where the server sets up elimination tournaments for 8, 16, 32 players who come in with 2 pilot/wingman pairs each? Instead of players playing in a handful of quick matchups they set up themseleves, they would enter a sort of tournament where the server sets up the matchups? I imagine a 16 player elimination would take about an hour or a little longer to play out which is a nice length of time for a play session. And the best pilots of the slab are forced to face off against one another at the end of the tourny which should lead to some nice tension (and will kill some of the top pilots keeping the leader board in constant flux). Allowing spectators to watch games might also work.

[Panzer76]

Originally posted by Moon:

LOL... when you say "it takes so long time for the pilots to get some skills", that makes me wonder if you're aware that there is a 100 XP cap in the beta demo.

I am aware of that.