I am missing the good old times when the original Black Shark was released. I miss the completeness of the Black Shark simulator upon release. I miss the open, frank and non-bitter conversations about missing features, our faith in the franchise as customers, the unbroken promises and break-neck turnaround times from the developers.
I'm not mad about DCS's current state. Just tired of the perpetual beta "pay for wait" business model, the candor of some 3rd party developers calling bare bone versions of their air frames "betas".
I am aware is a sign of the times we live in, but hell I don't mind the old times.
So here I am, taking off in the Black Shark in yet another mission against insurgents in Abkhazia. A proud Russian attack helicopter that saw action in Chechnya but was designed for conventional warfare.
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| Breathtaking morning in the new DCS 2.5 world. I am flying towards an insurgent hideout deep in the mountains. |
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| My mission: destroy an insurgent T-55 tank in north Abkhazia. Do not cross the frontier if possible. |
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| The enemy tank just got a case of the Vikhr. |
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| It never fails, mountain flying gives me that feeling of fighting in a cage. The collective is all the way up to my armpits by now. |
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| Bugging out of the target area. Mission complete. |
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| For my way back I decided not to go through valleys but just climb and make it straight back to the Sochi-Adler airbase. |
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| A hell of a descent this will be! |
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| I came, I saw, I landed. The stabilization system of the Ka-50 is a masterpiece of Russian design. |
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| This sortie out of Sochi-Adler was to support a platoon of Russian mechanized infantry that found themselves stuck near a railroad station. |
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| Well, I see everybody is busy down there. Time to go in with rockets! |
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| I find myself more at ease with running attacks rather than with attacks from a hover position. |
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| Well, I see why these insurgents had an interest in this train station ... |
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| Do not overfly the enemy! Do not fly into the high voltage cables! Do turn that position light off! |
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| Dayum! I just hit a few tons of captured Russian military equipment. |
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| Looking for more targets. Note the flight path (black lines) in the ABRIS (right display). |
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| Back into the airbase for a pleasant landing. |
Cheers,
4 comments:
I thought I was the only one who still enjoyed BS1. At least it was *finished*. What is this bullshit state of affairs where they release (incomplete, broken) DLC when the main game isn’t even finished? I want to go back to 1999 sometimes. Flight sims may look nicer today, but the games themselves remind me of the really bare-bones stuff from the mid-80’s. I’m not a military pilot. I’d like to have some sort of game element (like, God forbid, a dynamic campaign) to keep me motivated. As it is, we’re stuck with canned mission and scripted fake campaigns. Yawn.
And half of these betas never progress beyond that phase before the dev teams move on to new projects in order to stay afloat. I'd rather they just be honest up front and market their modules as FC3-level rather than full-blown DCS level.
Nice write up and even better pictures!
I can see where your nostalgia comes from... :)
Thanks all for reading.
Although I'm looking forward to the F/A 18 and the F-14, this time around I'm very un-hyed.
Cheers,
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