Many moons ago, AH water looked like someone splashed blue paint everywhere, now it reflects, it has ripples, and looks pretty good. A few years later, the terrain went from green tiles to actual detailed terrain with different shades and colors, and recently, we also got bump mapping, which makes the colors even richer.
So where's the fire? Our explosions are 2D popups of gray, orange and black. Sometimes, they don't even show and the plane just disappears. The only "explosion" that looks cool is the two pieces of burning debris followed by thick black smoke and the plane itself on fire spiraling to the ground.
Can we get an actual 3D explosion? Fire? Flames? Smoke? Debris bouncing along the ground if they're close enough? It's the most anti climatic thing ever. Watching the awesome burning plane about to die then *poof*, "Here's your 2D block of orange and gray." When a plane impact the ground, let us see the shockwave, a plume of dirt, or a fireball.
And yes, this would probably make combat impossible for guys flying with a 1.6Ghz processor with 512MB of RAM and an onboard chip. But seriously, if you were playing with a set up like that in the first place, you probably also had to hand crank your monitor. It's 2012 and we have 1999 explosions.
