Salute Gents,
Having been a closed beta tester for a short time with WW2OL I can give first impressions now that it is out without violating my NDA. I have made oblique comments about it over the last few days but this will be a bit more detailed.
If you are thinking of quitting AH for WW2OL.......well that might be a bit premature. I have been up in planes, in tanks, and on the ground as a trooper, and while the game has some aspects AH lacks, it's planeset is limited and it is largely unfinished. I, for one, will wait and see how it develops before making any kind of jump.
The tanks are VERY realistic, they really went the whole nine yards on that aspect of the game. I used to drive and gun tanks when I was in the army and they got the peculiar rolling, gliding ride of a tank down pat. The gunnery in tanks is more realistic than the AH model, (too much bullet drop in AH imho) but AH is primarily an air combat game, so I can see why, since that is not the focus of the game. The control system of the tanks is not too bad, but there is no provision for steering the tank from the gunner position using rudder like AH has.
The ability to be a trooper is nifty, and the gun sights are realistic, but the control system for walking is all keyboard/mouse based with little joystick input. Hopefully they will make it easier to use a joystick for these features.
Now for the planes...There is no radar so finding a fight is not terribly easy, you basically have to ask where air cons are. The rolling cockpit map is a bit restricted (narrow field of view), either you know the map by road configuration, or you fly along till you fly past something with a name on it to find your position. I found it frustrating. The icon system is interesting, a circle appears, partial for distant targets, complete for closer ones, then it changes color to signify nationality as it gets closer, finally it will tell you what type of aircraft it is at visual ranges.
As to the flight model, the holy grail of combat sims... It is as yet unfinished and it shows. All the planes refuse to bleed "E". Think of every plane in WW2OL as an AH Niki, with varying degrees of turn rate proportional to their type. All the planes can do loops indefinitely and actualy GAIN altitude. Gunnery in the planes is challenging but not as difficult as AH, with much less bullet drop modeled. Damage models in the planes are a bit unfinished as well, the spit can't really hurt the 109 very easily, where the 109 can seriously damage a spit with the cannon. There are only four planes in the current release, Spitfire Mk1 (all 303's), the Hawk 75 (french thingie I never heard of before), 109F4, and stuka.
Connection issues and playability...Connections are sporadic to some extent, especially since the release. I haven't been able to get into the game since it's release, and I am on cable internet. Playability... The view system is not too bad but no straight back over the shoulder view is incorporated. I had to edit some files to make my hat switch work, but after that it became similar to AH in that respect. The system requirements are VERY HIGH, so don't expect it to run well on an older computer. 256 mb of ram is almost required, and some tweaking is in order for the swapfile, to prevent disk thrashing. This is the first game I have seen that is more of a ram hog than CFS-II.
The graphics are quite acceptable, with less of the stark clarity that AH has. I was particularly impressed with the multiple cloud layers. I found that lowering the resolution in WW2OL has a great effect on FPS and less of an effect on visual enjoyment than expected, much as in AH. Lower resolutions still look almost if not just as good, but with much higher framerates in both games.
I, for one, will not be buying the boxed version of this game due to it's limited planeset and unfinished FM and DM, however, I am not ruling it out as it, like AH, will be constantly updated and might turn out to be a gem in the future. I laughingly call my computer the Cray III, after the DOD computer the Cray II and this game taxes my system to it's limits. (Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 Gig processor, Vodoo 5, 256 mb PC-133 ram) so those of you without at least 5-600 mhz computers might as well forget this one.
Multiplayer Persistent games are a balance of things, good graphics = poor performance or high system requirements, good playability = lesser graphics and lower system requirements. Balance is the key, and it is more of an art than a science. AH has better playability, better FPS, and certainly a better FM, DM, and planeset. WW2OL shows potential in graphics and a historical and more strategic arena than AH. In my opinion AH has the best balance I have seen. I am not going anywhere for awhile gents, see ya in the MA.
Jeff Waite
aka GIJeff
