New players will watch this video and wonder how we managed to play this horrible looking game. I wonder how many will actually sit through the whole 11 minutes.
Vet's will watch this video and catch themselves,twisting and turning with the dogfight and lose themselves in the fight, not the graphics.
Maybe, just maybe, some of the younger ones might get lost in it as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oI_yjcCCNUWhat we lost, is patience. Look at the stuff that had to be done to set up a fight. Select baud rate?? WTH is that?? Right? We had to know how to do that stuff, we didn't have anything else and that's how the early days were done.
We came from an era that had no online game, no computer screen, no games on tv, nothing. We had Risk, Monopoly and such for board games, we had Dungeons and Dragons that required nothing short of a vivid imagination and dice.
We would spend all night playing Risk, or all afternoon imagining our way through D&D, and it was all imagination, patiently playing the game, even spending days before the big game working out strategy and selecting D&D roles.
When Air Warrior hit the screen, no one looked at the graphics and said they sucked, we were STUNNED that we could see what we only imagined before. We were lost in the fight, lost in the battle, fully immersed as we were before but with the added bonus of a visual cue to put us closer. We took the full immersion that we experienced in our board games and transferred that immersion into the game itself. We were there, it was natural, intuitive, instinctive, we were lost in the game, the graphics added to and expanded our imagination, not replace it.
Our scenarios were epic adventures. We looked forward to the event. Not Saturday where we flew, but the event. The event was the whole experience. We built teams, recruited pilots, stole players, enticed squads to join, antagonized our opponents and rallied enemies to fly against, we spent weeks, months on the phone, on the computer, in chat rooms, planning missions, forming attacks, playing the game, and then on Saturday we TESTED our ideas, our plans, our team and then started over again Sunday to assess our gains, review in depth After Action Reports where we counted planes lost, enemy lost, objectives gained or missed, tried our best to assess where we were in the fight and move forward. Rarely knowing where we stood at the end of the frame, rarely knowing what really happened until after the war was over. Then, we went back, compared notes on what we thought against what really was, and got excited to try new things for the next fight.
We have to post the scores now between frames. Did we win? Did we lose? No effort, no desire to log your kills, meet after the event and debrief, assess what worked, what didn't, just push out the logs. No patience, no fog of war, not thrill of the unknown. No desire to continue in spite of the results that may or may not be fact.
It seems we don't have the desire, interest, patience, and need to do these any longer. It's pretty, I'll give you that. New players test the graphics against the xbox and judge the game without any clue at all at how a complex "game" like this is played. The worst part of it all is that the team that DOES the team building, does spend the time putting players together that can fly, can communicate, can take orders, is the one that tends to win. The one who is prepared.
It's no ones fault, entertainment evolves. We were odd for playing our games when TV was available, bikes were there to ride, and other adventures awaited, but we chose to game for the imagination.
We have taken the imagination out of our game. Not by choice, but almost by necessity from a certain point of view. The events seem scripted to end up being played like the designer wanted to watch a movie unfold that he wrote, but knowing that it's most likely designed to make sure no one get's board because, well, it's hard to wait that long for a fight! What we need is a game board that allows the players to create their war and figure out how to overcome their objectives. Events should have the pieces and rule set to identify basic limits. Chess with a mountain of rules, conditions and limits is not the goal. Chess, with a few basic rules and limits and countless books on possible strategies is the goal. The pieces and the board configuration are set, what is to be done with them has to be up to the players. If you take the imagination out of the scenario, we might as well all watch TV. What needed to be planned for in the last one? Nothing. Even looking at the Allies effort in planning and mission outlines, well done I might add, was for naught as basically, their mission plans were obvious, we had a pretty good feeling where you would go, and your plans pretty much covered them all, the design made it absolutely clear what your limits were, timing had to be, and where you had to go, we just had to figure out which one you were going to use. Imagine a chess game with 4 strategic options, that's all there was. The game would have died out centuries ago but it lives on and even today new strategies unfold. The board and pieces have not changed one bit. Didn't need to add a new Crusader piece that could hop over the Queen, didn't need to change the color of the board and put LED lights into the pieces, nothing changed, but the game continually evolves because it restricts what the Game decides you can do.
We need to get back to building game boards. We are trying to find new ways to get people to fly scenarios but that is going to require inspiration, not hoping they show up.
Put the strategy back. Let us think. I was on Full scout duty, I had netflix running with a Flash episode I wanted to catch up on, still found the flight because, well, there just weren't any other options for them. In the little time I had to prepare for the event, I flew the routes, knew where they had to be based on where they weren't.
We know the plane match-ups were always unbalanced in the war. No body went into war calling the other side and saying Hey Dolphy babe, we're kinda short on Spits so can you fly the 109g and we'll toss up some extra P51s? Put the accurate setup in place, expand the boundaries and let the players figure out how THEY would have made that run that got their WW2 counterparts wiped out. You can even set it up to where it's simply impossible to take down all of the bombers, and that oil field is going to go down, no way to stop it. Ok, so if they take out more bombers than expected, then they gained so the reward is a win. If you make the objective Destroy the OilField and make it impossible not to destroy it, that is not balanced. If you make the objective Destroy the OilField and keep 50% of your bombers alive, and the other side takes out 52%, then you have a win. Did they lose the oilfield? Did the bombers bomb? Yes, stopping it was impossible, but causing more damage and attrition than they accounted for was the goal. You also have a flight of bombers who know they are going to get to target, well, some are, so they go in knowing they at least have a chance of surviving as well as actually dropping on target. They also have the nervousness inherent with knowing someone's going down, just not who it's going to be.
The designer also has to be absolutely sure that enough ordinance is in the air to actually accomplish that goal. Are there physically enough bullets to take out enough bombers to achieve the objective? Are there enough planes in the air so that a reasonable amount of survivors can get to the bombers? These take time to count, verify, test and prove, and it is impossible to do on a chart, each option must be flown and tested, each object identified, accounted for. Design an event for a few people? No, design a major event and make sure there is time to fill it up, and if it's not ready, don't run it yet, be as patient as the vet players are, we want Great events, not simply a bunch of them.
Make the effort worth the risk. The obstacles don't have to be the same, but the reward for effort must be. To have 4 lives in a squadron of B25s that are worth a good amount of points if they die but can fly 4 unanswered sorties and bomb ships and the Axis doesn't care if they do or not, that isn't a balanced reward. Had the objectives been worth 20 points and their deaths 20 (pick any number, 3 1/2 works just as well) then there was an incentive to both stay alive as well as bomb, and a clear need to take them out before they did damage.
New players for the most part have no interest in taking time to do an event. Look at the success of world of tanks and other games. Spawn, shoot, die, spawn, shoot die, run run run, instant gratification. No need for strategy, no time for strategy, no time to team build, no time to do anything. If you build events that cater to this crowd then you lose the ones who thrive on scenarios and replace them with a player base that is off and running to the next "ooh shiny" object.
If you want the base back, to recover what has been lost, remember why they worked in the first place and get back there.
In my humble opinion.
