Opinion Pieces

For some reason, many developers, publishers and media outlets choose April 1st as the ideal date to announce exciting new products, new features or provide the community with an update to their existing product line. As a media outlet, we are always prepared to tackle this challenging day and as usual, we found a lot of great new announcements.

New Helicopter for DCS World!?

Let’s start with our friends at Helisimmer. They were lucky enough to be provided with EXCLUSIVE news of a Helicopter coming to DCS World. We know Sergio is a huge fan of the spinning tops so he must have been beside himself when he found out this great news. The news is that Heatblur are working on a F-14 Heli-edition for the combat simulator. The team said “Not really but we HAD to do it after we have seen how happy Bel Geode was about our module. We know he’s a huge fan of rotor aircraft as well – and especially tiltrotors. We decided to embark on this project to cater such an amazing Tomcat lover. This one’s for you, Drew”

November was supposed to be a relatively calm month. Some releases to be expected, some updates here and there, and the big Black Friday sale. However, that should have been about it. It almost sounded too good to be true. And if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

In all fairness, I might be slightly exaggerating. November started out quite calm with relatively few big news items. Halfway through the month, we saw QualityWings’ surprise release of the Ultimate 146. This was pretty big news and some members of the community got into rather heated arguments in our comment section. Is the price worth it? Should it have been free for previous owners? What’s happening on the Ultimate 787 front? In the end, nobody seemed to be able to find a consensus on these topics.

After the Ultimate 146 news we had a rather calm Black Friday. Nobody rushed to be first in line at any of the digital stores because, well, they are digital. And nobody rushed to even get in line to begin with at FlightSimStore. We probably could have suspected this and see it coming for a bit, but because they were so uncommunicative and keeping up the appearance that everything was “fine”, it still came as a bit of a surprise. It’s sad to see them go. I have been a customer there for quite a few years, and I’m losing access to a fair amount of products. However, there is no excuse for the things they have done. Not paying developers and running off with money is never a good idea. Let’s hope justice catches up with them sooner or later.

But, by far, the biggest news was the Prepar3D v4.4 surprise announcement. With PBR.