GameLog Page

Please sign in or sign up!

...blogs for gamers

Find a GameLog

... by game	... by platform

[ advanced search ]

HOME	GAMES	LOGS	MEMBERS			ABOUT	HELP

1661's Falcon 4.0: Allied Force (PC)

[March 6, 2008 05:10:31 AM]

Gameplay 2:

There is, in fact, no way to do justice to the complexity of Falcon in something as short as this gamelog. My previous depiction in the last gameplay section only scratches a small part of the surface of the types of operations going on in the dynamic campaign. I didn't take into account, for example, the fact that the game engine also has A.I. for each of the ground units that move around in the theater or that even while I am not flying, the game will continue to carry out the war while missions are flown by the A.I. But I digress. There are just too many things to talk about regarding the complexity of the game and the flight controls. Sometimes it is easier to just sit back and watch the computer fight the war with little or no human player involvement. I found myself doing that quite often.

While not flying, the player can also watch all of what is going on throughout the battlefield from an overhead map of the entire theater. The player is also afforded a certain degree of control over the battlefield as the player can create new missions and assign any available aircraft from any squadron to fly them, much in the same way that the game engine normally does automatically. If the player so chose, he could turn off the automatic generation of missions and create them all himself as he sees fit to winning the campaign. Due to the complex synthesis of the entire campaign situation that is required to generate the hundreds of missions actually needed to run a successful campaign, such micromanagement is not advisable. A more effective technique of exercising control over the war is to simply assign priority levels to the different types of targets (aircraft, armor, bridges, radars, etc) and regions of the map.

All the while, there are all sorts of statistical information available to the player. Details about every single flight package can be viewed and changed. All friendly and visible enemy air units, ground units, and structures can be seen on the map represented by icons and their positions will be updated as time progresses. Supply levels, relative power graphs, and radio live radio chatter can all be accessed and heard from the campaign planning mode. If so desired, a player could leave the game running for 2 weeks straight and two weeks worth of campaign operations would be carried out autonomously, with the player receiving news updates as if from the position of a war planner. All of these elements make Falcon much more than a flight simulator, but a tactical war simulator.

Design:

Falcon 4.0: AF is actually a re-release of the 1998 game Falcon 4.0. Many of the elements in the game have changed little from the original release, and most of what has changed between the 1998 and 2005 releases relate to stability. The new content in the game was developed mostly by members of the community who added modifications to the game and were subsequently hired by the company to update it. With all of that in mind, the original release of Falcon 4.0 was truly ahead of its time. Even the parts of the game that received only minor upgrades still show remarkable design quality, namely the terrain mapping. The terrain used real satellite images of Korea to cover the landscape in the game. By today's standards, the images used aren't particularly high resolution and are probably the graphical weak point of the game today. But the sheer expanse of the gameworld and the amount of terrain covered are design elements that cannot be ignored.

The gameworld in the Korean theater is modeled to be the actual size of the Korean peninsula, using nautical mile measurements to calculate distance. If it would take 30 minutes to fly at cruise speed in an F-16 from Seoul to Pyongyang, it would take 30 minutes in the game and the corresponding distance would be traversed in the game's nautical mile measurement. Luckily, the player needn't sit through 30 minutes of flight to a destination, which can sometimes be boring especially if the flight is an uneventful air patrol over friendly territory. Instead, the player has the option of speeding up time to 64x the current rate.

Another significant design element is the way in which the game world is presented. Once the player enters the cockpit, there are no loading screens and the player can fly from one end of korea to the next. There are tons of air traffic, ground traffic, and landmarks to be seen. and all of the terrain and objects in the game world will be rendered as they are come across. This gives the sense of the game taking place in a massive, continuous game world the size of an actual country.

There are also changes in the weather patterns which will affect where and when there will be clouds or haze and what altitude and thickness it will appear. This design element not only adds a layer of difficulty to flying safely, but also creates breathtaking visuals. Despite all of the praise I gave to gameplay, sometimes I found it satisfying to fly just to see the landscape from 70,000 feet in the sky and to simply admire the well rendered 3D plane models, jet streams, and aerobatic maneuvers. There is no doubt that the design of the game world and the game objects themselves greatly add to the quality of this title.

add a comment

[March 6, 2008 04:16:30 AM]

Summary:

Falcon 4.0: Allied Force is a combat flight simulator that sticks you in the cockpit of an F-16. The game is unique in that it simulates both air combat as well as running a full scale war in the background. Players chose from a variety of combat missions that are generated on the fly by the dynamic game engine, leading to a fresh and unique experience each flight. The 700+ Page game manual and accurately modeled avionics systems won't appeal to most gamers, unfortunately, and the steep learning curve will drive away all but the most dedicated flight sim enthusiasts.

Gameplay:

For me, however, just knowing that I may never actually master this game, especially with all of the realism and difficulty settings set to maximum, makes the game that much more appealing. Since there is no real story line in this game, the wealth of content along with assurance that there will always be some aspect of the gameplay left to uncover and master are what keep the game fresh and exciting.

There are two main theaters of operations that the game can be played in: Korea and the Balkans. Within each theater are three playable campaigns with different victory conditions for each one. In the Korean theater, the adversary is a fictional and somewhat well equipped North Korea who has broken peace and attacked South Korea. You fly for the United States, which has stepped into the theater to help South Korea repel the invasion.

The real hallmark of this game is it's dynamic campaign engine. Essentially, the game generates a campaign and coordinates the movements of hundreds or thousands of units within a scale model of the Korean peninsula or the Balkans in real time. Just to give a glimpse of the depth of what the game engine is doing, there are nearly 200 different airbases in the game amongst friendlies and foes, each of which is home to at least one squadron. Each individual squadron will have a number of aircraft, for example 24 F-16s, that can be dispatched to fly missions. At the onset of the campaign, my F-16 squadron is given a list of missions with different take off times, priority levels, destinations, and targets. In this instance I chose a SEAD mission. My objective is to suppress enemy air defenses around Pyongyang so that friendly aircraft can fly missions over enemy territory with less risk of getting shot down. The mission calls for a flight of 4 F-16s from my squadron. So I load my aircraft with the appropriate armament of anti-radar missiles needed to successfully complete the mission, and take off, making sure to have proper clearance from air traffic control so that I don't get court martialed.

Half way into my mission, and still over 100 nautical miles away from my destination, my flight of 4 F-16's is joined by a flight of 4 F-15s from a Fighter Squadron stationed in Seoul. We are in fact all part of a larger package of aircraft. Since I am the only human player in this campaign, the other aircraft in the package, including the ones in my flight, are flown by complex A.I. who will follow your flight patterns and commands. My flight's objective is to clear enemy air defenses while the F-15s are tasked with escorting me to the target and fending off enemy fighters. An additional element in the package is a flight of 2 F-16s, tasked with photographing the bomb damage to see how well my SEAD mission went. If my mission were to fail and the recon element of the package reported that the target was still in tact, the game engine might generate followup SEAD missions.

The outcome of all missions are taken into account by the game engine which it uses to form an understanding of how the campaign is progressing so that it can generate appropriate additional missions. Now imagine that at any given time during the peak of the campaign there could be 50 or 100 such packages being flown by both friend and foe, with missions ranging from airlifting troops and supplies across Korea to escorting a tanker plane as it loiters on the battlefield waiting to refuel other planes. Did I mention all of this is happening in real time?

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Mar 6th, 2008 at 04:17:05.