As many of you know IL2 Cliffs of Dover Blitz edition was released last week. The Storm of War admins have been testing and reviewing what changes have occurred with a view to relaunching Storm of War using this updated platform. We know that at least some of you have valued what we did and what we offered and are possibly waiting to see whether we relaunch before downloading/installing/playing Blitz.
Unfortunately it is our opinion that this release has done nothing to address some of the fundamental problems SoW encounters when trying to run the large scale campaign missions we’re widely known for, and in fact has introduced a number of new issues which mean that it is highly unlikely that we would get even the same performance as previous campaigns.
We know that this is not what you wanted to hear, but while the performance is so low (both in terms of FPS drops and online desync/lag/banding), the AI is essentially as untouched as it was, and there remain (and have been introduced!) numerous bugs and inaccuracies in both the aircraft and map we feel we cannot invest the time, effort and resources it takes to run SoW. We have discussed rolling back to TF4.312 but that will just put us back in the hole we were in last year. None of us have the enthusiasm or drive necessary with the game in the state it is and have little faith that in the long term that Cliffs of Dover has much of a future.
This is a pity because as we have discussed numerous times on the SoW Forums, the alternatives also show great shortcomings. However, we think it is inevitable that the future of SoW (and indeed WW2 combat flight simming) will likely lie with either the IL2: BoX series or DCS. Neither will in their current or short term be capable of offering the environment that Cliffs of Dover did, but they are both being actively developed and have significantly higher player bases than Cliffs of Dover.
We will continue to investigate the possibilities offered by these platforms and will monitor the coming developments such as the DCS "merge" and BoX 3.0 etc. Should there be a substantive patch or fix to Cliffs of Dover Blitz we will of course take a look at that too and reassess.
In the meantime the SOW Admin wish you and yours all a happy a healthy festive season. We hope to see you in 2018!