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Abandoned Fortress?
by Jim "Bismarck" CobbProduct Name: B-17 Flying Fortress The Mighty 8th!
Category: WWII Bomber Crew and Flight Simulation
Developed By: Wayward Design, Ltd.
Published By: Microprose/Hasbro Interactive
Release Date: Released
Minimum Spec: Windows 95/98/Millenium; Intel Pentium II 300 or faster; 128MB RAM; Voodoo3 or higher; 8MB VRAM; DirectX Compatible Joystick.
Recommended Spec: Intel Pentium II 400 or faster; 256MB RAM; 16MB VRAM; Supports Hardware T&L; A3d Compatible Sound card; 400MB Swap file or larger.
Demo: None
Files: | v1.05 PATCH | Paint Utility |
Links: | Viking1's B-17 Tweaks | Iain Howe's B-17 Tweaks | B-17 Review (Viking 1) | B-17 Review (Impaler) | B-17 Custom Art | Patch 1.05 Review |
Article Type: Comment
Article Date: March 12th, 2001
The Ads That Didn’t Come to Dinner . . . Or Lunch or Breakfast
Major game companies herald their upcoming products in computer gaming magazines months, sometimes years, in advance and continue beating their drums at least a quarter after release. Print magazines usually have a 12:1 ratio of ads to text because of this. A survey of three major computer games magazines show no ads for B-17 in the last nine months. A call for ad sightings on the COMBATSIM.COM forum turned up only one ad in a French magazine. What happened? Did Hasbro come to rely on word-of-mouth? No, because Starship Troopers got several months of garish glossy pages. Perhaps Hasbro went for a Web blitz? Hardly. Outside of a few banners, no Web ads are grabbing us by our virtual throats from major websites.
Hasbro Interactive’s homepage has a link—small, to be sure—to the official home page, www.b17flyingfortress.com. This page is pretty with many action shots and oodles of action words but seems to be updated haphazardly. Retailers have had small blurbs for months, some still touting the multi-player options that were pulled four months ago.
Hovever, Hasbro may well have set their sights higher. They advertized in aviation magazines such as January 2001 edition of the Smithsonian's "Air & Space" magazine. They decided to broaden their appeal to non-gamers and leave the "usual suspects" to be rounded up by word of mouth. Therefore, ad content becomes an issue.
At the www.B17flyingfortress.com, the emphasis on technology points toward a flight sim
Genre Confusion
Even when ads are found, they offer confusion or misleading statements. Chips & Bits, a major online seller of games, takes the easy way out by using action verbs. You “navigate”, “master”, “command”. “locate and bomb”; anything to avoid the intransitive “This game is a . . .”, although it is slotted under the simulation category. The French piece is more exact, calling the game a flight sim. The official B-17 web site starts out strong with “. . . it's [sic] eagerly awaited Second World War flight simulator . . .” and “And, if it’s a B-17 flight sim you want B-17 Flying Fortress 'The Mighty Eighth' has it all!” However, further reading shows the verbiage waddling off into the same action-packed verb-covered cuckoo land again. The text pulls the reader from one station to another. Readers who know flight sims will start wondering how this game is played.
The copywriter didn’t know what a flight sim means to flight simmers. A flight sim is very close to a first-person shooter in that the players are responsible for all their actions. Their view is first person, except for the occasional glimpse from a camera view. Real action is in the cockpit, surrounded by controls and target reticules. The player leaves the cockpit only to de-brief or to hit the silk. Multiple stations simply aren’t in the equation. Therefore, even if the flight model was better and even if staying in one position the entire flight was enjoyable, B-17 is a story wrapped around flight. Wayward, honest and put-upon folk they are, let the cat out of the bag on p. 8 of the manual. Here, they say, “This is the ultimate flight crew simulation . . .” There we have it: precise and tidy. Unfortunately, this term is also about as sexy as pond scum to those not immersed in WWII flight history.
The Chips&Bits ad is composed largely of verbs, barely describing the game.
Malign Neglect
A picture forms. Hasbro is burnt by Gunship II. Wayward is making a game that is outside of most categories and will not lend itself to buzz words. It’s not a flight sim nor was it a role-playing game since the player manipulates all characters without being one. The project is late and, to make deadline, Hasbro pulls the multiplayer functions that would make it a true flight sim. A firestorm ensues and Hasbro sees disaster. Combined with other failures, Hasbro begins to cut losses. The game is not pushed to gamers but to the geneal aviation community. This approach is logical on one level but is flawed. The general public needs specific information. They got hype that is limited to cliches and misinformation with the term “minimum requirements” stretched to mean the game will boot and play a little if the gamer knows how to tweak hardware and software like a Microsoft employee. Given the unclear expectations and initial bugs, the "word of mouth" strategy backfired with gamers. Hasbro could have countered this better but left Wayward holding the bag. In short, B-17 is left to turn in the wind, an object of pity for both admirers and detractors.
Fortunately, the gaming community is not dependent on corporate razzmatazz to keep a game alive. Wayward has created a patch that fixes the technical flaws. The second patch promises more improvements, hinting with seductive vagueness at expanding play. Players who hesitated to buy are now, after hearing what the game really is, are accepting it. So this game may eventually become the hit it should have been immediately. If it does, its success will be in spite of Hasbro’s marketing, not because of it.
Full-page ad from January 2001 edition of Smithsonian's 'Air & Space' magazine.
[Ed Note: Since this article was first written, MicroProse along with "B-17" were sold to Infogrames. We called Wayward Design's Graham Davis for comment about how the new owners might be handling the "B-17" title. Davis told us that he was unaware of any of Infogrames plans for the title at this time.]
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