One major problem of CFS3 is that it's nowhere near a good game.
It has that terrific Flight Simulator engine underneath what looks like a action packed game and that's its downfall - it's a brilliant flight simulator but a nowhere near a good action packed game. During the years I've been astonished to see how the physics engine reacts to aircraft spec changes, if a flight model is accurate to begin with changing something on it produces a performance change exactly the same as what happened in real life when the same thing was done to a real aircraft. We're talking about top speeds within half a mile per hour here. I doubt there will be a combat flight sim with better physics than this in the near future, if ever.
But it's still a bad game. Simulators are nearly always bad products - no fast action, no colourful achievements, no bonus points for performing certain feats, you know the modern way of making action games. The modern incarnation is War Thunder that gives the impression of being a flight sim but in the end it's another arcade game posing as a simulator. But it's a far better product from the game point of view, unlocking new aircraft and upgrading them by getting points from good performance on missions, and you get into action in minutes after take off.
Now, we old simulator geeks (I consider myself as old here too) know that aircraft are unlocked when the factory gets a new model rolling off the production line and upgraded in the same way, not by shooting down five opponents in a row. Getting into action in minutes means that we're more or less screwed because the enemy is positioned right on the edge of our airfield and we had better get them now or we're dead. That's fine for us but it's not fine for the average gamer of today. The world has changed a lot from what it was 20 years ago in the heyday of the flight simulator. We might be in trouble here guys.
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