T.Power

Head NNW into the hills from Chagcharan there are plenty of opportunities for insurgency missions, I've included a Taliban heat map for inspiration. Jon Anders also has many Kiowa videos on YT showing long routes with no breaks in quality. I highly recommend flying at sunrise or sunset to fully appreciate the new depth map that gives life to fields even at a few hundred feet. And explore the hills, for some reason ED chose to do a lot of work in some of those areas. Routes NNW out of Kandahar airport at low level taken over the western most hillock are fantastic, head straight through Kandahar and head west out of the city there's plenty done there too. Tarinkot to Deh Rawud is pretty much done all the way , Qala i Naw has some amazing work done around the area, which is much further north than I expected to find any work done. And for everyone pointing out all the flaws which you are more than welcome to do, are not mentioning the insane amount of detail and ground clutter in urban areas which are going to make life way more difficult and realistic for Helos. The glass of milk can be half full, or it can be half empty, please try not to consider the milk sour.

I fly helos, the parts of Afghanistan that are done are head and shoulders above Syria, I'm not focused on what's unfinished.

Very frustrating watching poorly placed trees stop large planes form taxiing to runway.

T.Power

I pre-purchased the SW portion just because it was coming first and it was an opportunity to test drive it for system performance testing as I don't have a high end rig. I'm all in on this map now and will gladly purchase the full map if there is a suitable discount applied for those who already purchased the SW. I remember Wags mentioning this in the interview, I have more money to give once that's the case.

I've been enjoying the map immensely at low altitude in the Hind, Kiowa and Gazelle, there are plenty of fully finished areas and it looks great, not denying there's some eye gougingly bad guide textures and even faceted airfields, but what has been buffed and polished is top drawer, I'm already well into developing an insurgent mission up in the hills, performance has been great in all air platforms thus far. I followed Jon Anders' routes in his Kiowa videos, link below. https://www.youtube.com/@AiuRkx

It's the heliwhopper with dual rotors and a foreign sounding name from my childhood, I would have lost my mind if I'd ever got one as a model as a kid, so getting to fly an authentic simulation of one is something I would never of dreamed of.

It's certainly starting to feel a little Faustian.

My Southwest Afghanistan license has been replaced by an A10-A license which I already had. Obviously something has gone wrong, if someone from ED can shed some light on this it would be appreciated.

I'm sorry what was that?

Are you serious? Get in your Rotor and find them yourself you bum.

People honestly thought the SW was final? The really bad textures are clearly the guide layer they work from for placing objects and creating tiles, there are plenty of areas that are fully completed and they are jaw dropping even at low altitude. This will be the new benchmark, and winter textures are coming.

Patiently waiting for the Chinny here so I gratefully appreciate the EA manual to thumb through while I'm waiting.

Very true.

With what's currently unfolding in the Levant, why would you want to fly anywhere else right now?

Everyone is absolutely entitled to their opinions and part of me thinks this is a social experiment by ED to gauge reactions about where to draw the line for the low res portions of the map for those that only purchase portions not the entire thing. I could of course be completely out to lunch, but ED would do well to canvas the comments if I'm wrong. I've spent most of my DCS hours since release in free camera mode looking for interesting FARP locations, I've barely even got started and I have dozens dotted around the map, the rift valley is Eden in the making. My takeaways are this; The template image that they use to place objects on is still in place and visible, it's extremely low res as you'd expect to minimize lag whilst world building, some areas do not have full altitude rendering either so dunes look flat, no doubt to keep performance up before final meshing and optimization, this would also explain highly facetted mountains which is not ubiquitous, I found sections of fully rendered dunes and facet less mountains with all appropriate textures and bump maps applied. Turkmenistan and Pakistan are not just more mountains, the density of urban and agricultural areas in those two countries is staggering and is far beyond anything ED have produced in the past. Sure, the placeholder textures and facetted mountains are currently an ugly duckling, but one day this map will be a swan.

You really are testing the limits of DCS by choosing rotors on an old rig. I own every rotor apart from the Kiowa and primarily fly the Hind, they're all resource hogs, stay clear of the Apache but the Gazelle is very CPU friendly if you ever plan on purchasing more mods.

Somebody really needs to get in touch with health and safety before a fire breaks out.

I'm an ex Steam user after their refund policy became unworkable for testing new modules. I fixed my problem by accessing my DCS user account and re-transferring my Steam FC3 license to DCS.

I just took another reccy with the airport free camera, there are a lot of fun and deep canyons that they've already started buffing up, there's some jaw dropping scenery, higher res and colour matched textures and higher polygon count in the relevant mountainous areas and we'll have a winner. In the meantime we need to get started on some static templates to inject some life into the map.

Found some pretty nicely rendered mountains, it's not quite the Star Wars canyons, but there is at least evidence that the lower res ones are far from representative of the final product.

+1 - To use the South Atlantic map as an example which was lets face it a dog's dinner of a map at launch, now look at it, it's literally jaw dropping. Kola got shredded at launch and is now undeniably a new benchmark. I honestly believe that Afghanistan has the potential to be on par with both of those maps, sub par textures and mountain rendering issues aside, I'm not seeing anything that can't be fixed, but that's just my personal choice to be positive about a game that I love in a world that I increasingly despair for, other opinions are available.

I'm also a rotor head and it will take a brave man with a very large stick to get me out of my Hind, but the options are as you say limited, and this is the crux of the problem, ED has zero competition, yet they don't at least in my view, treat their customers with the same level of disdain as Apple or INVIDIA, by accepting the terms of EA, we get to voice opinions and affect the QC of the final product, feedback can be constructive and yield positive results, trying to form an angry mob to burn down ED is not constructive.

My point is as you just so wonderfully reiterated, life is a giant dog sh*t sandwich, we are all forced to eat it regardless of how we feel about it, but we can make purchasing choices, if one has a tendency towards disappointment due to unrealistic expectations or just being sour about life, maybe steer clear of EA, at least wait until people review it, as someone who suffers from crippling anxiety, my mental health was greatly improved by not engaging in situations that antagonized it. Life skills 101, and I'm sorry you're dealing with cancer.