My wishlist for brand-new ATC game (not strictly to one dev)

[Dell Conagher]

So I've been downing a whole lot of Unmatched ATC on my mobile, and if there's one thing I can say, it is ADDICTING. I've been looking for some games similar to Unmatched ATC on Steam, and Tower! 3D aside, there...just isn't anything that good. It's mostly 2D top-down games, which may be fun, but I'm seeking a hardcore ATC game. I would like to buy Tower! 3D but the entire thing is just straight up overpriced. Meanwhile, a Japanese dev has worked hard on his ATC franchise, with ATC4 being out for some time now (that guy is straight-up understated), and I'd like to put out a wishlist on what I desire in my dream but strictly hypothetical air traffic control simulator. So as Phil DeFranco said, let's just jump straight into it.

1. HD Graphics - Now this seems like a fairly obvious choice. I'm not asking for something that is CoD: Modern Warfare when it comes to the graphics level, but I want them to be good enough that aircraft look realistic, whilst at the same time does not take too much memory. This is Tower! 3D's largest failing, as the aircraft models look so bad I'd bet the dev was on weed or something when he made the models. ATC4 - the fourth ATC game from Japan, which I'll be referring to specifically - has better models, but the polygons are far too obvious to be realistic. The fans are not translucent as they should be, which kind of kills the immersion that a game requires. There is a reason why I put HD graphics as the first and most important.

2. Intuitive gameplay - If you go and see ATC4 game clips, the system is very good. You don't have to click on an aircraft in order to assign instructions - the way you access an aircraft to give it instructions is via a strip system - you click on the strip, and the camera moves away from Aircraft A to Aircraft B, at least when you are centred on Aircraft A. Then the strip changes, and now you have 4 or 5 max. instructions that you just click and the aircraft does. I'd like to see this system adopted in new ATC games to make the system easier to understand than currently. Also, I'd like a sort of system that, when you assign a plane to taxi to a runway, pulls up a map with points scattered around the taxiways. The point is those points on the taxiways are waypoints, so if there happens to be an incident that blocks a taxiway, you can just assign the plane to go around it by picking a different taxiway.

3. Airport choices - I believe that, no doubt, @BigFatSimulations has made a good effort cherry picking airports for AM3D and AM3DV2, but I'd like to see more airports, like Bristol, Warsaw-Chopin, Berlin-Schoenefeld/Brandenburg, Manchester, Moscow-Zhukovsky or Domodedovo, Hong Kong's old Kai Tak, etc. Now I'll drop in a bombshell and say that the ATC4 dev's airport choices were good, but there are very little airports beyond his home country of Japan in ATC4. Now you hardcore ATC fans may say that he had already put in two international airports into his older ATC3 - Honolulu and Kai Tak, to be specific - but I'm talking a game that goes to a large number of countries/places, like 15 or something.

4. Random airport events (i.e. engine failures, aircraft spinning out, closed taxiways, etc) - This is a place where I can give props to the ATC4 dev. Whilst the actual airlines in his games don't cause any issues, there is an odd TBA Airlines (TBA being an abbreviation of the dev's name) aircraft that comes into an airport and stuff happens when it does so. It would be a nice feature that an aircraft comes in, then at random something happens on the aircraft and ultimately closes a taxiway, runway, etc. This is something that I DEEPLY desire in that hypothetical ATC game that I want.

5. Runway changes and closings due to weather conditions - The fifth thing that I want to have in my hypothetical perfect ATC game is weather conditions causing runways to shift from, say, runway 04 to 22. It's kind of tied to the same reason why I ask for random airport events - it's to keep things spicy and fun. Again, I deeply desire this sort of feature in my hypothetical game.

6. Intuitive UI - Now don't get me wrong, @BigFatSimulations has done a great effort of, if making a crude 3D airport control simulator aside (I don't mean to diss you! Sorry!), making a nice, clean and modern UI for his game, and I really like it. I would like a clean UI that is simple, easy to understand, and not overly convoluted and like a maze to find that one option that you need to execute in order to make your airport run more efficiently.

That was hard finding all the things I want in that hypothetical ATC game of mine, and hopefully you enjoyed it. I am not expecting BigFatSimulations to do it all single-handed, so a set of devs working in a sort of coalition would do. Thanks for reading!