Yesterday Wright II ended as scheduled. But contrary to most time-limited game worlds, there won't be a third run at this time.
If you recall, Wright II was an experimental game world launched to test out a little development project I treated myself to at the end of 2025. The idea was simple: If we moved the source of demand from airports to actual places (like cities and towns) and made it a function of population size, we could feed historical population data into the system and get out historical demand. Not realistic per se, but hopefully plausible. But given the short development time invested into this experiment, it comes as no surprise that the results weren't too convincing.
Firstly, while the idea of modelling absolute demand as a function of population density makes sense and should yield acceptable results eventually, my first stab at this was just too simple. Real-world demand for air traffic is a result of countless factors, most of which currently aren't in our data. One prime example is touristic destinations, where the size of the local population is completely detached from the (sometimes) massive air traffic they receive.
Secondly, this was an experiment that had the goal of proper historic game worlds in mind but could only really address one tiny part of it. So while Wright II featured "historic demand" and many aircraft types from the 80s, there were inconsistencies left and right. Like airports that shouldn't exist yet or - worse - airports that should exist but were already replaced by their successors in our data. Or the fact that there should have been two Germanies at the time.
Long story short, the overall result wasn't satisfactory. That said, the respective ideas and features remain on the roadmap and will be pursued further. Proper historic game worlds are a frequently voiced request by players, and I am personally convinced that in the long run, location-based demand and an artificial model for absolute demand are the way to go for many reasons besides historic game worlds. But getting this right will require a lot more work, both in terms of development and data research.
All that aside, Wright II was a regular time-limited game world. As such, you can, of course, find the final stats on the forums. Congrats to the airlines with the highest scores and thanks a lot to all who came along for this bumpy ride! Let me know how you liked it!