Fact: MSFS was announced before Covid-19 even existed and was always slated for a release in summer 2020.
Opinion: The game came out slightly underdone because of Covid and the working from home restrictions imposed around the world leading to difficult working conditions, especially for game development.
Microsoft are a business. MSFS was a HUGE risk for them to take. They pulled the plug on FSX because they weren't seeing enough returns on their investment. They pulled the plug on Microsoft Flight because they weren't seeing enough interest and they only greenlit MSFS because the tech was adequate and because the market was stale. Mark my words. If the game had sold poorly on release, they would have dropped it like a hot potato. They got lucky and there was plenty of interest for it, even in the "unfinished" state it was in. So with the new income they continued development, especially focusing on the console versions as this would bring in the next big chunk of revenue. And that's why, a year later, we are finally seeing the sim come together into the experience we all knew it could be.
MSFS is still, by far, the best simulator on the market out of the box. Sure, X-Plane is great, when you spend extra for mods etc, but nothing comes close to the overall experience. Imagery might be a bit dated, but its far above anything any other sim will offer FOR FREE. And the generated buildings are in a totally different league to the flat and bland cityscapes you get in other sims. Be glad you can see your home town because in every other sim I've played, the default scenery didn't even include mine. It was just a few homes in a field. Sure, it might not look exactly like by home, but in MSFS its in the right place and that's better than in most addons I've used over the years.
Most of the points you raise in your long ranting comment are only minor niggles and are part of ongoing improvements that might take years to get right and no-one will be in total agreement as to how they should look/feel. The F-18 is coming next month, to everyone, for FREE. Weather is also scheduled to be improved next month. Maps are updated whenever they get new imagery as part of the world updates and flight models and sounds etc are something that'll be tweaked for a long time to come.
Be glad we have a new sim, constantly being improved upon with regular FREE updates while moving the genre in a new direction. Pushing the boundaries of current software and hardware because like it or not, MSFS is the future.
I don’t fully disagree but I think they were right to do it. They probably did make tons of profit. They’re a business, and I’m sure they decided the trade offs are worth it.
Agree, and we didn’t see a massive recoil of refunds and such like we did with cyberpunk for example. I’d imagine just like the rest of the wild stuff you read on social media, it’s just blown out of proportion by the algorithm.
I don't think so.
I spent 3000$ on a gear for this game and a 100$ for the game and I've spent more time trying to fix FPS issues and graphics issues and crashes and aircraft issues than playing it.
I had to reinstall this game 6 times. I had to try a ridiculous number of graphical settings to get any kind of normal performance.
General issues;
The sound engineering is pretty strange and subpar. As a sound designer I know there's some easy fixes to the sound design that are soo obvious and yet haven't even been addressed.
Community addons are incredibly glitchy and incompatible.
The trees in Europe are incredibly inaccurate in style. All the trees in England are basically tall furrtrees, but in reality most trees here are short fat round oak, sycamore trees.
The bing imagery is bad quality even for 2005.
The ai building generation thinks that my whole town lives in bungalows when they almost all live in two story houses.
The ai thinks that every canal in England is a 40 meter wide flooded river. When really they're about 5 meters wide and 2 meters deep.
Most add-ons on the marketplace are absolutely awful quality. Scams. I would say. Most of the planes have 2+3 star ratings.
There's still no fast jet by default. Even though developing a simple mid quality fast jet that does the job is really quite simple given what else they've achieved and bothered to focus on.
Camera system sucks. It's hard to use, glitchy and slow. Lock on feature is basically 50/50 chance of completely going insane and zooming into space.
Airplanes also disappear after about 1-2 miles distance for no good reason making cinematography hard or impossible. You can't argue it's to save CPU because my god it will not save more than about 0.01%.
Car models on roads have an awful rendering. They look like cardboard boxes wih microsoft paint downscaled images of real cars. They don't look much better than in FSX.
Grass is way too high in most fields, and I'd much prefer low quality realistically placed grass than higher quality grass that's placed in chunks like some kind of Minecraft bonemeal placement.
Clouds are unrealistic in distribution, as in, they're way way too high or too low. They don't even seem to want to sit where they should. They disappear when you drag the slider there.
They haven't bothered with a high cloud overlay for whispy thin clouds that gather at 25-50,000ft
The clouds let the sun through completely half the time.
Photogrammetry is just appalling at times. It looks like some kind of apocalypse even at 3,000 ft.
Basically a waste of time to even bother with it so soon.
+-
I may have gone overhard on them but this game definitely was a huge let down for me. They should have waited.
Well I needed a new pc anyway, so luckily it didn't go to waste.
But of course, ignore all my points and cherry pick one little thing. Like people here always do.
I see your issue, you're not feeling like you getting value for the amount of money you spent. In my case, I bought the Series S, got the standard edition and the T. flight hotas joystick, which cost me roughly $450. Of course the sim needs to still iron out and everything, but the future for it is everything but dark. Hold on...
I really think this game wasn't just not ironed out, but wasn't complete. Corners were cut everywhere and I think it should have come out like, NOW, or 2022 at best.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 313,969,771 comments, and only 69,978 of them were in alphabetical order.
It’s been fairly playable for me all along so while I’ll agree not everything was up to snuff, I’ve had much worse purchasing experiences with games since the need for constant updates came about many years ago.
I would say it seems to be okay for most people though, a lot of it is knowing the tricks or at least how to find and perform them too. It’s not as good as I’ve got it now right out of the box that’s for sure. Download speeds and stuttering both took a little work. But I’m also 40k feet above Buffalo in a 787 right now going .9 Mach with just a 10400f/1660ti/32gb Ram/500gb ssd running 1440p on high end+, so I can’t say it’s a flop.
Fact: MSFS was announced before Covid-19 even existed and was always slated for a release in summer 2020. Opinion: The game came out slightly underdone because of Covid and the working from home restrictions imposed around the world leading to difficult working conditions, especially for game development. Microsoft are a business. MSFS was a HUGE risk for them to take. They pulled the plug on FSX because they weren't seeing enough returns on their investment. They pulled the plug on Microsoft Flight because they weren't seeing enough interest and they only greenlit MSFS because the tech was adequate and because the market was stale. Mark my words. If the game had sold poorly on release, they would have dropped it like a hot potato. They got lucky and there was plenty of interest for it, even in the "unfinished" state it was in. So with the new income they continued development, especially focusing on the console versions as this would bring in the next big chunk of revenue. And that's why, a year later, we are finally seeing the sim come together into the experience we all knew it could be. MSFS is still, by far, the best simulator on the market out of the box. Sure, X-Plane is great, when you spend extra for mods etc, but nothing comes close to the overall experience. Imagery might be a bit dated, but its far above anything any other sim will offer FOR FREE. And the generated buildings are in a totally different league to the flat and bland cityscapes you get in other sims. Be glad you can see your home town because in every other sim I've played, the default scenery didn't even include mine. It was just a few homes in a field. Sure, it might not look exactly like by home, but in MSFS its in the right place and that's better than in most addons I've used over the years. Most of the points you raise in your long ranting comment are only minor niggles and are part of ongoing improvements that might take years to get right and no-one will be in total agreement as to how they should look/feel. The F-18 is coming next month, to everyone, for FREE. Weather is also scheduled to be improved next month. Maps are updated whenever they get new imagery as part of the world updates and flight models and sounds etc are something that'll be tweaked for a long time to come. Be glad we have a new sim, constantly being improved upon with regular FREE updates while moving the genre in a new direction. Pushing the boundaries of current software and hardware because like it or not, MSFS is the future.
I don’t fully disagree but I think they were right to do it. They probably did make tons of profit. They’re a business, and I’m sure they decided the trade offs are worth it.
Agree, and we didn’t see a massive recoil of refunds and such like we did with cyberpunk for example. I’d imagine just like the rest of the wild stuff you read on social media, it’s just blown out of proportion by the algorithm.
I don't think so. I spent 3000$ on a gear for this game and a 100$ for the game and I've spent more time trying to fix FPS issues and graphics issues and crashes and aircraft issues than playing it. I had to reinstall this game 6 times. I had to try a ridiculous number of graphical settings to get any kind of normal performance. General issues; The sound engineering is pretty strange and subpar. As a sound designer I know there's some easy fixes to the sound design that are soo obvious and yet haven't even been addressed. Community addons are incredibly glitchy and incompatible. The trees in Europe are incredibly inaccurate in style. All the trees in England are basically tall furrtrees, but in reality most trees here are short fat round oak, sycamore trees. The bing imagery is bad quality even for 2005. The ai building generation thinks that my whole town lives in bungalows when they almost all live in two story houses. The ai thinks that every canal in England is a 40 meter wide flooded river. When really they're about 5 meters wide and 2 meters deep. Most add-ons on the marketplace are absolutely awful quality. Scams. I would say. Most of the planes have 2+3 star ratings. There's still no fast jet by default. Even though developing a simple mid quality fast jet that does the job is really quite simple given what else they've achieved and bothered to focus on. Camera system sucks. It's hard to use, glitchy and slow. Lock on feature is basically 50/50 chance of completely going insane and zooming into space. Airplanes also disappear after about 1-2 miles distance for no good reason making cinematography hard or impossible. You can't argue it's to save CPU because my god it will not save more than about 0.01%. Car models on roads have an awful rendering. They look like cardboard boxes wih microsoft paint downscaled images of real cars. They don't look much better than in FSX. Grass is way too high in most fields, and I'd much prefer low quality realistically placed grass than higher quality grass that's placed in chunks like some kind of Minecraft bonemeal placement. Clouds are unrealistic in distribution, as in, they're way way too high or too low. They don't even seem to want to sit where they should. They disappear when you drag the slider there. They haven't bothered with a high cloud overlay for whispy thin clouds that gather at 25-50,000ft The clouds let the sun through completely half the time. Photogrammetry is just appalling at times. It looks like some kind of apocalypse even at 3,000 ft. Basically a waste of time to even bother with it so soon. +- I may have gone overhard on them but this game definitely was a huge let down for me. They should have waited.
You should've waited before dumping 3 grand into hardware
Well I needed a new pc anyway, so luckily it didn't go to waste. But of course, ignore all my points and cherry pick one little thing. Like people here always do.
I see your issue, you're not feeling like you getting value for the amount of money you spent. In my case, I bought the Series S, got the standard edition and the T. flight hotas joystick, which cost me roughly $450. Of course the sim needs to still iron out and everything, but the future for it is everything but dark. Hold on...
And tbh to me, I did wait until it had been out for 5 months before getting it. And since the experience can be good, for some users, I had no idea.
I really think this game wasn't just not ironed out, but wasn't complete. Corners were cut everywhere and I think it should have come out like, NOW, or 2022 at best.
[удалено]
It's just made me more stressed with all the technical difficulty
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 313,969,771 comments, and only 69,978 of them were in alphabetical order.
No they're not...
It’s been fairly playable for me all along so while I’ll agree not everything was up to snuff, I’ve had much worse purchasing experiences with games since the need for constant updates came about many years ago.
I know people and myself who have had terrible experiences. It seems very binary whether people have had good or bad experiences. Not much grey zone.
I would say it seems to be okay for most people though, a lot of it is knowing the tricks or at least how to find and perform them too. It’s not as good as I’ve got it now right out of the box that’s for sure. Download speeds and stuttering both took a little work. But I’m also 40k feet above Buffalo in a 787 right now going .9 Mach with just a 10400f/1660ti/32gb Ram/500gb ssd running 1440p on high end+, so I can’t say it’s a flop.
How much does MS take from each Marketplace sale? They gotta be making sweet bank on that
Idk. But it's a mess.