FLIGHT Gameplay. Do you like it?

[Xpendable 0]

I've now played around with Flight for a few hours and tried most of the different features (such as Flight, Missions, Challenges) and have played with the weather settings and time settings. Here are my thoughts:

• This feels like an Xbox 360 game. I know that many of you will disagree with me, but that's what it feels like to me after playing with it for 2 days. Just take a look at all of the Xbox-like achievements you can earn. You actually get an achievement for crashing a plane 5 times. And there's another achievement for crashing your plane 100 times. I couldn't find any way to turn these achievements off, which can even be earned while you are doing free flight. Say what you will, but that is too arcady for me.
• Graphics were pretty decent and the framerate was impressively smooth. I don't have the best computer, although it is relatively decent: QX6700 quad-core extreme overclocked to 3.2Ghz, 4 GB ram, Vista 64-bit, (2x) Geforce 8800 GTX cards in SLI. I ran my graphics settings all at "High". I tried setting things to Maximum and frame rate dropped to < 10 frames a second. Fortunately things look pretty nice at the High settings. I will say that Flight does have nice visuals.
• I was impressed with how much autogen there was, and the trees did look pretty good.
• I was not that impressed with the clouds. I noticed a glitch where the same cloud puffs were repeated in a line pattern over and over again as they went further and further out. This happening only in one direction of the sky. It looked like what you would see if you held up 2 mirrors facing each other and the image is duplicated out to infinity. Anybody else notice this? I consider this a minor issue that I can look past, and I'm sure it's something they (MS) can fix in the future.
• I noticed at night that the some of the lit windows in the resort complexes turn on and off every few seconds. Unfortunately, it's not a single window at a time. instead, about 10% of the windows that are on switch off and 10% of the windows that were off switch on, and this happens all at the same time. Again, not a big deal.
• I initially had a huge problem with the Games For Windows Live Client being unable to download my profile, which means I was unable to initially access the Stearman or have the ability to purchase and use DLC. I got 2 error messages over and over again and no amount of research on Google or Microsoft's support websites were of any help. I finally figured out what the problem is after trying things for 4 hours. Apparently you can not have Cisco's VPN software installed -- The GFWLClient.exe simply will not function properly if you have that VPN software installed, regardless of whether the VPN is active or not (it was not). I have to use this software for work. Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it to get the Games for Windows Live Client to connect and download my profile. Good thing that I usually use a WinXP Virtual Machine to do my VPN stuff, so that really doesn't end up being an issue.
• I have turned off all of the assists to get the most realistic flight model. Unfortunately, the throttle does not seem to be working properly with my X52 in this game. Pulling the throttle all the way back on the Stearman still yields like 60% engine power. What??? That's not right. For now I'm assuming it's a glitch. This means that I currently have to pull mixture to idle cutoff in order to land. The plane just won't land with the throttle at idle (and I even played tried maximum RPM and minimum RPM on the prop). I double-check the throttle in the Game Controllers control panel and I am getting full range of motion on the throttle. Very odd. I'll setup my Saitek TPM later instead of using the X52's throttle to see if I get anything different.
• I was not able to spin the Stearman despite stalling the aircraft with fully cross-controlled rudder and ailerons and full power. I never even got so much as a wing dip. This was with all assists turned off. That is not realistic at all. A real Stearman WILL spin.
• I'm not too impressed with the Icon A5. I'm not faulting the flight model here, I just think the A5 doesn't have much power. That's probably true in real life since it's a sport category plane. I'm surprised the A5 doesn't even have a compass. Really? Wow. Don't get lost in that plane! I guess you can always turn the map on.
• I was impressed with the shadowing on the Stearman at dusk. That looked really good. I was not impressed with the shadowing on the Icon A5.
• The instruments were smooth like they are in XPlane-10. Much, much, much better than FSX.
• I tried a few of the challenges and a few of the missions. They all had an Xbox 360 feel to them.
• I was surprised that there were no rotating airport beacons. You know, the green and white beacons that help you identify that there is an airport 15 nm away. Those are oddly absent. The flashing strobes at the end of some of the bigger runways is unrealistic from a distance. They just don't light up the sky that much in real life on a clear day with good visbility. That's something they should tweak.

My bottom line is this:I just can't get past the feeling of this being a game. There are those that will argue that this is not a game and that this is a full-fledged simulator under the covers. While there is a flight simulator engine under there, it is fairly well hidden behind all the "gaming" elements. I'm sure this will be fun for some, but I'm already getting bored fast. Wow, there's an achievement for transporting 1,000,000 tons of cargo. Really? Did anybody do the math on that? The Maule has a useful load of 1,100 lbs without fuel. Full fuel takes up just over 500 lbs. Let's assume 200 lbs for the pilot. That leaves 400 lbs for cargo. 1 ton = 2000 lbs. 1,000,000 tons of cargo means you would actually have to fly 5,000,000 flights. Wow. Let's say that each flight took 30 minutes. That's 150,000,000 flight minutes. Or 2,500,000 flight hours. That's TWO MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND hours. There isn't a pilot alive that has logged that many hours. How do I know? Even if you flew 24 hours a day, it would take you 104,166.7 days to fly that many hours. Which is... wait for it... 285 years -- if you flew every minute of every day, 24 hours a day. Sooo... what *idiot* designed that achievement? :LMAO: I can only assume that MS plans a DLC aircraft in the future that will have some serious cargo hold capability. Maybe a DC-3? Oh, and just so you know... there is also a 2,000,000 ton achievement. Seriously.

[OHN 1]

You can just ignore the achievements, all games have achievements now, its not going to ruin your flying that sometimes an achievement pops up. FSX is boring to most people, including me, but i respect that some peoplel like to just sit and look at a screen for hours and hours at 30000 feet where absolutely nothing happens.

[Attila 2]

You can just ignore the achievements, all games have achievements now, its not going to ruin your flying that sometimes an achievement pops up. FSX is boring to most people, including me, but i respect that some peoplel like to just sit and look at a screen for hours and hours at 30000 feet where absolutely nothing happens.

That's why some of us have failures enabled. Edited March 2, 2012 by Attila

[HiFlyer 9,371]

I like FSX, or at least the concept of it, but the practice of FSX has become more one of a tweaking experience than anything else for me, lately.Notice stutter? Tweak this. Notice roof gable problem? Replace that. Notice corruption? Reinstall this or that. Install an add on and whoops! It does not like another add on.Lets get a new graphics card. Lets buy a stronger computer.This does not even take into account the efforts to make an aging game look like anything modern. Then there are the installations, and the territory switchers, and the careful installation order, and the searching for duplicate aircraft, and that cool 3rd party module that may or may not be causing stutters...........Was I flying a sim, or tweaking my computer? It was at the point that once you had everything "tweaked" to some semblance of stable working order, you were forever thereafter terrified of changing anything for any reason, for fear of blowing over the whole fragile house of cards.Imagine how this state of affairs looks to a newcomer!Now here is flight. I boot up, get into my airplane and go. Hopefully with everything (at least at first) coming from a central source, everything with flight will be just that easy. Install it, and just go fly! Just that simplicity alone will make it worth it for many, and honestly, the lack of the need for 200 page manuals and possibly an engineering degree will allow new people to gradually ease into the hobby at a speed and level that is simply not catered to by the present market and its focus on ever greater complexity.That market needed a firm, maybe even violent shakeup to keep it from flying up its own navel and never being seen again.Do I like flight? Yes I do. I missed badly the old joy of just getting in and going. I missed the fun of just spinning through the air and of diving heedlessly at the ground without worrying about roof gables or whether my lod was correct, or whether I should change the cloud resolution and what was causing that occasional texture flash.........When was the last time I laughed in FSX, like I did with the chickens mission in Flight!Flight lets me just fly! And yes, I like that a lot.

[Buckster 0]

I let my son try flight" this evening(he's 7) this evening - as I've possibily been playing Flight with too negative "eyes"he didn't like take to it at all - his first comments were(1) Graphics do not look good (he has played FSX in the past)(2) Where are all the planes - what exciting planes are there ?I remember as a youngster playing FS4 and what got me into flightsims was playing around with lots of different aicraft, landing at locations all round the world. This got me into flightsims.

[simmerhead 885]

You can just ignore the achievements, all games have achievements now, its not going to ruin your flying that sometimes an achievement pops up. FSX is boring to most people, including me, but i respect that some peoplel like to just sit and look at a screen for hours and hours at 30000 feet where absolutely nothing happens.

I like the achievements, but I'd like to be in control of when to earn them.

[axelb9 0]

F.ex. I could sign up as a student pilot and though various challenges earn a pilots liscence, or I could get a job as a transport pilot and get a series of missions themed around transporting goods and livestock, or I could be hired as a coast guard pilot and do a series of SAR missions. These kinds of campaigns would not be the entire game, but complement the freedom that allready exists.

These are there. Try to acquire some of the Live achievements. Eg. there is one where you need to transport 6 different kinds of animals. I started from Wheeler where on the job board I found arequest to take the airfiled pigs to some old geezer on Molokai. After landing on Kalaupapa I found an ad for taking someone's cats back to Dilingham. And so on until I get the cheevo. And there are a good few others like this.Alex