New MS Flight Sim shown at E3

[Woozie 732]

37 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

The FS trailer is among the E3´s most viewed ones:
 

https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1138851365340553216

Well, lets take on Cyberpunk 2077, shall we? We would need 15 members creating 1 million views each, who's volunteering?

[DaWu 779]

5 minutes ago, F737NG said:

 

A lot of surprise on Twitter about how popular Flight Sim is. Almost the same level of surprise as it is to Americans that football/soccer is popular around the rest of the world. 😁

Thank goodness MFS trailer views are above Animal Crossings: New Horizons. Might as well cancel the Flight Sim reboot if fluffy cartoon characters could beat it!

Super Smash Bros is above Flight Sim though. Says it all about the gaming scene

[strider1 575]

4 hours ago, Speedbird 217 said:

The flightsim community never ceases to amaze. Reading through this topic or actually this entire new board, it all seems to have kicked off quite a bit of hysteria and immediately the usual factions have formed.

Here’s the people asking whether it’ll run on Windows 98, what hardware you will need to run it or just complaining about something else vaguely related, like how bad big evil Microsoft are.

Then we have the “fake news apostles”. People that just repeat speculation and their opinion often enough for it to become fact. Apparently the new simulator will be nothing else but Mario Kart in the air, will be cloud based and streamed, not support any third party developers, is just a ploy to kill X-Plane and P3D, and developed together with the CIA and NSA from Microsoft’s Volcano Lair labs in North Korea in an attempt to establish a global “big brother” surveillance network.

 

5

lol.... Too late! MS, Google, Facebook, have been harvesting out data for a long time. Ever since FaceBook sold our data, ive been getting Robocalls day and night. If I google something, I will get an ad on MS outlook within seconds. Facebook was created by Darpa to track "A person's entire existence" Pentagon Kills Lifelog Project 02/04/04. Facebook founded 02/04/04, coincidence? I don't think so. The "HAMMER'! You heard it here first! Future proves past! 

[Torg Smith 31]

13 minutes ago, Woozie said:

Well, lets take on Cyberpunk 2077, shall we? We would need 15 members creating 1 million views each, who's volunteering?

Well, I have to admit, I watched Cyberpunk 2077 about three times. XD That game looks good too.

[eslader 1,782]

15 hours ago, irrics said:

Yeah but does $60 actually get you going?

I find the base offering to be pathetic and you are likely well into the hundreds of dollars to get an actually good experience off the ground on that old platform

Yes, it unquestionably gets you going. When your kid wants to take up band, you don't go out and buy him a $3,300 Besson Sovereign trumpet. You go down to the local music store and rent him something for 30 bucks a month. It's probably dented all to hell, and at least one of the valves is sticky, and it sounds more like a kazoo than a concert trumpet, but it gets him going, and then if he finds that he's serious about it and it isn't just some passing fancy, you start looking into getting him a better instrument.

Same thing with flight sims. No one is going to get into the hobby if they have to plunk down a car payment. $60 gets you going so you can find out if it's something that will hold your interest, and if it is, then you start improving your sim.

14 hours ago, Woozie said:

Shows that "Flight" wasn't as bad as some want to make it.

I thought Flight had great potential. It was really pretty out of the box. From what I could tell, the flight physics were fine.

The business model is what did it in. Ironically, everyone hates the Icon A5 that was in Flight. The real plane is actually really cool. It's like a winged waverunner. It'll go almost anywhere. My wife even wanted one, and she doesn't care about airplanes.

What sucks about the real A5 is the company behind it. The asinine 40-page contract you used to have to sign (in effect when Flight came out) to buy one was beyond stupid. You're not allowed to resell it without paying Icon transfer fees, if you do sell it you have to require that your buyer undergo factory training or *you* owe Icon an extra $5,000, you're not allowed to keep it more than 30 years, every 10 years you have to have the airframe overhauled (that's fine) *by mechanics who have an agreement with Icon* (that's not) at a guaranteed $15,000 the first time, and unlimited charges from then on and if you don't have it done by Icon's pet mechanic you're in breach of contract, etc etc.

The parallels between Icon's business model and Flight's were interesting to say the least. But unlike Microsoft, Icon didn't just fold up shop when they found that sales were kinda sucky. They got rid of most of the BS in the contract and now they've got a 1,300 order backlog. Microsoft should have learned from them and gotten rid of the "you're going to pay us about the price of a Porsche if you want everything by the end of this" garbage.

14 hours ago, Paraffin said:

The question is -- would a monthly subscription suppress the market for add-ons? It won't for the fanatics, but are there enough people willing to pay for add-ons when they're already paying monthly? Enough to support a healthy add-on market? 

Just speculative questions before we know more.

Tough call. A lot of us already pay a monthly subscription to Navigraph, and we still buy addons. I'm not sure if I qualify as a fanatic or not, honestly. I sim, a lot, but I can go days or even weeks without a flight if other things occupy my time. I spend a lot of money on p3d, but it's not like I'm sacrificing life necessities to do it. Where I think you have a big point is that not everyone is lucky enough to have the disposable income to throw away on pixel-crack. I'd really like for MS to find that balance between affordability and featureset out of the box. I think it did, in the past. FS2004 was probably the best example. You could donk around in that for years without getting bored, without ever downloading an addon. Going back further, pre-internet, I remember downloading a few things from a local flight sim BBS on a 2400 baud modem. It'd take something like 6 hours to get one plane, so I didn't do it often. Somehow the hobby held my interest from the subLOGIC days until boards like Avsim and Flightsim.com came along to make grabbing stuff for the sim easy and fast.

And in the days before I had disposable income, I was stuck with freeware addons, most of which weren't any better quality-wise than what came in the box. It still held my interest. Maybe that makes me a fanatic, I dunno.

The problem with a subscription model, I think, isn't so much the 3rd party market, but convincing people who haven't used a sim before to pick it up when it's a monthly fee. Everquest had a heck of a time getting subscribers at first. I remember talking with fellow gamers who would say things like "don't ever get Everquest - they charge you for the game once a month, forever! Total ripoff!" And it wasn't until WOW came along and people started generating buzz that the idea of a game you never stop paying for took off in the first place.

One thing that MMOs do to retain customers that I think flight sims will have a hard time matching is that they shower you with pixel crack. There's always a legendary sword or a mithril armor set or some other stupid thing to spend a month grinding for. That triggers something in our psychology that makes us willing to stay in the game, usually doing some grindy thing that isn't fun at all, just to get that item. And then once we get it, there's immediately some monster we go to use it on that's too powerful for us but we're in luck, because the Grinder's Sword of Sisyphus is available by running this one quest only 4,000 times!

I can sort of see how that might work in flight sims - you start in a Cub, have to run trips to earn enough for a Cessna, eventually working your way up to a 747 or something. But the trouble with that is that if an MMO wants to make some new bauble for us to pursue, they have an artist spend 30 minutes drawing it, then plug in some numbers for its stats and toss it into the game. In a flight sim, you're gonna have to build a whole airplane - and if it's gonna capture people's interest it's gonna have to be at *least* Carenado-level if not higher, and that takes enough time that it's doubtful they could crank out the merchandise fast enough to keep people subscribing.

The other problem with that is that there's really only so far you can go. In an MMO you can always make a more powerful sword because it's fantasy. In a flight sim, once you hit the A380 you're capped for size. Once you hit the SR71, you're capped for speed. The only way to go up from there is to start dropping fictional airplanes, and then it's not a simulator at all anymore. So at some point simmers will reach "end game" and they've been conditioned to a goal-oriented sim experience. Once the goal disappears, they'll tend to lose interest even if they would otherwise have kept going. I hope MS thinks about these things if they're considering a subscription model.

 

Edited June 13, 2019 by eslader

[Woozie 732]

8 minutes ago, Torg Smith said:

Well, I have to admit, I watched Cyberpunk 2077 about three times. XD That game looks good too.

Haha, pls watch the FS trailer four times to compensate 🙂

 

Yeah, looking forward to it too, i just hope the 2077 in the title doesn't indicate the release year...

[DaWu 779]

3 minutes ago, Woozie said:

Haha, pls watch the FS trailer four times to compensate 🙂

 

Yeah, looking forward to it too, i just hope the 2077 in the title doesn't indicate the release year...

CP releasedate was announced during E3: 16.4.2020

[Guest]

55 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

What has not been chatted about is the possibility of network flying via Xbox Game Pass..

It could be interesting..& of course, Microsoft is going to monetize this whole thing.

It kind of is at 1:20 in the Video.

[ckyliu 1,749]

 

51 minutes ago, Anders Bermann said:

There's a lot of 'evidence' in this thread, that is getting tossed around. Users are just jumping on the 'hype-train', or even boosting it, with bold - and might I say baseless - claims of features which will be included, without a shred of evidence of anything other than a teaser (or trailer).

So you're allowed to baselessly speculate but the rest of us aren't? Let me remind you again:

On 6/11/2019 at 5:25 PM, Anders Bermann said:

My take on this (and I'll probably get hell for saying this, but here goes...) is the following:

• It will be a cloud-based subscription game.
• All the heavy computational number crunching (scenery, autogen, weather data, physics simulation etc), is done in the cloud, and the local user will be responsible of rendering the final product.
• It's an advanced Google-Earth-Simulator type of game (with an improved physics engine and shaders) and with a set of airplanes. I'm sorry to say so, but I doubt we'll see 3rd party additions (God, I hope I'm wrong here!). [Truncated, it goes on further]

1 hour ago, Anders Bermann said:

Also, you claim, that PMDG would be forced to drop prices, if they were to announce/sell their products on MS Store? Again, speculation - AND you're basing that conclusion on the assumption, that PMDG's prices is already too high, for what you're getting. That's your own opinion, which you cleverly are generalizing. I really don't think, that PMDG would have any problems, with maintaining their prices on a 3rd-party store.

I'm with @tonywob here; whilst the PMDG faithful roll over and pay the exorbitant P3D prices, I can't see the mass market tolerating it when there's cheaper alternatives that would suit them; should FS11 have a successful integrated marketplace, RSR/PMDG will have to decide if they're willing to accept lower prices and margins for increased market share, or stick with the P3D pricing they've now become accustomed to recieving. I think they've had things their own way for too long, a shake up is overdue.

Edited June 13, 2019 by ckyliu

[Guest]

1 hour ago, GCBraun said:

ALL base flight simulators are. Or can you do any serious simming with P3D and its default airplanes/airports and no weather??

Aerosoft is certainly working with Microsoft, so that would give us, at very least, their decent Airbuses. If that comes built-in with the Sim then you would probably have the most advanced default aircraft like...ever...

What are you citing as your source for that claim?

[eslader 1,782]

6 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

whilst the PMDG faithful roll over and pay the exorbitant P3D prices, I can't see the mass market tolerating it when there's cheaper alternatives that would suit them;

Nor should they, if the cheaper alternatives suit them. I don't think PMDG is marketing to casual simmers who just want to fly around and look at scenery. They're offering something for the more hardcore virtual pilots.

In real life, I drive an MR2. It's quick, agile, lots of fun, and I can take the roof off when it's sunny. You can say the same thing, only much moreso, about the Porsche GT3 convertible, and the people who can afford it and want a higher-grade driving experience than I get are welcome to buy it. Neither choice is wrong.

If a dealership put a GT3 next to an MR2, I don't think sales would drop for either car. Those of us without GT3 money would still get the MR2, and the GT3 crowd would not look at the old MR2 sitting there and say "well hell, why am I paying so much for this brand new GT3 when I can get the MR2 for 5 grand!?" Guaranteed they'd still buy the GT3.

PMDG is selling sky-GT3's, and for the people who can afford it and want that level of fidelity in their addon planes, it's great. Putting a PMDG next to a Carenado isn't going to reduce sales for either addon.

 

[G-RFRY 1,709]

Is this based on some users thinking that Microsoft don't have the resources and talent to produce an advanced default aircraft.    

[Wobbie 938]

Indeed, Aerosoft & PMDG & their likes do not a perfect sim make.

If they are targeting gamers as well as simmers, the greater mass of users, will, in all probability expect fast jets. Others prefer the older props.

Not everybody enjoys procedural flying. I'm sure the basic initial MFS will cater for the masses, & not a niche market. 

Then, who actually knows... 

[LHookins 3,102]

Good posts, eslander.

There's no reason why simple and complex versions of the same aircraft can't coexist at different prices.  You can use the free default Cessna 172 or pay for a better one.  P3D has two Constellations included, but I never looked at them;  I bought the A2A Constellation.

You don't want to force a new player to use a PMDG aircraft.  But it's good that they exist for those who want that kind of experience.

Hook

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

1 hour ago, DaWu said:

From the FS2CREW Facebook page

Here is another example of a business trying to protect itself to possible negative events, especially considering theirs is linked to the ones of PMDG and co.

I think addon developers which shows this are giving themselves a bit too much value. They are not irreplaceable, and with a new game, new audience and new players can also come new developers. Microsoft is building their sim. Theirs. This is not a joint Microsoft + addon developers effort. And we sure as hell saw, during the years, how addon developers also lacked knowledge and resources to do their own simulator. 

I also think that Microsoft has plenty of time to contact them, if they want, and more importantly release more info about the game itself and a possible/probable SDK. The game will be out in more of a year, there will surely be closed alpha, closed betas and public betas and it's likely that our feedback (and theirs) will be listened to by then, provided it isn't too different from what Microsoft view of their new simulator is.

As usual, my two cents.