Since the release of MSFS (and even pre-release) there has been a lot of angst on this forum against the thought that MSFS would be a "game" rather than a "sim", and that it would be "dumbed down" so that "xbox kids" and newbies could play it...all to the determent of it being acceptable to hard core simulators.  Here are a few points to consider in terms of the development approach, Microsoft's likely business plan and how it relates to the long-term health of our hobby.

Asobo/MS would have never put the development effort and time that they did into this title without being able to sell it to the masses, that is certainly a fact.  Without the masses wanting to play this we would be left with a small niche market of P3D and X-Plane.  Maybe some would have been perfectly happy to just keep playing P3D forever but I for one am very happy to see MSFS and the advances it has made.  It's not perfect, but it is a great base sim and will only get better.

Our hobby needs "kids" and newbies to get interested in order to keep it going.  This is where I draw the parallel to my other hobby, golf.  Junior golfers are a catch 22 on the golf course.  They can be slow, sometimes annoying, maybe they cheat, they occasionally need to be coached on etiquette, but they are absolutely essential to the to the future of the sport.  Why?  Golf is a sport that has it's core members generally in an older, retired age bracket (plus some middle aged folks like me trying to gets rounds in whenever we can).  These are the people who have time to play, and the money to do so.  What happens if there's no one interested in golf to replace these older golfers when they, um, move on?  The golf industry collapses. 

The same goes for new golfers.  They can be slower as they learn the game, and require patience and encouragement to foster the love of the game that most golfers have.  It takes time, but it's an investment in the future of the sport.  Does the existence of Junior and newbie golfers mean everyone else has to play like them?  No.  Do they need the support of more experienced golfers to remain engaged and interested in golf?  For sure!  Just like golf, if we aren't actively growing our participant base for this hobby it will literally and figuratively die out.  Then what?  We end up with a stagnant sim with a small market for payware addons and we all lose out (and pay more for our addons overall).  Just look at the time between FSX and P3Dv2 for an example of what could happen again.

We all were newbie simmers at one time, maybe we were even (gasp) kids when we became newbie simmers.  I first started really getting into it with FS5..I would have been 14 or so at the time.  Did I use the sim to do crazy stuff like flying under the golden gate bridge?  Sure.  Guess what, I even used the visual approach path aid to help me learn how to manually fly an ILS approach.  The sim world carried on.  Did that time also foster the interest in me that I've carried on 25 years later as a "serious" simmer?  Absolutely.  Just because someone is a kid playing on Xbox doesn't mean their incapable of learning and flying realistically.  There's no doubt that MSFS has tried to cater to both the serious crowd and the casual crowd.  As outlined above, it really has to in order to be a commercial success.  Anyone who thinks MS/Asobo could have developed something on this scale while focusing only on the hardcore market is living in a dreamland.  Money doesn't work that way and Microsoft is not building this sim out of the kindness of their hearts.

But the good news is that if you are a hardcore simmer, you can isolate yourself from the newbies.  Don't fly online unless you want to do so with VATSIM/IVAO or Pilotedge.  Turn off all of the assists and you have a base experience that looks and feels like a sim to me.  Sure the airliners aren't great, but nobody should have expected a high-fidelity airliner simulation in a default aircraft.  The big developers will step in and we'll get out high-fidelity airliners eventually.  Eventually A2A etc will be along with their excellent GA offerings if the default GA planes don't do it for you.

All in all, I just want to say be nice to the newbies and kids, encourage them, and our hobby will be stronger for it.  Just because you don't need any assists doesn't mean no one does and that they shouldn't exist at all...that sort of elitism does none of us any good.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by regis9

YASSSS! Can we just get this post pinned and make everyone read it before being granted permission to post in the FS2020 forum?!

13 minutes ago, regis9 said:

Sure the airliners aren't great, but nobody should have expected a high-fidelity airliner simulation in a default aircraft. 

There we have it again. Why is it that people on beforehand start to sort of excuse the developers by saying 'it's not to be expected to simulate an airliner with high fidelity'.

Why not? This is supposed to be the greatest flight sim release since 15 years. This is exactly what I would expect it to do, to simulate an airliner with high fidelity.

3 minutes ago, RudyB24 said:

Why not? This is supposed to be the greatest flight sim release since 15 years. This is exactly what I would expect it to do, to simulate an airliner with high fidelity.

It would not be commercial viable to do so and there are third party developers that will cater to those who want the high-fidelity aircraft.  This is not new, FSX, P3D, X-Plane have all been this way.

6 minutes ago, RudyB24 said:

There we have it again. Why is it that people on beforehand start to sort of excuse the developers by saying 'it's not to be expected to simulate an airliner with high fidelity'.

Why not? This is supposed to be the greatest flight sim release since 15 years. This is exactly what I would expect it to do, to simulate an airliner with high fidelity.

Because it already is without that...

 

Golf has too much walking to be a good game, and just enough game to spoil a good walk. Golf fairways do make pretty good emergency airfields though. 🤣

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Chock

 

9 minutes ago, RudyB24 said:

There we have it again. Why is it that people on beforehand start to sort of excuse the developers by saying 'it's not to be expected to simulate an airliner with high fidelity'.

Why not? This is supposed to be the greatest flight sim release since 15 years. This is exactly what I would expect it to do, to simulate an airliner with high fidelity.

Because we realize that MSFS invest heavily in modelling the world and weather system to address the concerns of many. That is a lot of work, and MSFS can't focus on "everything" at a detailed level.

It is not an excuse, it is the reality when developing a project this big. MSFS focussed on the broader tasks....and now...the 3PDevs can create more detailed planes to fly in the beautiful world that MSFS has created.

That is why MSFS is the greatest sim in 15 years, because it has the foundation (latest tech) to build upon for the next 15 years.

Complain all you want...no Dev is going to match what MSFS has done...and it will only get better.

 

Hi Regis

1/ I find the distinction between  game and sim utterly absurd. I consider myself an old and serious (well maybe not serious, maybe old only) simmer who plays the sim. 

The fact is that the FS20 team leaders said in the Summer of 2019 that they had hardcore simmers in mind when designing the sim and not gamers. All the recent PR campaign through open-mouthed, eye-stretched, over-vitamined YTers was in contradiction with that.  At no time MS did anything to back the early declaration with their own promotional material. Blurring the message is something you do with more care.

2/ There is a strange and very new quasi-idolization of the generic  casual gamers and newcomers. New because we have not seen that with the older versions but new chiefly because it is few months old. 

3/ I resent* that somebody could advise me to be kind and helpful. Of course I am. Always. My motto : Elitism And (tough) Love.

*kidding you of course
 

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Dominique_K

37 minutes ago, RudyB24 said:

There we have it again. Why is it that people on beforehand start to sort of excuse the developers by saying 'it's not to be expected to simulate an airliner with high fidelity'.

Why not? This is supposed to be the greatest flight sim release since 15 years. This is exactly what I would expect it to do, to simulate an airliner with high fidelity.

I think a lot of older people who aren't "gamers" don't understand the legitimate issue of developers releasing unfinished software and getting rightly lambasted for it. If the tubeliners don't function correctly then MS deserves a complete lambasting . Ubisoft, EA, and other big devs pull this garbage all the time. Hence the meme of the "day one patch"

I didn't expect PMDG level , or worry about fully functional hydraulic modeling, but the default should have impeccable AP and FMC functionality. To settle for less is enabling trashy unfinished releases to continue through the industry. This isn't some indie dev team, they had all the resources of MS and as the end user paying for a product you are doing all a disservice by trying to make any kind of excuse on launch day of unfinished products 

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Jose Munoz

 

7 minutes ago, Chock said:

Golf fairways do make pretty good emergency airfields though

Lol.

@FlyBaby Who says I'm complaining? I'm wondering why with a new released flight simulator people keep telling me I should not expect airliners to have high fidelity?

Well ... probably because they are right, and if so, that's a pity. It sounds too easy for Jorg to say 'we've made a base, others can add on that'. They have 200+ developers, they can have a mathematician, a control systems engineer and a pilot work out a high fidelity airliner.

44 minutes ago, Chock said:

Golf has too much walking to be a good game, and just enough game to spoil a good walk.

Lol that’s a good one.  Golf can be fun when it’s going well and utterly frustrating when it’s not.  I remember having a particularly bad round last year when I saw a Cessna fly overhead.  I haven’t pursued a pilot’s license due to medical reasons but I remember looking at that plane thinking “I bet they’re having a lot more fun with their hobby than I am right now!!” 😄

Haha, great post. I was thinking similar the other day, how you get the old fart, snobby core of members who snarl and stare at anyone under the age of 40 for having the temerity to be on THEIR golf course, I mean how dare we. 😄

Although in my experience its the older groups that are the slowest, I die a little inside when I see a fourball of 70 year olds in front. 😩

1 hour ago, Jose Munoz said:

To settle for less is enabling trashy unfinished releases to continue through the industry.

I'm sorry, but I find this to be a risible statement that completely fails to account for the realities of game development.   The fact is that AAA game development as it is is barely sustainable -- the cost of AAA development to modern standards is staggering, and game prices have not remotely kept up with inflation over the past 15-20 years; you can see this in this chart of inflation-adjusted game prices at the bottom of this post.  And this is just for AAA games.   The market now is more competitive than ever, and digital distribution and the rise of indie gaming has driven price expectations lower than ever before.

As it is the current situation means that game development is a crushing, almost inhumane profession with people working insane hours for pay that is often ridiculously low -- and kept so because of the many people who are willing to work for pennies because it's "cool" to make games.  Until they burn out and need to quit, that is.   If we actually paid people more and gave them reasonable hours the price tension would increase even more than it already has.

At the same time there is an ever-expanding number of different configurations of hardware and software that PC developers have to account for.    Here's the latest Steam hardware survey results *just* for video cards:  https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/

Every one of those line items is a unique case that poses the possibility of bugs.  Factor in drivers, OS versions, and other hardware in a system and it's combinatorically insane.

The simple fact is this:  The only way for AAA development to put out "better" quality is for people to work longer for less, or for consumers to accept much higher prices for games -- in a market where even a $10 increase in the cost of a game draws outrage, and lots of people feel comfortable righteously declaring that they will *never* pay $60 for a game, whatever it is.   Similarly, there is no possible way that every hardware combination can be fully tested by any developer, whatever their resources, in the limited amount of time development cycles allow. It's Just.  Not.  Feasible.

Railing about "trashy unfinished releases" is spitting in the wind -- especially in a time when near-instant global distribution of Day 0 patches is no longer miraculous, but common place.   Have we all become beta-testers to an extent we weren't before?  Perhaps, yes.   But I'd argue, from a consumer's perspective,. gaming now may be the *best* it's ever been.  People are entitled to their outrage, of course, but I find it a bit blinkered and overdone.

 

 

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by kaosfere

11 minutes ago, AllRed said:

Haha, great post. I was thinking similar the other day, how you get the old fart, snobby core of members who snarl and stare at anyone under the age of 40 for having the temerity to be on THEIR golf course, I mean how dare we. 😄

Although in my experience its the older groups that are the slowest, I die a little inside when I see a fourball of 70 year olds in front. 😩

Lol so true!  Luckily at my course most of those guys play at the crack of dawn and I am definitely a “not before 10am” golfer on weekends, or after work on weekdays so I don’t see them too often.

As a former golf instructor, I approve this message!