Duplicate post

Edited October 21, 20205 yr by Maxis

Just now, Maxis said:

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

Really? Because The Witcher 3 would seem to be in direct opposition to that opinion.

 

eslader

My comments are on the bottom of Kaosferes comments.. Not sure why my name is showing up on his quotes

AAA games tend to spend a long time in bug testing and also generally nerf the high end graphic options a bit to avoid the classic teenager playing on mum's laptop trashing the game online because when he/she wound all the settings up to max the fps went through the floor.   The exception to this was Control who blatantly said do not turn all the RT options on at once if you want any sort of frame rate,

A viable alternative to avoid bad press for a lot of Indy games is simply stay in a paid Alpha. There is one non-flightsim game I play that was in Alpha for 6 years for just that reason. They needed some income to complete the project but going public was going to get the game trashed by the more entitled internet trolls out there.

Of course MSFS is not an Indy game. However the general internet reaction to it (outside the sim community)  seems generally positive and by the time it hits Xbox and really takes off hopefully most of the major issues will be sorted.

 

 

52 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Its just that rocking the boat seems futile.

Yeah, well.  For some of us, our souls can't be quiet if that boat's not rocked at least a little now and then.  I suspect you know what I mean. 🙂

52 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

There are Avsim expatriates on other venues that ask me repeatedly why I am still here. The only answer that smacks of truth is that I do still find value, plus its familiar place that has been my flight simulation home for so long that its hard to even think of leaving, and finally because after all this time, it seems I am dusty little creature of habit.

Yeah, ditto.   For all its flaws this is a great place and I still consider it my flight sim "home".   It's why I bother to be outspoken about things like this in the first place. Like a song I really love that I've listened to a lot over the past few years says about another home of mine also in peril:  "gotta care enough to give a testament about the deeply depressing mess we're in, it's home so we better make the best of it, I want to make this [website] what it says it is."  Or something like that. 

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by kaosfere

7 hours ago, wthomas33065 said:

A while back there was a game that basically simulated every system on the Space Shuttle,  It was a huge failure.  It was too complex.  It was a switch simulator, nothing more.  I expect Flight simulators to make me feel like I'm flying an airliner,  not make me feel that I have to spend hours of training to do so.
 

I agreed with the gist of your whole post until this point.  SSM 2007 (assuming that was the sim referenced) was and still is an amazing accomplishment.  No one should have expected that level of fidelity from a generic space sim just as not one should expect that level of fidelity from a generic flight sim.  There is still a market for that level of space sim, just as there is still a market for that level of flight sim.  To equate study level as failure is not sound. The commercial failure of SSM 2007 at the time could easily be attributed to lack of distribution, marketing, and draconian copy protection.  It did not fail because it was "too complex". It was no more a switch simulator than a current accurate airline sim is a switch simulator.  Yes, there are a lot of switches, and yes, you need to understand what they do, but there is much more involved in both cases.

That's clearly not what you want, and that's fine.  That's also not the role of a mass market simulator, so you are right to call out those expecting one to be so.  There *is*, however, a very hungry audience for that type of simulator, both aviation and space, which is where some of the dissenting voices rise. If there was *no* market for in-depth simulations, then PMDG and the like would not even exist.

Personally, I am thrilled by the new base sim we can now access.  I'm not thrilled by the fidelity of the default planes, nor did I expect to be so.  I am thrilled by the efforts of mods, especially the exceptional FlyByWire A320, and look forward to what we will see in the future.  Heck, the FBW project is entirely free, so one can look at it as being included in the base price of MSFS.

44 minutes ago, Sigwolf said:

SSM 2007 (assuming that was the sim referenced) was and still is an amazing accomplishment.

That is not the game I was referring to.  I was referring to Shuttle by Virgin games and 90% of it was manipulating switches that you had no idea what they did.  It was tedious and time consuming, and unless you had the audits on which auto focused and highlighted the switch, you spent forever scanning between multiple screens to find it.

 Worst of all, it just wasn’t very fun.  
 

My point was NOT that there isn’t a market for a study level sim.  My point was that while it’s great that study level sims exist and can be built for the platform, they were never the thrust of MSFS, and further more appeal to a limited number of folks.

 Falcon 4.0 was a superb sim.  But it has a steep learning curve and as a result, limited appeal.

 The beautiful thing about all of Microsoft’s flight simulators were they were sufficiently accessible out of the box, but open ended enough to allow a more technical aircraft to be modeled.  To expect MSFS to stray from that formula, and it’s not reasonable to expect them to.  Leave the study level stuff to the 3rd party developers where it traditionally has always been.

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by wthomas33065

1 minute ago, wthomas33065 said:

That is not the game I was referring to.  I was referring to Shuttle by Virgin games and 90% of it was manipulating switches that you had no idea what they did.  It was tedious and time consuming, and unless you had the audits on which auto focused and highlighted the switch, you spent forever scanning between multiple screens to find it.

 Worst of all, it just wasn’t very fun.  

Well... apparently, you were looking at the wrong shuttle sim.  🤣  Granted SSM came many years later, but holds up today as an amazing simulation of the shuttle's systems and operation (and models  just about every button on it). It's hard to get working on modern systems thanks to the aforementioned copy protection, but I still have a windows 7 system that will fire it up.  Sadly, it was mostly a one-man op, and health issues have made it apparent that the once promising sequel will never see the light of day.