...if anyone cares!

Coming from a predominantly car racing simulation background for many many years I knew in advance to keep my expectations in check, I fully understand the meaning of the words "continuous development" and I fully understand that Rome was not built in a day!

With that in mind and having only briefly touched flight Sims in recent years (mainly in VR) and not fully played one since F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Amiga (what a machine!) no less, I came into MSF with a completely open mind and will continue with that into the future.

Anyway enough rambling, here's my initial first impressions:

- Download was smooth, started before i left for work and got home to it fully finished with no apparent stoppages.

- Installation was a doddle (oh bought standard on Steam)

- The menu system is clean and fairly intuitive, not too many clicks to get where you want to go.

- Controller/HOTAS setup was fairly easy, being essentially a flight sim newbie I had a bit of trouble binding the correct buttons in relation to the multitude of possible bindings, but I'm getting there! (Saitek x45 + various other USB Controllers)

- the manual Cache area is a bit of an oddball, you can't select a zoomed out areas for High so you have to zoom right in and then when it completes its barely a mb or two in size...need to investigate this area some more but it seems a bit pointless to me.

- loading times are fine, maybe long for the Xbox/lack of patience crowd but no problem for me.

- Set to High-End graphics and the FPS was very good about my home area (Sussex Coastline, England). Drops around larger cities, stayed very good around mountainous areas and even with all weather conditions i haven't yet noticed any FPS issues yet. So i changed to Ultra and was even more surprised at the decent FPS, 45-50 in most places with drops to 30fps around Cities and handcrafted airports. I'm still in the prices of tweaking the graphics so far from finished with an "ideal" setup. RAM usage has touched 15gb but generally around 10-13gb so far, keeping an eye on it with msi afterburner, but no lags or stutters at all even with everything on Live details (i9-9900k, 16gb RAM, 2070Super, m.2 1tb SSD).

- A bit disappointed that a few local landmarks are MIA, but by most accounts Bing don't have great data for most of the UK, my area certainly looks a bit naff compared to random other places around the world that I've since visited.

- The weather system is superb, already love messing about with it.

- The World map is great, missing some QOL features, finding friends is fairly easy.

- As a newbie i won't comment on the flight physics as I've not even started to Learn via the tutorials yet.

- I cannot wait for VR, sure I'll have to lower the settings a bit (perhaps...) and I still cannot fathom why they didn't properly design the Sim with VR in mind from the very start, a baffling and quite frankly pathetic omission but at least they're adding it in eventually...I just hope they make a good crack of it and not a half arsed attempt to appease the (many) VR users.

 

- Overall First Impressions are great, I've already sat down for a "quick 20 minutes" and three hours later I'm still up in the skies! The graphics in general are great, breathtaking at times with the right conditions. I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time with this Sim in the coming years *if* they nail the VR Update as it's hard work Flying in Pancake mode, oh and my wallet is in hiding from the DLC prices though....😝

I'm a VR flight simmer.

Microsoft Xbox Game Pass for PC. £1 subscription and download MSFS2020 Standard Edition.

Checking out Saitek and Bodnar compatibility. Airfield existance. ATC. AI traffic etc.

Will wait for HP Reverb G2 to arrive before purchasing Premier Deluxe through Steam.

 

Cheers.

@MarcG Welcome and glad to hear you are enjoying your experiences so far.

My Crosswind pedals don't work, my PFC alloy yoke doesn't work and most buttons on my Warthog stock and throttle don't work, all in all a great sim!

4 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

My Crosswind pedals don't work, my PFC alloy yoke doesn't work and most buttons on my Warthog stock and throttle don't work, all in all a great sim!

That's really odd. My VKB Gladiator works great. So does the TWCS throttle.

7 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

My Crosswind pedals don't work, my PFC alloy yoke doesn't work and most buttons on my Warthog stock and throttle don't work, all in all a great sim!

Very odd. I have Crosswinds and they work perfectly. They were a breeze to calibrate, including the toe brakes. Maybe a USB issue?

10 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

My Crosswind pedals don't work, my PFC alloy yoke doesn't work and most buttons on my Warthog stock and throttle don't work, all in all a great sim!

Also, my Warthog HOTAS works fine. I have found that even though the sim says that the inputs were already bound, I had to rebind some of them with the exact same binding to get them to “stick”.

Its a funny mixture of stuff that is aimed at new simmers and things that are very difficult for more experienced simmers, such as configuring peripherals. 

There's a bunch of bugs and ommisions that there shouldn't be that make AP/IFR impossible or at least very difficult for the moment. 

It does look nice, but only P3D with Orbx nice, although it's great that it covers most of the world. 

I don't think it should have gone out in its current state, its going to really baffle and annoy both first timers and old timers for different reasons and I don't understand why VR on launch wasn't prioritised, an autumn launch with everything fixed would have been better. 

I look forward to seeing how it develops but still finding XP with VR and Voice operated ATC with p2ATC a far more immersive experience for now. 

The other thing that I can't fathom is data being downloaded while you fly or having the data on your HD. So which gives best performance and/or visuals and how do I go about choosing the best way of doing so? I also have no way of starting the sim from the desktop! There's no exe anywhere, or at least nowhere  I can see,  it doesn't even show in the add or remove programs directory so I can't see the best way of uninstalling it. I'm not overly impressed so far, but it's perhaps finger trouble at my end.

3 hours ago, Bilbosmeggins said:

Also, my Warthog HOTAS works fine. I have found that even though the sim says that the inputs were already bound, I had to rebind some of them with the exact same binding to get them to “stick”.

Yeah possibly, I have to admit I need to spend  alittle more time taking a closer look at things.

5 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

The other thing that I can't fathom is data being downloaded while you fly or having the data on your HD. So which gives best performance and/or visuals and how do I go about choosing the best way of doing so? I also have no way of starting the sim from the desktop! There's no exe anywhere, or at least nowhere  I can see,  it doesn't even show in the add or remove programs directory so I can't see the best way of uninstalling it. I'm not overly impressed so far, but it's perhaps finger trouble at my end.

Assuming you're using the Windows Store version. You can search for Flight Simulator in the windows search (press windows key), then right click on it, and pin it to Start. Don't know about desktop, but, I like to keep my desktop clean, so, not a problem for me. To uninstall, you can also right click the entry in the start menu, and click uninstall.

If it's the Steam version, just manage everything via steam.

3 hours ago, Rockliffe said:

My Crosswind pedals don't work, my PFC alloy yoke doesn't work and most buttons on my Warthog stock and throttle don't work, all in all a great sim!

My Crosswind works, my Warthog Throttle works, my WarBRD with Warthog Stick works, and so on. From the first minute. Indeed, a great sim!

9 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

The other thing that I can't fathom is data being downloaded while you fly or having the data on your HD. So which gives best performance and/or visuals and how do I go about choosing the best way of doing so? I also have no way of starting the sim from the desktop! There's no exe anywhere, or at least nowhere  I can see,  it doesn't even show in the add or remove programs directory so I can't see the best way of uninstalling it. I'm not overly impressed so far, but it's perhaps finger trouble at my end.

Howard, are you running the sim via Steam? If so, right-click on MSFS in your Steam game library...among the options that appear will be one to create a short-cut on your desktop. If you've purchased the sim from the MS Store, then try to create a shortcut to the FlightSimulator.exe in the directory where you installed the sim.

If your data plan isn't capped, then try turning the rolling cache off for better performance. The manual cache is best for visuals but will consume a lot of disk space potentially.

Edited August 20, 20205 yr by RudiJG1

Nice to hear a writeup from a non-simmer!  Welcome!

 I'm enjoying it. The default binds on my T-16000 HOTAS are a bit complex and hard to get used to but that will come with time and rearranging some of the more commonly used ones. As far as whether it was ready for release yet, I don't know about simming because I haven't done it in awhile but this is the common state of gaming now. When a piece of software releases, in the early days, you are essentially a second beta tester and you've basically paid for the privilege.