Finally got to spend a couple hours flying. Takeaways

The "queue" thing finally went away awhile ago, for me anyway here in the USA. Which is a good thing because I discovered a lot of ways to crash the sim.

I really like the new scenery. It's definitely an improvement over the old sim. I loaded into my home airport and unlike 2020, the hangars are there rather than just being flat pads on the ground. It's also nicely populated with appropriate aircraft - in 2020 it wasn't unusual to see A320s at an airport that can't take anything larger than a private jet.

It's definitely not perfect. The buildings are still melty but you have to get a lot closer to them before it becomes obvious. It's a bit tree happy. There are two trees growing out of my house and several on my driveway. Oddly, the one tree that's actually where it should be is correct - like, even the branch structure matches the real one. That has to be a coincidence, but it's one heck of a coincidence.

I noticed some of the map data is very old - I flew over a stadium that opened in 2016, but in the sim it's still in the early phases of construction.

I also noticed that every bridge I saw is no longer a solid box from the bridge deck to the surface. They're now proper-looking bridges. Unfortunately, the bridge road is also painted on the terrain below the bridge, so that looks dumb. And don't try to fly under a bridge because it looks like a bridge with nothing filling in the underside, but its hitbox is a wall reaching all the way to the ground.

Ground handling seems much improved. Ground textures certainly are. The runway markings are sharp from one end to the other. The grass waving in the wind is nice, but at least in the Jetson, rotor wash does not have any effect on the grass so it's clearly just a sway animation rather than actually reacting to the wind.

Flying is a lot better. The aircraft no longer feels like it's flying straight and occasionally being punched by weird turbulence like it did in 2020. It felt much closer to real flying.

Career mode:

I think it will be fun eventually but right now it's a hot mess. At least on my rig, framerates suffer badly in career mode. I was having perfectly smooth flights in freeflight, but career mode in the same area was a slideshow. Especially when I was close to the ground I was getting probably 5-10 max FPS. Reminded me of playing F15 Strike Eagle on my old Apple II. 😉

The airport choices don't make much sense. I understand not letting you choose an international airport, but a lot of the regionals aren't available either, even though the availability of other regionals points to them not being ineligible for career mode. At first I thought maybe the devs were hand-verifying career-start airports to make sure they'd work but then I made the mistake of starting my career at Telluride. Don't do that - you'll have to nuke your career and start a new one because the ramp is on a square box cliff around 50 feet above the rest of the airport so there's no way to taxi to the runway without falling off and crashing (and crash damage can't be turned off in career mode, apparently). The fam-flight tutorial also expects your climb performance not to change with altitude. You will have trouble climbing fast enough to hit your target altitude where you're supposed to if you're at a high altitude strip. Just start your career in a Midwest or coastal airport., and check the airport in freeflight mode first to make sure it doesn't have any terrain surprises.

That said, a lot of people have been worried about having to progress through pilot training before you can do career stuff. You don't have to take any of the lessons. You can go straight to the test. I did the PPL and passed with flying colors even though my flying sucked - the framerates were so bad that I was all over the sky but the sim didn't care. So experienced sim pilots should be able to whip through the tests in very short order, though they'll probably want to wait until the framerate thing is fixed.

Annoyances:

I think I'll be turning off the walkaround feature pretty quick. First off, movement is clunky and it's sometimes hard to get aligned right so your mouse cursor "sees" the thing you're supposed to be clicking. And second, it's not a complete preflight anyway. You don't even drain the sumps to check the fuel.

I hope to figure out how to turn off the feature that puts blue highlights on every control if you touch it with the mouse. I found the settings to remove tool tips, but I've not yet found the one to turn off that stupid highlight.

Avionics are a little goofy - I got in the Cessna 170 and before I even got the battery turned on, much less the GPS, It played the "TAWS system test OK" announcement.

Was surprised and amused that the instructor told me I'd be one hell of a pilot. I believe that may be the first time swearing was present in a non-military flight simulator. 😉

Game-breaking bugs I found:

If you're flying and want to change a setting, when you're done don't hit escape to get back to the game. Crashed my sim every time. Click the "return" button on the right instead.

Don't attempt to change settings if you're using VR or the sim will crash. Stop VR, change the setting, return to the flight, then restart VR.

The mouse is really wonky. Sometimes it will stop registering clicks. Occasionally it'll start working again but usually I have to reset the flight in order to get anything to respond.

A very annoying one involves my Fulcrum yoke. The sim simply won't keep any of the settings. If I restart a flight, I have to go into the control menu and turn on the default profile again. It's only happening with the yoke - no other controller is losing settings like this. Sometimes it will lose the settings in the middle of a flight. I'd done a free/correct check before takeoff and everything was fine. Then the yoke dropped settings halfway through the takeoff roll and I had no control.

This thing definitely needs more time to bake, and I simply don't understand why they didn't get it into a better state before release - they could have avoided the dumb review bombing on Steam/etc. I have no doubt they'll get things ironed out eventually but a non-working game for most of release day and then one filled with serious bugs when you could finally start playing... I'm not mad, I can find other things to do, but it was definitely an unforced reputation management error.