givionte

I had to dig through this thread to even find what the announcement was. Bit letdown. Why do I never receive these emails anymore? Outlook must have their emails nuked, I never get their emails anymore.

I don't expect a study level aircraft, nor would I expect it from MS as this is a game being developed for consoles and PC's. I would rather MS devote their time to getting the feel of the controls and conditions accurate, so those who want to pay add-on companies for professional-grade aircraft models can build just about anything as realistic as they can afford to program. Microsoft should focus on their core audience which are the casuals who just hop in defaults and occasionally skin the aircraft with liveries, build a nice AI world traffic and ATC system that's easy to work with, and leave the professional tools open to other developers to give enthusiasts choices and build an ecosystem around it. As long as the out-of-the-box plane has a basic working GPS and the most common controls to fire up the engines, I'm cool with it. Their resources should be devoted to adding more depth to the overall game, not making every gizmo and doodad in the cockpit do something for an audience that mostly won't care.

Paid beta is just "early access", which is fine and it's a good idea to build up hype before they put the "released" tag on it and ship discs in retail stores. But because this game will heavily rely on the servers, it will make a lot of sense to have some open Insider preview weekends, to try to break their servers with a rush of people downloading and playing. Anyway, on the subject, a late 2020 release seems realistic based on everything I've seen. But with the current pandemic situation, I'd question whether the developers are running at the same pace as they were several months ago. They may need a lot more time to finish some systems and do art passes. I won't be surprised at all if it slips into 2021. If Microsoft gets this game right, it's easily going to be a PC system seller, and likely garner millions of sales for years to come. The Microsoft of today won't let this one flop like the previous attempt under old management, and an extra year with the bun in the oven is not going to hurt their financials.

I just get some weird XBLA invalid error when I try to login. No idea why.