Hi all, my first post - so please be gentle!
Got FS2020 up and running on Tuesday. Like everyone else experienced, it took forever to download and setup. Annoying that you can't turn the music off during that process, had to listen to it for 30 hours! At least that's just a one-off annoyance.
My initial thoughts:
1. Takes a serious amount of time to actually launch and get to the point where you can fly. On my machine, 6 minutes between clicking the icon to being on the runway. Massive spec machine too, so not hardware problem. You can't jump in and have a "quick 10 minute fly" - it's a commitment.
2. Graphics and weather options, scenery, attention to detail are incredible. Genuinely breathtaking. I flew right over my own home and couldn't believe how accurate the area was.
3. Gameplay is very awkward at times. I'm finding it very difficult to be accurate with some of the control knobs in the cockpit. E.g. setting altitude when it's bumpy outside is extremely awkward because the button moves as you're hovering over it. Can't believe this age-old problem (from old FSX days) is still a problem today. More annoying than that is that the tooltips that pop up constantly over the top and get in the way of the mouse, preventing you from activating the control knob or button you want. Can't seem to switch them off, despite switching all the assist options off in the menu. Also, when you have multi-function knobs, like (altitude set / altitude +1000 / altitude +100) in one button, you have to be almost pixel-perfect, and then the plane moves slightly and you end up clicking the wrong one.
4. Despite purchasing the deluxe edition, I'm a bit disappointed in the number of inoperative buttons in the cockpits. I appreciate some of them wouldn't make any sense to implement, but there are plenty of buttons (across the whole range of aircraft) that do nothing. For example, in planes with dual controls, sometimes keyboards and switchgear are duplicated for copilot, but these often don't work at all, which is a shame.
5. Likewise, so many options/features/menus don't work in the glass cockpits either. For example, in the jets, the diagnostics and details pages are mostly "INOP". They definitely could have put more work into implementing more features.
6. Very annoyingly, when using the Garmin on the old FSX, after you select the first character, you could then use your keyboard to type an airport code or intersection code, which made it way easier and faster. I can't seem to find a way to do this in FS2020. You have to go through the dials click by click, which I appreciate accurately depicts real life, but it ain't half annoying and slow (see next point as to why).
7. When moving analogue control knobs in the cockpit, the rate of change is linear - it never speeds up. In the old FSX, if you held the mouse down on heading for example, the selection started to speed up after a moment to save you some time. I can't find a way to do this in FS2020, so if you starting moving the heading bug, it can take 30 seconds to get it to move 180 deg. I've tried different combos like word not allowed+Mouse, etc. but can't find a way to speed up. So it's painful and not enjoyable. In real life, you can spin the dials very quickly.
8. In flight map is very disappointing. In FSX, you could click on the Map, drill down into a feature and get its data. For example, clicking on an airport, pulled up its runway details, ILS settings, COM info, etc. Same with weather stations, VORs, etc. In FS2020, the map seems to do virtually NOTHING. It's almost useless to be honest. It seems the only way to get airport or feature info is to do it through the garmins, which is very laborious. (I appreciate this is like real-life, however, pilots often have foreflight or charts or other stuff to help them inflight). It'd be nice to be able to get info out of the map.
9. Multi window mode - very disappointed that I can't seem to find a way to have alternative views at the same time. There's no chase plane, no tower view, no runway view, etc. Seem to just have the cockpit view and behind view. You have drone mode, which is cool, but it's not the same as the old FSX views, so you can't see yourself land from the outside in a picture-in-picture window like before.
10. Doesn't seem to have any multi-monitor options at all, except for the ability to tear off the Tower/COM log into its own window.
11. Can't find any "Simulation Rate" feature. Which means if you set up LONDON to NEW YORK and get autopilot on, you're in it for 9 hours! In FSX you could do 8x speed over the Atlantic and miss out the boring bit. Anybody else know how to do this?
12. Can't find any "Replay" feature. This is a real shame, because in FSX I enjoy landing, then replaying the landing using the chase plane so I can see where I went wrong and how I might improve next time. Anybody else know how to do this?
13. I'm not going to bang on about it too much (because every already knows this now), but the software is extremely buggy and crashes an awful lot. I only successfully get to the runway 1 in 4 attempts. The other 3 times, it crashes either on loading or during aircraft selection. Once in the air, I rarely get more than 20 minutes before it just exits without warning. It's very unstable and very unreliable.
14. No helicopters in the any edition, not even in Deluxe mode.
15. Detail of the premiere airports is incredible. Heathrow looks incredible.
16. The AI relating to ATC Comms is very unreliable. I often don't get audio. Then all of a sudden I'll get "ATC services terminated!". When I review the log, the tower has been talking to me but nothing came through the speakers.
17. The help features are non existent. The FSX actually had a really good help and tutorial guide, which explained all the terminology, helped you get to grips with a lot of the controls, etc. Doesn't seem to have the same level of ingame help.
So, that's my first impression. Very mixed emotions. Having awesome graphics is great, but I'd rather have poorer graphics and more features and less bugs. I feel that the RTM release is actually a beta (at best!). MS have pushed this out before it was ready. It's nowhere near ready for general release. I feel they've played a game of misdirection with us, showing us the fancy graphics but lacking in overall stability and quality. Feels like a shell and peanut game to be honest. I can't believe after 10 years of playing FSX that suddenly crashes without warning, we're still in that place in 2020. Sad.
Right now, I'm 50/50 on whether to get a refund or wait it out. I hope a major update comes out in the next few days to fix many of the issues people are reporting. Probably give them a week or so and then I think I'll get my money back and wait for a few months.
OK, so flame me...
