30 years of using flight simulator but disappointed by 2020 version

Dose really matter? How many playing? . Seriously? Fact of the matter a whole lot of simmers are having million-dollar sim FUN. No CTD Weather is stunning and good in sim… flight model is good You can talk about the weather forever! Yes this sim is like FSX . BUT 1000x better! And its only get better! I saw a player who said he had 2000 hours. The Concord is coming.

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I don’t care about the weather. But you’re trying to explain to @WebbyPrincess86 that all the stuff we’ve found in every flight sim for years as standard is redundant because nobody else needs it. That’s not progress, that’s regression.

And for the million user, look…

It’s perfectly fine that the sim is sufficient for you. And I’m happy for you. But just accept that for some User it has not yet met the “promised” expectations.

Curious. How many hours do you have? Cause you are in a very very small cadre that will never be satisfied with the sim. I bet Windows 11 let you down?

Fly, let fly and watch TV, or fly by hand?

In DCS more than a thousand, here, hmm about 150 flight hours (hand VFR in VR) if the counter right, with 430 hours of steam-playtime. The difference was bug fixing and download waiting.
Win11, not interest

Or do you mean in total? I have no idea, I started with Red Baron on the Amiga in 1990, then continued with Comanche on the PC in 1992 and at some point I ended up with XPlane and mostly DCS.
But yeah, the outer world himself, has the best look in FS 2020. But a lot of things are so… unfinished

MSFS Hours 150. 1000 DCS makes sense
Like F18’s don’t have targeting radar or weapons? I can see how that could be disappointing for some. DCS is a good example of what a flight game is.

I have been flying MSFS for 40 years and can honestly say MSFS 2020 is vastly superior to the original.

Jokes aside, I was looking at a comment thread in another forum about the upcoming X-Plane 12 and it was full of people saying, “It better have _____ from MSFS or I won’t be getting it!”

And it wasn’t long ago many of these same people were saying X-Plane 11 was superior to MSFS.

That’s the story of every sim in the internet age. The new one is a buggy mess that lacks features and the mature one is perfect.

MSFS is maturing. It keeps improving but it isn’t perfect yet. That said, if you could load the original version, you would immediately recognize how much has improved already.

Weapons don’t interest me either. I’m love the near realistic technically system deep and flight dynamics.
I see you’ve never dealt deep with DCS. :wink:

Yes, very true. I like those civilian airliners and GAs in DCS specifically. They are extremely well modeled.

Yes I have played with DCS. 100 or so hours its ok DCS It is a game not a sim. And it has been around for a long long time. The graphics are bad. The planes are ugly. The flight model old . That was XP11 mantra oh boy our physics are better! Brother that ship has sailed. It really is not fair to compare MSFS to DCS XP11 or any flight sim that matter. Physics, Weather, The world rendered, All better and getting better. I’m sorry you are disappointed. Naw not really lol

Don’t be ridiculous. An airplane is an airplane. And if you can fly an FW190D, you can handle a 152 in your sleep. And a Huey is the Huey - Civil and Military

Are youre sure, you have loaded after 2016 DCS?! :joy:

Dion’t be silly now! If in ALL of your years, you can NOT manipulate any aspect of your simulator by now? Then you need to go back to playstation, and i mean that in a friendly sense. This simulator, as you’d KNOW by now, can certainly have ANY parameters met, by Yourself!. Yes! this new simulator is still in it’s infancy, but, you know what to do, if you are a real simmer. Good Luck.

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That’s concurrent users, not owners, which is a big difference. Plus you appear to be looking at the Steam stats? Which isn’t even all MSFS owners.

If so that number seems high, as Steam seems to average around 6,000 users, peaking at around 10,000. That chart shows 194,000. The all time peak was 61,775

Probably my post will get hidden when I post screenshots here - but just like in Flight Sim the visuals depend on the module.
I have tested every single DCS module (because there is a 14 day trial phase for every module) and I have found out that the following modules are absolute top-notch graphics, high fidelity modules, including fully functional photorealistic cockpit, rotating N1 fan spinner and rotating turbine outlet in the rear nozzle, and fully animated high quality 3D model:
F-18 Hornet
F-14 Tomcat
F-16 Fighting Falcon (yes I know it´s called “Viper” but I go with the tradition and an F-16 is a Falcon for me)
Mi-24 Hind
and the oncoming Apache Helicopter from Eagly Dynamics is high quality too.

The rest is indeed trash stuck in year 2009/2010 graphics like for example the Huey, the Tiger, and others.
So the quality depends on the module that you are using :wink:

I personally always fly in my favorite map - Area 51 Nevada.

It´s always great to have Flight Sim 20 and DCS ready to launch on the desktop when spontanius getting in the mood to fly something!
And I am in no way disappointed by Flight Sim 20. Yes there were some significant visual downgrades in 2020 that truly disappointed me because Flight Sim was the most sophisticated and modern software ever created and I hate to see a masterpiece of art downgraded to run on some mediocre consoles and low-end-OEM-computers, but now they slowly start to bring back the old exquisite PC visuals for the clouds the cloud illumination and other things.
DCS and Flight Sim 20 are completely the same: Your experience fully depends on the modules you buy. If you buy Carenado, PMDG Cloudmaster, PMDG 737, Fenix Airbus, and who knows what great things will come in the future - you will get the most exquisite looking flight sim ever made and sit in the most gorgeous fantastic looking cockpits ever developed…

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It’s amazing that you feel DCS and X-Plane 11 are inferior to MSFS regarding flight characteristics. So far, flying them all quite a bit, it’s MSFS that lacks realistic behavior. To me, MSFS feels rubbery and isolated from the real feel of flying. It doesn’t feel like Asobo gave any thought to real aerodynamics or engine performance with the release of this sim. Hopefully they will keep improving it to the point when the performance of its planes matches its superb rendering quality.

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I wouldn’t read all 156 previous posts but on the case it was not said, the poor in-map VFR/IFR map has a simple solution:
a) Buy a second monitor
b) Install Alex Projects - Little Navmap

Free and amazing.

Steam has 4k-5k dayly.

The 194k graph is a web tracker. Average number of players conected to the game server monthly. The overall longer-term active average since launch is around 247k, which a good value given the short time of 1.5 years.
Shows about 330k, as the number of full-price purchases.
Purchase via Gamepass are not recorded. The latter should be the main part (round 1,5 Million). Only MS knows how much has actually exceeded the 14-day period of use for the few dollars.

The numbers should be reasonably accurate. Farming Simulator 19+22 is reported to have 2.5 million buyers/upgraders with 1.5 million active players (2019-2022), which roughly corresponds to the confirmed values.

The figures for DCS are also largely correct, the operators themselves speak of 350k users over all years (2008-2022). The first, very high 3.5m number of users comes from the fact that the basic module is free und you have 2 different versions (Stable+Beta). So it was loaded very often, only tested and removed again.

I never considered a flight simulator to be as popular as a general video game in the long run. I think gamers are curious and give it a try, get bored and put it aside. It’s always been a very niche audience of real pilots and wanna be pilots. DCS has the advantage of being a war game too, which probably attracts a larger audience. I think flight sims keep a small but very loyal serious following who probably have all the different sims on their PCs, as they all have their strong points and weak points. Not sure what Steam has to do with any of this, as I never purchased a flight sim from them.

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