A little perspective… I’ve also been around flightsimming since the mid-80s (started with MSFS for Macintosh in '86, so not all the way back to SubLogic days, but still…) Was also in on the start of the alpha, from December on.
I’ve been lucky in not having any of the crashes or stutters or installation hangs. But I get how enraging those things can be.
I’m currently having a pretty decent experience with MSFS, in spite of everything that’s wrong. I’m mostly flying small GAs like the 152 in hand-flown VFR flights, so that’s playing to strengths. Visuals at their best are great, and it’s proving to be a whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience.
That said - it feels like it was kicked out the door three months too early. I don’t blame the developers, I blame business-unit or division-level execs. I can think of a few reasons why corporate would go for an August launch decision, some more legit than others (book the revenue now is hard to defend, but you might decide to go early to avoid a rush of disappointed consumers around holiday season - because there are always going to be disappointed consumers and you might as well deal with them in August - or, related, you might decide to launch for PC and then work to get the house in order for the console launch).
Basically I’m OK with it as a limited-use sim with a lot of potential, and I’m hopeful it’ll come into its own in the next 3-12 months.
The main reason I wanted to comment was to correct some of the posts about how much better past versions of MSFS were at launch. They really weren’t. The original poster said that ACOF (that’d be FS2004, aka FS9) was great and it was. But that was the end of a development cycle that started with FS 2000, which was a mess, and continued through FS2002, which is where it started to come into its own. FS2004 was a final refinement - so basically the endpoint of a three-version run. Then FSX came out and started the whole cycle over again. It was a couple of years before any of us could even begin to get adequate performance out of it.
My point is that MSFS isn’t the first time that we’ve gotten the 1.0 version of a sim in a pretty raw state and had to wait for it to fall into place.
The other point I’d make - or more of a question, really - is about default aircraft. What was everybody expecting? Payware quality? Default aircraft have never been that. Those old classic versions of FS had bare-bones airliners in them that used the default GPS - there wasn’t even a cosmetic attempt at an FMC. GA aircraft were rudimentary and the flight modeling was simplistic. I didn’t start to appreciate the potential of the modern sim until Rob Young of RealAir published his freeware alternative flight model for the default 172 - I think that was for FS2002. That was the first airplane I came across in post-2000 FS that felt like a real physical object moving in an air mass.
Short version - current default aircraft are bad, or at best barely adequate because default aircraft have always been bad or at best barely adequate.
Now again - I’m not saying MSFS is great - it’s not. I’m not saying we should be satisfied with it - we shouldn’t. There are things to be concerned about - the performance issues, obviously, but also problems in the flight modeling that have the potential to make life much harder for third-party developers, like the poor turboprop modeling, the mixture bug and the lack of prop friction - those are fundamental problems that absolutely have to get fixed.
What I am saying that what we’ve got on our hands is about par for the the 1.0 version of a new flightsim. It has the potential to get better. Sometimes that happens. But basically, we’ve been here before.
