Have Devs lost their love for the Sim?

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Just curious, how many other games have you played that have developers live stream Q&As every two months, addressing the most popular issues with the game every single time they hold one?

How many games publish an update road map every month?

How many games add free content every two months?

How many people do you think work at Asobo? How many are working on their next Plague’s Tale game instead of MSFS?

Folks act like Asobo isn’t transparent… :joy:

They are about as good as it gets in the gaming industry (especially the AAA gaming industry) when it comes to talking to the players and keeping them informed.

We knew before SU8 released what the focus of SU9 would be and what the next (FREE) WU would focus on. We have known this for at least a month! So we know months out the main focus of what is to come.

Asobo: We give you the world.

Us: We want moar!!!

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I don’t understand what the point of these conversations are anymore.

One half says X.

One half says Y.

Neither compromise their opinions to meet halfway.

I don’t get it. Why bother?

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Some day I swear, someone will reply, “You know? You are right. I changed my mind. Thank you.” and I will be able to die happy.

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Hilarious comment… wrong on every point but Hilarious. And yeah, you’re right, I changed my mind end of discussion. Happy?

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I have no idea what you’re talking about, fortunately.

My experience with this sim has been mostly to very positive. It’s a work of art; not sure about the VR experience. I’ve just ordered my first flight yoke with throttle. Pedals coming soon.

I was working last month in Madrid Barajas Airport. Airside; The similarites between the real airport, gates, runways, etc is absolutely stunning. Even the pilots and workers there were amazed.

Sorry about your VR experience that sounds like very specific issues.

This is an ourstanding piece of programming and technology. I’m still in awe; I still mostly fly the Citation CJ4 though. Seems stable and mostly enjoyable.

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??

Don’t speak for everyone when you only have your own experience as an example.

My VR experience in FS is great, it was bad immediately after SU5, but it was fixed quickly and improves slighly with each of the releases since.

I actually have more performance problems with FS on my 4k monitor than I do in VR.

IF they would get photogrammetry performance sorted out, I’d really have nothing (performance wise) to complain about and could focus my negativity entirely on little annoyances, like lights on at airports in VFR Daylight, or the fact that for some reason 3rd party devs can’t edit ILS’s when they edit airports… Or that those same folks seem to be limited by the software to making only dead flat runways even though Asobo seems to have the tools to make sloped runways etc.

But performance? No, Performance is just fine. Could it be better? Of course. Bad? No, its quite good.

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Everyone’s going on about how the sim’s better, and totally not answering the OP’s question.

He seems to be asking if others believe Asobo has lost their enthusiasm. (Actually, one answer did address this, “Have you watched the Dev Q&A’s?”).

In order to answer your question, we’re going to need to understand what evidence you are basing your conclusion on? Marketing costs money and time. 3 VP’s do not a cross-section of the development team create. What are you possibly basing your conclusion on. I don’t see any change in enthusiasm on the part of Asobo. Are the bugs they are fixing now seem like it’s taking longer? Well, that’s likely because the code is more mature and a host of other reasons.

But, again, no, I don’t see any change in enthusiasm. They are doing a lot of work and there’s a whole lot of more features in the sim now, including VR, that weren’t there in the beginning. So, you’ll naturally see fewer changes in any given feature over time because there’s a lot more features to spread development time over. A natural consequence of any development process.

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I really liked your pivot at the end there!

Folks often don’t know how small Asobo is.

They hear MICROSOFT Flight Simulator and expect MS to have put its full weight and resources behind the sim, but they didn’t. They contracted it out to a company they don’t even own.

And for the scale and scope of MSFS, Asobo is tiny (even before you subtract the folks working on other games besides MSFS). It is really stunning what they have accomplished with a team around 1/3-1/2 the size of the team that made the latest Halo.

It is important to understand this is what Microsoft budgeted for. Not a team of thousands.

It is also worth understanding this monthly update cycle is common amongst all 1st Party Game Pass titles. Forza, GoW, Halo…

And Asobo is neither obligated to, contracted to, nor able to triple their manpower and release updates at a faster rate. This is, and always was working how Asobo and Microsoft agreed to work together on this project.

And there is no flight sim out there that released stable. X plane? P3D? FSX? DCS? :joy:

And I swear by this. Test ANY old, mature sim… VANILLA against vanilla MSFS today. Any of them. And you will come out with a list of grievances AT LEAST as long as your grief for MSFS.

Try loading a new plane in P3D without first turning crashing off! :joy:

There is no perfect sim. There is no finished sim. MSFS is no exception.

But what they are accomplishing over at Asobo is rather remarkable. And the things we are complaining about are kinda next level (OMG the clouds no longer look perfect!).

There are a zillion little things to nitpick about MSFS… but I really don’t know a sim that is perfect. If it exists, I would love to fly it.

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If you watch the way Seb goes off into massive detail any chance he gets in a Dev Q&A I’d say for sure he still has passion for the project. If the other devs are half as excited about this stuff as him then the project is in safe hands in my opinion. As for the current state of the game, I don’t use VR and probably don’t have as many add ons as some people do, but it works well for me. I haven’t had a CTD since the first day in the beta of SU7 and that was because I didn’t update the FBW to a version that would work.

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After tonights Q&A I’ve lost my love for the Devs, Jorg mentioned last Q&A that he was going to talk more about VR in this Q&A…but he barely touched on the subject. I’m done beta testing their product if he/they cannot be bothered to properly talk about VR, it’s obvious there’s work to be done, it’s obvious there’s issues and to me it’s obvious it’s a part of the Sim they wish they didn’t have to include (they never had VR planned initially remember!?).

I’ll continue to enjoy the Sim when I can, but I’ve been here before with Devs who say “yeah we’ll get around to X feature” and they never do. Thankfully we have some top modders doing Asobos work for them with the OpenVR Toolkit, such a shame we have to rely on others to improve what Asobo should be doing themselves.

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This right here is the paradox Asobo is in.

Nobody else in the industry does a developers Q&A this regularly, frequently, and publicly. But Asobo didn’t talk about your pet issue ENOUGH for your liking. They did talk about it… they delivered on their promise to talk more about it in this Q&A… but not enough for you to be appeased.

If Asobo was like other developers and didn’t do these Q&As at all, folks wouldn’t be complaining about them failing to talk ENOUGH about their pet issue(s) during said Q&As. No promises would have been made during the last Q&A.

Problem solved?

See the paradox here?

As always, it is good for a simmer’s mental health to take breaks from sims once in a while. Especially when they have issues with the sim that bother them so much they cannot think straight. We’ve all been there at one time or another.

Take a few months off. See how it is after a few more updates. It will still be here and it certainly will be better. And you won’t have to spend your days festering over what isn’t addressed ENOUGH in their regular (like clockwork) Q&A sessions.

BTW, your problems with VR were nonexistent when MSFS released… for a rather obvious reason that should prove the sim has grown by leaps and bounds since release. Can you guess what it is?

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I mean literally…they gave us the world…

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I have no idea, but I can imagine their hatred growing for the complaints (if they actually visit the forum to read them).

I do hope they enjoy what they do for a living.

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This topic ranks as “Baseless Speculation.”

Cheers.

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Hey, thanks for your reply.

I apologize for not feeling as sour towards this sim as you do, as it seems to make it difficult for you to direct polite communication towards me.

This thread initially looked like a failure waiting to happen when I saw you post it so I really tried my best to give another perspective to keep conversation positive, and to prevent it from being closed prematurely… as tends to happen with threads like these. There is a pattern. You give a fair critique and it tends to be allowed. You pretend to read the minds of the developers (or other unfair criticisms) and the thread tends to die.

You seem to be confused by the simple fact that sometimes people respond to people other than you, even within your own thread. And some points made were directed to other people. For future reference, the reply function and icons on posts help make this clear to avoid such confusion.

As is common in forums where developers can pop in at any time, we are held to a very high standard in here, and even criticism is best if it is constructive. Yes. It gets annoying. That’s just how forums like these work.

Not every sim is for every person. And crashes are maddening. This may not be a good match for you.

Again, I profusely apologize for trying to get you to look at a brighter side of things instead of just watching you march your own way to a locked thread.

There’s a way to give criticism in this forum and this isn’t it.

Later, Gator.

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Who built your PC? I am not having this issue. Edit - nevermind I see you are on Xbox, my bad.

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I agree. This isn’t the best place or way to criticize. Ultimately there shouldn’t have to be a need to criticize but to give constructive friendly feedback. And smoke a pipe and sing kumbaya around a fire.
I love the sim, it’s Asobo I have a problem with, that I can’t elaborate on here.
Patronizing and cynical but it was fun talking to you anyway. Take care

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SU7 brought nothing but crashes for me. No matter what I tried, it would crash within a few minutes. I was never able to fly SU7.

I wasn’t aware SU8 was about to be released, so in desperation, I reinstalled FS 2020 in an attempt to fix things.

So, I don’t know if it was the reinstall or the update that came with it, that cured my crashes. So far, other than losing all my bush trip progress, SU8 has been great in both 2D and in VR.

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I don’t understand why helicopters were left off the sim for what will be close to 3 years and still operating on Direct X 11 which is only one update from where FS 9 was back in 2008.

The aim was to get it onto X Box ASAP and to heck with PC users as we were just the fodder to get the X Box version ready. I am sure that we have had a lot of compromises and will continue to have compromises so they can keep the gaming dream alive on X Box.

In terms of professional simming X Pane 12 may make Asobo lift their game when it comes to technical flying and usage.

It bugs the ■■■■ out of me we can’t have simple things like linking joystick profiles to individual aircraft let alone a lack of a helicopter of the same ilk as what we get in X plane or proper gliders.

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Why ? Different markets …

  • X-Plane is a Flight Simulator, by flight simulator people, for Flight Simulation

  • MSFS (X-Box) is a Money making DRM Market place front end Game, to make money for Microsoft Share Holders.

Grated, FSX was also to make Money for Microsoft Share Holders, but at least back then, it did seem like the Flight Simulation part was an important part of the franchise.

As far as what Asobo Devs think, I doubt that even ONE person in this Forum really has any personal idea what any of the Asobo Devs Think, Love or Hate.

But its a fair bet they would not like the rude & disrespectful comments made about them in this forum, and IF I were one of them, I certainly would not chose to continue reading this forum, unless my job required me to.

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