Just realized something really nice and that is that I finally seem to have found peace with flight simulators. I’ve been busy playing flight simulators since SubLogic FS 2 on the Commodore 64 and since then I’ve always been hungry for more. Better scenery, better airplanes, better clouds, better performance, etc. New flight simulators came and they always added more, but the hunger for even more came back just after a few days. You might recognize this.
When X-Plane came with it’s VR expansion I thought we were getting there, but performance was terrible (with clouds enabled) and the everlasting hunt for more photoreal scenery, better graphics, more planes and better clouds kept me from actually flying it most of the time.
Then MSFS came, I was one of the first Technical Alpha participants and MSFS seemed to be able to still the hunger for much longer, but then it returned. The performance was okay-ish, but never good enough and there were still so many bugs. The sim was way more satisfying for me, but the lack of VR left a hole unfilled. Upgrading to an RTX3080 helped and playing MSFS in 4K was so overwhelming.
Then the VR update landed, heaven seemed close because it looked better than I dared to dream, but the performance seemed to throw everything in the water. When I actually got the performance to an adequate level 2 weeks ago things clicked into place for me.
I’ve never done so much flying without tweaking and worrying in my life. The scenery is gorgeous, the planes look and handle wonderfully, the clouds are stunning and the graphics are awesome. Sure there is room for improvement, but for the first time there is a team behind this sim that actually cares about the same things many of us care about AND they actually have the resources to provide these. They also want a sim that is almost as real as it can get and they are listening to us and open in there development. But the main thing is, this sim is finally just enough in it’s default form, everything is satisfying enough to not cause that hunger for more and more. No more feelings like “When I get this cloud add-on I can finally go and enjoy flying”.
So I stopped hunting for things to make the experience better, sure I bought some nice airports and planes (the Aermacchi is great for example), but the rest of the sim is good enough already. There is no need to buy scenery areas anymore, you can just go somewhere and it will look like the real area most of the time. No need to buy tweaks to make it look better as it already looks more than good enough. And with the team working on even more areas, better performance, better graphics and more features I finally can go with the flow and just enjoy flying around till the next update. I would love to have better pushback and good ATC and realistic AI traffic with liveries one day, but knowing that they are working on these things is enough for me.
I would just like to thank the team for this great product, it’s getting better and better by the month and we have something to look forward to again and again. Can’t wait for the UK update and especially for the Netherlands update because that’s where I live.
. Those days are finally over! Thank you Microsoft for letting the franchise live up again and ASOBO for doing such a great job! Thanks to COVID 19 I spend very much time with the sim. It‘s very, very fun to be able to explore the whole planet! Awesome, guys! The only question now is where to go next!!