I don’t think that’s a solid defense though. “They worked as intended because there wasn’t much going on”. That’s like saying a paper airplane runs into less problems than a Cessna, which is undeniable true due to its simple construction and purpose. The OG planes worked, but were quickly replaced by payware and high quality freeware for a myriad of reasons.
Its neither a defense nor a statement on simplicity. The stock planes in FS9/FSX are not paper airplanes. They have all the basic functionalities that can get you from point A to point B with all the basic controls that one would need from an airplane, and that is the whole point. They don’t overcomplicate things. The issue with FS2020 is that they tried to do more–and I applaud them for trying–but a lot of areas are half-baked where getting from point A to point B in certain aircraft becomes a questionable endeavor.
Now, its easy to say that all will get fixed with time so that we won’t have to avoid certain aircraft entirely. I also understand they are committed to supporting this sim for 10 years or so. I certainly hope this is the case, and that the glimpse of what the sim will be within the near future is hopefully a lot less problematic than in its current state. At the same time, however, its been two months and 3 patches. While we have a new and better looking Japan, many of the same problems are still there with the addition of new ones. And yes, perhaps a little patience is in order, but the direction in addressing the old issues is a concern.
Of course, many of the aircraft may be replaced by payware eventually anyways like it did in all the other sims which would make these gripes moot. However, before that happens, the SDK needs to be ironed out, which is an issue I hear a lot of developers are having to deal with.
I could make the claim YSFlight is far more stable, doesn’t crash, has more aircraft, and it ‘works as intended with no problems’ while getting you from point A to B, but why am I playing FS2020 and not YSFlight? Well for start it brings nothing new. To me, 2020 is far more immersive than any current sim, and I like to actually feel like I am flying an airplane. I love the xCub the most, so I guess I lucked out.
We can all agree the sim is bugged, and saying that it’s totally fine in its current state would be ridiculous, but I am not going to join the ‘Asobo is lazy’ frenzy during a global pandemic and will give them the benefit of the doubt, we are lucky to even have them updating at all currently.
And you would be entitled to your opinion. If you find FS2020 is far immersive than any current sim, you are welcome to that opinion. I personally don’t think it is, but that’s just my opinion.
I haven’t bashed Asobo for any of this, so please don’t take this the wrong way. There is potential here, and as you can agree that the sim is bugged, let us both hope that they will get fixed with time.
It could conceivably be useful to learn about the aircraft in question first before assuming that there are bugs in the systems just because you can’t make them work. The MCDU is not a Garmin–and in many ways (which is true to real life) it is less sophisticated and less user friendly. There are certainly some bugs and issues to work around, but for a default aircraft, the A320 is amazingly functional. I probably have 50 hours in the A320 on the simulator and it is certainly modelled well enough to accept an ILS approach from ATC, plug it in and fly it. The only caveat is that you have to add the transition waypoint to the flight plan before adding the approach. Not ideal, but easy enough. I have no doubt that a third party will produce a study level aircraft that addresses this issue. Honestly, the A320 is great for what it is. It is well enough implemented to be functional, capable, “reasonably” realistic (this is from actual A320 pilots) and fun. The A32NX mod makes it even better and continues to add more realism.
Overall, I am not disappointed with the flight simulator. I think it released too early and they shipped with some bugs that were, from a professional software developer perspective, inexcusable. The two major patches have been rushed and have also included some severe regressions that again, should never have shipped. But Asobo has owned that publicly and they are trying to be transparent and customer focused. They are fixing bugs and rolling updates (as well as some incredible free upgraded scenery content) and once they get their cadence and their qa figured out, I expect that the quality problems will largely disappear.
There have been a small number of folks struggling with installation and upgrade issues and/or significant crash to desktop problems. Anyone in that group has a right to be disappointed. That is frustration that I can understand; particularly since those issues are often tough to diagnose and there are limited resources for those folks to get help. Unfortunately, these aren’t likely to be flight simulator issues. They are going to be hardware (most likely drivers) as well as Windows issues. For most of us, the game is stable. I’ve had one CTD in probably 150 hours; I don’t expect it to crash randomly. There is one crashing bug with the VFR map which shouldn’t have shipped, but it is easily worked around.
There are plenty of complaints about degradation of scenery–both from those who had alpha and beta builds and from those who have noticed degradation between the release version and the patches. This is also disappointing; though it is still not completely clear what is causing all of the problems. Asobo has indicated that they have made some changes to LOD that have not been ideal and there is plenty of speculation that server loads are playing a part as well. For the most part, I have been impressed with the scenery–I mean seriously–they gave us the world!
That said, it seems that in the current state of the simulator, it is no longer possibly to duplicate the level of beautifully displayed scenery that we have all seen in the trailers. IMO, that is a big deal and it needs to be addressed. It was also a big deal to not catch the bug that was introduced with the Japan scenery that caused tall buildings to appear everywhere in the sim. Once again, the community had to fix the issue, which really isn’t acceptable.
Frankly, I think it is a testament to just how amazing the environment that Asobo built is that they have been able to get away with some fairly slipshod development practices. They shipped with beta quality, their patches have introduced serious regressions and by some accounts significantly degraded the game, and yet most of us are still here. Why? Because Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is just that good. Microsoft certainly knows that they have a winner and while I have no idea how Asobo’s ship process worked or how much influence Microsoft truly had, I can say that from a business perspective, they made the right call to ship. A million copies sold in the first few weeks and a run on flight controller hardware world-wide is hard to argue against.
Despite all of the issues, I’ve never been blocked from enjoying the sim. The closest I came was with the A320 E1 shutdown bug that was introduced in the 1.8.3.0 patch, but the community figured out a simple workaround very quickly. I’ve flown a variety of aircraft and had a great time. I expect to have an even better time once we get some study-level aircraft released by third party developers.
People can say whatever they want about this simulator and most of the time they will be right. But IMO, this is one of those rare products that is so ground-breaking and represents such a significant leap forward technologically, that it is basically impervious to any and all criticism. There is nothing to argue because the market has already spoken.
I think that sums it up. After all, the thread is about being disappointed, not weather there are some amazing things going on, or whether you can currently still enjoy the sim by not minding, or avoiding, the bugs. I still can enjoy aspects of it too. I would have probably bought it if it had been called FS2020 beta…
Thanks for an invigorating discussion, folks. Let’s hope things start “working” as advertised (a very important phrase in order to answer the question posed by the OP) very soon and we can wait for the PMDG’s and whatever other 3rd party improvements come along.
Not disappointed, but just … frustrated at some things. So I’m just sticking to the planes that are relatively well behaved for now. The 787, 747 and Longitude are not even in my hangar anymore. I might download them again when/if the autopilot and control issues are fixed.
I got into Flight Unlimited II as a kid (my first flight sim from Target for $49 and it was much more immersive than the MSFS series was back then imho; heck you could even rip the wings of the planes off by over-stressing - yes totally animated not just some message - and ATC would berate you for flying aerobatics, and this was all done in 1998). It even came with missions like running illegal cargo and you had to fly under the radar. Maybe some memories are seen in rose tinted glasses. Later with MSFS 2000 … wow that thing was a total dog and it was insanely slow to load a flight (much, much slower than MSFS 2020). But hey, it was hardware from the late 90s…And so on with the MSFS franchise…they all had issues at launch, and many issues persisted throughout the life of the software.
Throughout all these years, I don’t recall a flight sim with this many issues at launch. So yes, it feels frustrating. That the scope and ambition of the project is totally wild…I think it’s totally amazing there is such ambition and scope, but the execution feels like an untamed horse galloping away. I don’t think the real challenge here is technical. I’m guessing it’s more along the lines of project management issues, feature scoping issues, process issues, and perhaps politics between Asobo and MS, causing all sorts of organizational stresses.
I don’t know…perhaps my distant memory of the past is in pink coloured glasses as I said and the adult me is just much more critical now…
But anyway I’m not dissapointed because I wasn’t expecting this sim, and it’s just a nice surprise that MSFS is back at all. I haven’t felt this excited about a sim, or any game really, for a very long time.
Long answer: Is based on some fundamental assumptions and conditions:
1.) Both MS and Asobo are businesses and so hope and need to make commercial profit now and ongoing. Fine by me - I wouldn’t want it any other way.
2.) I base my opinion with comparisons to other sims in their initial release form without any add-on content. Although it shares a code-base with FSX, FS2020 is so different that is deserves to be given every opportunity to mature.
3.) I was involved in the Alpha from January and had a pretty good understanding of what I was buying before the actual release date.
I cannot use FSX (or P3D) in it’s default state. Graphics, aircraft, everything is sub par.
I never took the time to get into the XP ecosystem (although I did try) because it was nowhere near a quantum shift from P3D. It didn’t really take any particular aspect of flight simming (that were valuable enough to me) to the next level.
I can “play” FS2020 for hours on end and still have a huge smile on my face at the end, and have been for 9+ months. Yes there are hugely frustrating flaws and new bugs / degradations that annoy the hell out of me, but there are plenty of other flights I can make to work around these flaws and still have an amazing experience that other sims don’t come close to.
Yes we are missing lots of required 3rd party add-ons. I wasn’t expecting them to be out for at least a few months after launch, and I wasn’t expecting launch to be until December or early next year, so I’ll start my clock in March 2021 or so.
Was the product released too early? - if you expected almost perfect than certainly yes. However I’m very realistic and although I was still surprised by some of the issues… I would MUCH rather have the sim now with the belief that these issues will be worked out than wait another 6-12 months for a sim that other people think is acceptable.
Is this the perfect situation? No.
Is it the best $120 I’ve spent in a long time? Hell yes!
P3D subscription was cancelled the day after MS2020 release.
XP was uninstalled a week or so previous.
I miss the FSL A320 and the PMDG 737 (although less than I expected to). I don’t miss the other sims even for a moment.
I would like to make one more comment about this thread… about being “disappointed”…
I remember in the “old” days of FSX, FS9, etc. there were always users who were frustrated over performance issues (low frame rates- especially the initial release of FSX), graphic problems, wanting better clouds, etc. These issues were eventually fixed. The forums that we all used, AVSIM, Flight Sim.com, etc were very “Flight Sim” specific, whereas this forum is more generic and has many posts by users who are regular “gamers”. I can see that by game references and posts made by users who obviously have just gotten into a flight sim for the first time. There’s nothing wrong with that- in fact it’s good to introduce new folks to the beauty of flight simming. My point is that I think MS made a tactical error in misjudging how this “unfinished” software would be received. As has been suggested elsewhere, it may have been a good financial decision but for the simmers who have made the long awaited jump from FSX/FS9, we were expecting a level of “completeness” based on those sims and based on where P3D and XPlane are currently at, regardless of how long it took for them to get tweaked.
So I think MS is just now realizing how strong and critical a community of serious simmers we have here, who are not as willing to accept all the flight-sim-specific bugs that will probably eventually be fixed. The other users, i.e. gamers and first-timers, are more prone to just have fun with what it does and, as the MS ads have stressed more than anything, “explore the world.”
We actually couldn’t have said it better. Many (we see it on facebook as well) still don’t seem to understand that and will want to start comparisons with how FSX was looking 15 years ago etc. They don’t realize that we have reached a high level of system-fidelity in all that time and that users won’t want to go 15 years back to experience the same again.
Anyway, if P3D or XP would bring out a new version without “study-level” new or compatibles aircraft, as we saw 15-20 years ago at the very beginning of the “new” simulator age of the 21th century, i don’t think they would be successful again…MSFS don’t have to worry as they have all these gamers in their back. I am not convinced for now that Asobo/MS really are interested in the needs of the few % " hardcore-simmers"…but i hope i’m wrong.
IMO, MS would do well to morph this into a ‘game’ rather than a ‘sim’. I don’t think they can do both, and given the toxic obsessive dissatisfaction of the sim enthusiasts here, they would be better off creating a simplified ‘game’ and writing off the ‘sim’. It’s a matter of diminishing returns. Is it worth all of the cost and grief trying to satisfy a small percentage of potentially never satisfied users? I think not.
Wow, that would shut some up quickly.
But I suspect that MS will simply ignore the few sim enthusiasts here who show a toxic obsessive dissatisfaction. It has however not been proven that they are actually simmers. I would prefer that they were identified and not given any online data.
I think that is the exact opposite of what they should do. Ultimately casual gamers will get bored flying around looking at pretty scenery and they have a wide interest in all sorts of other gaming genres too so will move on to new games as they come out. In the longer terms the simmers are the people who will retain interest in this product.
Are simmers a critical bunch, yep of course they are but it comes from an obsession with wanting things to be as good as they can be and that obsession is what fuels that long term interest.
Why should they be interested in the needs of a few %. Let’s say not just the 0.00001% who are the loud complaining voices in this forum, but 5%.? From a business point of view, why should MS take their wants and wishes into consideration? I bet you can’t or will not answer.
Thank you all for the feedback. Since this post started on release date, and we are now on the verge of receiving update #4 (on Tuesday), going to mark this one as closed. Looking forward to any constructive and measurable feedback on the upcoming version, specific to the simulator.
