Is Asobo up to a game of this level?

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21

I agree that the MSFS development team themselves likely did not decide the release date.

However,

I have been a part of very small organizations and very large organizations. I have been the little guy and the big guy.

Every time (not sometimes), I personally require(d) the right thing or I will not be involved. I learned that no matter how big or little I was in a company, I always made sure I did my part with excellence in the extreme. This way if I needed to protest any decision from anybody in the company, I would have the clout and respect from everybody.

If everybody would be like this, CEO’s (who may know little about what production does), would have a more correct level of authority and customer service/appreciation would be at a correct level. It takes courage and not allowing the love of money to rule ones life. I have never needed to be concerned about money because I actually literally hate money. This has given me great power and authority over others who would normally have power over me.

I have told owners, managers, ceo’s, marketing departments, human resource departments, and other various staff of companies to their face “no I will not do it”, they say “your job is on the line”. I say “I will leave this instant and never return”. They back down, because they realize I’m valuable. I never have asked for a raise, I always worked very hard, I always cared about the company and everybody in the company. But if I’m asked to do the wrong thing I simply will not do it.

In like manner, hypothetically, if the CEO of Microsoft or Asobo passed down an edict that August 18th was the release date and I was part of the MSFS development team, they would hear from me, even if I was only a low level QA. If they ignored me I would be gone that very moment. If everybody on the development team takes that stance what can any CEO do? Nothing, suddenly their power is gone, and we would not have this mess we have now.

EVERYBODY WINS when honesty, truth, justice, and customer satisfaction is job#1. As soon as money becomes job #1 problems will prevail…I have seen this first hand countless times.

22

No, it absolutely wouldn’t. Depending on how you define “open-beta”, which many would argue we are currently in right now, formalising it in this way, in effect tying a ribbon on it, would not change the code one iota. You would still have the people accessing it in the current state, and reporting the same problems.

23

I really commend your attitude, and have in some cases done similar things myself.

However, pride doesn’t pay the bills.

24

Yeah i get the same problems with the A320 wont start up after 5 restars it does then engine 1 shuts down on takeoff and just before landing i lose all electronics

25

You are talking about a very edge case, for most of the critical bugs they added with this patch all they had to do was to start a new flight and play for 5 minutes. Takes longer to load up the game than it takes to notice the awful bugs.

They simply didn’t test properly, there’s nothing else to it.

26

Correct, money is currently necessary to buy and sell.

But what money is paying the bills for Flight Sim World or MS Flight? - both with claims of long term development (like MSFS). There is no bills (nor anything) for money to even be necessary. That is the ultimate point.

Also, its important not to confuse pride with Fear Of God. Though its understandable if it is confused when one person does not really know another person.

27

i never seem to have issues besides some aircraft autopilot stuff, but its far from game breaking.

i understand you as you are in that industry, but as a general gamer who just enjoys games, i dont seem to notice many of the issues that some find (even post update).

28

I agree but anybody that has ever used ANY Microsoft product has been a beta tester. That is their business model, and has been the case since the 80’s and 90’s. They simply cannot legislate for the hardware/software differences (of which there a hundreds of millions) globally. That is why e.g. Apple use ONLY their fully tested and integrated hardware and software solutions - at great cost.

29

No, it’s a pretty fair question and criticism. I’ll be the third professional developer in this thread (and I specifically do simulation work) to say that this is really sloppy work. I’d be completely embarrassed by it.

I can appreciate what’s been accomplished, but still - I just can’t consider this acceptable.

So what? Someone else’s screwups don’t excuse your own.

That’s why as developers we have things like “test driven development” to take a complex code base and break it down into small quantities that can be tested in isolation, and in an automated manner.

So you do your code commits and at the end of the day you can let your automated test suite go through hundreds of features or use cases, and when you come in the next morning you can find which have failed and need to be fixed, or you go ahead with a release if they’ve all got a green light. And if your users find some new edge case scenario in the wild, you develop an automated test for it so you don’t get caught out by it again.

Even beyond that, we’re running into things here that should be pretty obvious in pre-release play testing. Like an A320 engine that shuts off when you turn off the APU. That’s not some edge case scenario.

30

No we are not paid beta testers, We are unpaid early alpha testers who have been tricked into paying to do this.
Invest more money into proper structured testing and in adequate content delivery servers to handle the loads you expect to handle.

31

my point was more the scope and complexity is far far greater than most games, and that comparatively speaking MSFS was in a far better more stable state than some far less complex games.

32

As a Alpha/Beta tester since December, I would have to say that in regards to to aircraft/aviation and the simulation side of MSFS, Asobo is not up to the task…at least so far. They seem very overwhelmed and way in over their heads.

They also seem to be struggling with the installation process, UI, controls, and overall usability of MSFS as well.

33

Austin Meyer did an interview where he said XP12 has been in development for “some time” and will compete with next gen sims.

Unfortunately the problem for Asobo is that they aren’t really into flying. The old Microsoft Aces studio that designed almost all of the flight simulator programs were very flight centric. They lived, ate, breathed Flying.

Asobo’s effort has been truly admirable.

Unfortunately I still find myself using xplane 90 percent of the time. The lack of real weather, commercial airliners, and numerous bugs are a huge turnoff.

Sure this game is amazing for VFR flying. However, I’m not a VFR GA pilot. Even if I was I’d be disappointed with the lack of real world weather, proper taxiways, and night lighting. I know it sounds petty but seeing floating orbs over the ground not attached to light poles is an enormous turnoff for a sim that’s supposed to be next gen.

34

Interesting - and I totally understand where you’re coming from. Since I’m not, nor have ever been, a technically-minded virtual pilot I enjoy the whole VFR approach and I wish Asobo would fully-embrace the concept and run with that. I don’t mind my world being filled with virtual place names (which could be switched on or off via a filter) - in fact, I’d like them to fill it up some more (with place names for towns, cities, etc) so that I could really try and navigate about using just the map information and visual details. Where we’re at now is neither fully one thing or another.

But they have to improve the world itself some more, too. It’s impressive, but it still needs a lot of work to tidy up poor texturing, collapsed bridges, sunken quays, etc. If MSFS is going for the whole ‘such wow visuals’ approach, go for it; put the focus there and get to work patching up the most egregious visual errors.

35

Thats because the expectations are for quality. I don’t consider that glass is half empty. Gone are the days where companies get a pass on pushing out ■■■■ products.

36

And that’s the thing. If they wanted to go all out visually they failed on that as well.

Xplane has had light poles AND traffic lights that actually change colors for 10 years! Heck they even have highway exit signs. This isn’t some new high end technology.

Asobo cut corners and to me that’s not cool given the hype of this product.

37

Exactly. Why are standards so low? Quality for the end user just comes down to a subjective WTFs per hour. For an out-of-beta full release I expect it to be pretty low, and that’s not unreasonable.

38

That’s my concern with Asobo… Once the buzz and money stream slow down will they move on to the next movie-based video game (judging by previous titles) and leave this half-done?

39

Since I don’t fly at ground level or below 20ft (other than take off and landing) i have not noticed these or care that they are not present.

40

I agree with you.

However, Devils advocate… we have been waiting over 10 years for a new sim. Thankfully the framework has been setup. I fully expect this sim to potentially be the best ever with proper addons and modifications.

I can tell you with 99 percent certainty that this product will be scrapped in the next 2 years and Asobo will disappear. This prediction is based on all past MSFS releases. There is no money in this, short of the game pass subscriptions. I think all this was, was a test of the azure system and bing maps.

Scrapped you say? Impossible! They spent so much money! Not so fast. Asobo is a small time studio and believe me they weren’t paid that much for this project. The bing and ortho data was already paid for so no cost there.

Wait until xplane enters into an agreement with google for their sat data.