Some really bizarre comments here. People have been raving about the scenery, clouds and other aspects of this sim but a few bugs mean Asobo don’t know what they are doing? I never realised default P3D or X-Plane were that amazing.
I certainly think about the future for MSFS with some trepidation.
- Microsoft Flight (RIP)
- Flight School (RIP)
- Flight Sim World (RIP)
As I’ve said: if we get another 3 years of reasonably frequent updates/patches I think we can consider that a success. Beyond that…? Hmmm, not on the evidence to date.
Yep. And when you take into account how little money this actually cost MS to develop it’s very easy for them to walk away. If they were serious about making a premier flight simulation product they would have done the coding in house. Plenty of flight centric developers in the Seattle area.
Instead they outsourced it to a small time mmo shop in France that hasn’t the slightest clue about flying.
Fun fact I used to live in Redmond Washington and have several current and former Microsoft employees as Friends and colleagues. I know how they operate. This was a rushed test project. The sole purpose to test their azure platform. Hats off to them for developing this on the cheap. I can tell you they probably spent almost as much on marketing as they did on developing.
It’s worried me from day one, tbh, like a little alarm going off vaguely in the distance… Well, we’ll see.
As long as they can finish the SDK and make it stable in 2-3 years is all the community needs. They can move on, and the community and 3rd parties will keep it alive. As long as they keep the streaming data servers online.
I’m sure the suits at MS see it as a way to advertise bing and azure as well. Otherwise I doubt it would have gotten the green light.
I have to agree though, all the signs say this was built on a pile of spaghetti code. I’ve been in development for a couple decades, and can tell you companies never invest the large sums of money and time it takes to refactor and modernize piles of crufty code. Even if they go through with the 10 year plan, it’ll probably never really be very polished. I hope I’m wrong though.
The moment I saw them publishing their development roadmap I knew this was one of their pilot projects and not something “premier”. What serious developer has their Project managers posting biweekly updates on development? Can you imaging rockstar posting weekly updates on the development of GTA 6? Or Microsoft posting a development roadmap of Windows 11? Of course not. No one cares. Lol
That’s where I fear this flight sim is bound. Asobo is a games developer, not a flight sim specialist. MSFS is a gargantuan project in both scope and technical depth. I can’t imagine this modestly-sized games developer is going to devote its entire team henceforth solely to maintaining and improving it. It’s a huge, huge job.
Asobo will want to move on to another games project - for financial and creative reasons. If you start to think this through, you start to see the implications…
I’m a 20+ years of experience professional software engineer too.
Releasing this product in it’s current state was relatively early and probably should have gone thru a lot more beta-testing. I can guess that the number of resources, both development and test teams, were lacking in count at a minimum. As a laundry list of bugs, features and shortcomings increased in count it would appear they made a decision to get the product to the consumer before it would be production-ready.
However, I believe they came to a realization that given the lack of resources and the overwhelming desire by the consumer to get their hands on this product they released it in its current condition. They knew it wasn’t perfect and had problems. But they also knew it was a useable product. They knew the feedback from the community would allow them to focus on those bugs that were most important to the consumer instead of trying to guess.
I’ve worked on projects where the bug count can grow considerably, and as developers we have a tendency to prioritize some bugs over others despite what a consumer would consider to warrant more immediate attention. The beta-user feedback becomes incredibly valuable as it often determines the direction of focus for a product near “completion”. Now the word completion is relative because software is never released bug-free, by anyone, any company, ever.
This is a unique product, and it is incredibly complex involving a lot of players from different vendors. When you consider a Bings Map integration, the weather engine, the flight model and how all of these sub-products have been brought together to provide one all-inclusive product it is an impressive feat. Not one you’ll typically see with products of this nature.
The consumer wanted this product NOW, and that became more clear as each day, week and month passed. Asobo and Microsoft made a decision to release as-is to get the product to an eager public. They knew they would have an opportunity to get real, useful feedback from that community and help prioritize which bugs and features they should address sooner than later. On its surface that was a good decision. However…I believe a paid pre-release would have potentially made more sense. That’s not a typical way to get a product in the hands of users; however, I feel many of us would have gladly paid to be part of a pre-release product, if not every single one of us.
I don’t think we would have been happy waiting until 2022 to get our hands on this product either so there’s that.
Now, this is all speculation and just one opinion.
There are some Max Kellerman level takes on here.
there is a workaround to the a320 engine issue until its patched, leave the APU and APU bleed on after starting your engines and engine 1 should stay on. Leave the APu on the entire flight.
The problem with this comment is the large flow of information coming from Alpha/Beta testers that have indicated Asobo were simply not interested in listening to the feedback they had to offer.
I’m still trying to figure out what the 13GB update encompassed.
13GB is an enormous amount of data for a few bug fixes/patch.
Did they inject another country into the sim? Lmao
Maybe a portal to Mars?
Vague patch notes from the developer don’t add any clarity. 16.5GB for me.
I think it is difficult to make that claim. Maybe they were interested in the feedback, maybe they were not. What does seem clear is that the feedback did not delay the launch of game.
File size notwithstanding, as I said before, it is hard to imagine that Asobo came up with such an all-encompassing patch (see the release notes) in two weeks time. My guess is that they knew about all these issues before the launch, and “fixes” were already in the pipeline.
The problem of course is that they don’t seem to be testing anything before pushing it out, or if they are (and know about all the issues), they are just doing it anyways and dealing with the PR aftermath in the community after the fact.
EDIT: There’s probably a reason that you have to be logged into this site to even view content.
That’s fair but my original statement still holds water. I can’t do anything about a company that refuses to address those issues I find most important. And this also likely addresses my other point…resources.
i got $10 says you never developed anything of this magnitude with this small a team. peanut galleries in this forum are a joke.
Hats-off to the folk at Asobo and Blackshark A.I. I’ve been very vocal in my praise for what they have delivered. That doesn’t excuse them from fair, polite criticism.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make assumptions like this.
I’m just a random forum commentor yet I’ve worked for some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies. I’ve also worked directly on Microsoft’s campus.
Are you having some kind of laugh? Default X-Plane scenery is absolute junk, globally.