While I am with you throughout that post, you lost me with this last part.
I have an F1 racing “game”. In some version, it has been around since the 90’s. By the time my son got interested, I was posting some extremely fast laps with no traction control, no brake assist, manual gearbox, no “racing line” and full damage and wear turned on.
My son started out with all those assists turned on and we could have some pretty good races. Now we run the modern version. Both of us race with no assists.
There is absolutely NO REASON that the same approach can’t be taken with MSFS. F1 even has a career mode if that’s what ‘drives’ you. I prefer to just set up races with friends online and spend an evening wearing out tires. Why not start with a ‘drop dead’ simulator and allow new users to dial in the assists they need to have fun flying. Toss in a career mode for those that want to progress through to seasoned pilot.
It is entirely possible to have a title that appeals to the hardcore and the casual at the same time.
But I think what it comes down to is the reason sims have always had limited mass market appeal in the past - the intimidation factor.
I still remember unpacking my first sim - Falcon 3.0 - to install on my old 386 back in 1993. I remember that 250-ish page manual that came with it. It also had that cardboard keyboard overlay with all those multiple commands, including the ctrl, alt and shift modifiers. When Falcon 4.0 came out a few years later, its manual was even more detailed and intimidating. If that’s not intimidating to the average gamer, I don’t know what is. Through the years, the commercial sims like MSFS, and eventually XP were similar. They weren’t “games” like most gamers were used to.
I also remember seeing an interview with either Seb or Martial (can’t remember which it was) from 1+ years ago where the interviewer asked him if he had played FSX or X-Plane before starting MSFS. He said no, as those “games” were far too intimidating.
So from the business perspective, I can see where they’re coming from. They may have claimed to be the “sim for simmers” during marketing, but really the primary goal was to make MSFS more accessible to the average gamer - both on PC and XBOX - and give them beautiful eye candy to wow them. That’s what ropes them in and gets them spending that money.
A lot of gamers won’t last long past a few flight, because there’s no ‘pew-pew’ involved. But those that do stick around will eventually disable assists and get more into detail and want more realistic options.
And I have no doubt we’ll get there at some point. It will be a sim that can appeal to both the casual gamer and hardcore simmer. But unfortunately for us who want more realism and more sim-oriented stuff, we have to wait for the “money maker” period of appealing to the mass-market to be over before we start getting what we want. And like I said, that’s not likely to happen until a good year after the XBOX version is released and the critical mass sales there have dwindled.
Yup. At least the launch version is. It’s about as far from a “sim for simmers” as you can get.
I have no doubt it will get there, but like I said, I don’t really see that happening soon. Right now, they’re still swimming in the money made from launch on PC. Now they’re looking for a repeat performance on XBOX. And if they don’t get that launch right, console gaming review sites and the gaming community at large will basically tear them a new one. They’re probably well aware of what CD Projekt Red went through with Cyberpunk and don’t want to end up in that situation. Their focus right now is getting XBOX players roped in and getting them to stick around as long as possible to sink their dollars into the marketplace.
Once that market dries up (or at least levels off), which will likely be mid 2022, we can expect focus to shift back on PC-centric and more hardcore sim features, as this is the crowd that will be keeping MSFS alive for the following 8 years. The ADHD-stricken gamers will already have moved on to whatever the new “game du jour” is by then.
Pc users are having difficulty getting more advanced Graphics cards, because of short supplies, blamed on (probably correctly) the world wide Chip Shortage.
No one is talking about how this Chip Shortage may be affecting the X-Box, and the predicted (?) increase in sales, once MSFS is available on Xbox.
I personally have no interest in Xbox, so I have not looked, but I suspect we will see X-Box Scalping, if it is not happening already.
The new gen console scalping already hit at launch. They were in such shortage. Not sure what the situation is with them currently, as I’m not a console owner and don’t really care much.