Offline Flying Feature?

Hi everyone, today most of us are not able to enter the game some hours earlier because of Microsoft server’s outrage. This brings me a question: Why this game requires an Internet connection to launch?
Why can’t I fly offline?

This game do have many awesome online features, such as live weather, multiplayer and high-quality scenery streaming, but none of these are core feature of a flight simulator. Look at Prepar3D, X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator X, all of them can run without an internet connection after properly installed. This title did not change the way of playing as a flight simulator, so why this one requires Internet connection?

I understand that this might be a DRM issue, and I’m a XGP subscriber. But today Steam owners also reports the same issue. So you still can’t play this 150GB huge game offline even if you payed $60 or so to “own” the game? (if that’s really for DRM, Crackwatch.com says that this title is “cracked”. Not sure how that works but I guess cracked version should work without Internet, while legal owners are not able to play because Xbox service is down. How ironic!)

Therefore, I would like to request the sim to launch when offline, so that the sim works properly without Internet connection.

[Edit]
Let’s be clear about online features.
Firstly, this sim DOES have a offline mode AFTER you launch it with Internet connection. When I unplug my Internet cable in the welcome screen, I can choose anywhere to fly and fly without a problem (There will be a note saying that I’m in offline mode and there’s no offline scenery streaming, but the sim works.) Therefore it’s only requesting the sim to support offline mode at launch.

HIgh-quality scenery streaming. When your network is bad you can see the lower-quality “default” scenery in this sim. Therefore, this sim itself supports offline scenery, so you do NOT need a huge hard disk to store a lower-quality worldwide quality. FSX stores the whole world’s scenery (at a very low quality) in 8GB, but it works offline. My point here is that the sim should WORK with the default senery, while the online scenery streaming is only a plus.

Multiplayer. Flight SImulators are NOT multiplayer games. It’s not MMO. It’s a single-player game with multiplayer feature. For decades, flight simulators are played solo (with some limited multiplayer capabilities). Massive Multiplayer is a new feature of this sim, but it does not changes the fact that flight simulators should be able to solo play.

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I agree 100%, I paid for the core game to work and it should run without an Internet connection to servers for all the “live” features.

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If you want to be able to fly anywhere, you’d need a huge harddrive. It’s not just the dynamic elements like weather and traffic that are continuously downloaded. The world itself is as well.

But maybe it would be technically possible to allow offline flying in manually cached areas? I don’t know. Anyway, I predict that it’s never going to happen. The entire computing world is slowly moving from individual computers into the cloud.

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Aa much as this pains the hard core “simmers,” MSFS 2020 is essentially a Massively Multiplayer Online game now.

MMOs by their nature require an always on Internet Connection and functioning backend that by design cannot be stored locally.

Respectfully, even if you didn’t follow the early development of this sim, the “box specs” and the fact that it’s Cloud based are clear indicators of the Operating Environment.

Let’s face it, there’s no way to deliver Bing Maps + Photogrammetry locally, no average consumer has that storage capability locally. I think you would be more outraged if the base cost to get you running a standalone copy of MSFS were 30-40K USD just for storage alone. At that point, I would have gotten an FAA Approved AATD and been done with it.

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i also agree. Today all have to be connected to the internet. and thats not so nice. Also that you need the disc or an image of it to play… why?? why, hmm its microsoft…

Boy did I have problems yesterday.

I spend HOURS (altogether, inbetween watching a movie and a Gary Sandler documentary) “fixing” ‘your XBox login does not correspond with your Store login’,

but it was the dam///n MS server.

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I said a few choice words when I saw that flash on my screen as well.

If you ever experience bad connection you will find the scenery become lower-level (because of scenery streaming does not work). This means that this sim supports a low level scenery for anywhere (just like FSX). Therefore you don’t need a huge harddrive to fly anywhere, only need to accept the downgraded scenery quality.

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This sim do have offline mode when you unplug your cable AFTER entering the welcome screen. In the offline mode you can still fly anywhere locally. Which MMO game have the support of offline mode? So this sim is not a MMO, and all essential things are stored locally.
In the offline mode, there’s no scenery streaming so the scenery quality is bad, and there’s no live whether or multiplayer.
I also checked Microsoft Store page and there’s no description for Internect connection requirement. Seriously, even though the game requires 100GB+ Internet download it did not mention Internet requirement in sys requirement or the description.

Let’s face it, the sim do supports offline mode after launch into the welcome page. So why it won’t launch without Internet?

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So you can’t say the user experience is optimal or even meets expectations for an “offline experience.” Once again, the infrastructure behind the flying experience - scenery (especially Bing Maps), weather, traffic is all Online.

FSX was a true offline experience given everything was locally stored.

I also checked Microsoft Store page and there’s no description for Internect connection requirement. Seriously, even though the game requires 100GB+ Internet download it did not mention Internet requirement in sys requirement or the description.

Please do check the Knowledge Base, which is accessible from the FAQ Link on the Home Page of this forum. Note that original KB article has been online approximately four (4) months before launch.

https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360013463459-Minimum-Recommended-and-Ideal-PC-Specifications-for-Microsoft-Flight-Simulator

Note the Bandwidth Line.

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“The entire computing world is slowly moving from individual computers into the cloud.”

Which is a HUGE problem. While FS 2020 was useless to own (while the servers were down) I had high-resolution satellite imagery that worked just fine using X-Plane 11.

If X-Plane can run (and use locally stored data/imagery) without internet service there’s no reason FS 2020 shouldn’t be able to do the same.

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Yes, that’s all true. Offline experience is worse than online. But offline mode is still supported, just not availablt to use (cannot launch).
Therefore, this sim still have every essential things locally stored. What’s the difference between this and FSX?

Oh, yes, somewhere in the KB. Why people are supposed to look at the KB before they buy? The Store page is where they buy this product. How can one know that the store page’s requirement is fake and the true one is in somewhere in the KB? I don’t want to make this a point, you made this point. It’s probably just a mistake not updating the store page but makes your point invalid. So don’t argue more on this, they probably forgot to update the store page.
This game do requires a Internet connection to download the thing. But my point is: This sim supports offline mode after launch, so it should launch when offline (currently it won’t launch when offline)

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Oh, yes, somewhere in the KB. Why people are supposed to look at the KB before they buy? The Store page is where they buy this product. How can one know that the store page’s requirement is fake and the true one is in somewhere in the KB? I don’t want to make this a point, you made this point. It’s probably just a mistake not updating the store page but makes your point invalid. So don’t argue more on this, they probably forgot to update the store page.

Consumers who protect themselves perform due diligence, at least if they care about their hard-earned money. Hence Caveat Emptor.

Consumers of technology commodities will check FAQs, as well as independent reviews and other sources, to see if there are any gotchas. Which is why I knew at purchase I’d need to move to an 8GB card minimum, especially after reading reviews, and this forum with beta user feedback.

One can choose to buy something sight unseen, that’s perfectly within rights, but there’s no excuse to be able to say one didn’t know about the offline / online functionality. If people waited one day after launch, there were numerous reviews that covered this piece.

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Please stop wasting time arguing your wrong point. There is a official system requirement on the store page, so why the consumer need to search somewhere else for the system requirement? I may ignore all other info about “system requirement” because there’s an official source in the store page. Hey, THEY JUST FORGOT TO UPDATE but your point is invalid becaue of this. STOP arguing this.

I believe it is useless debating whether because the min specs or the FAQ is telling it would require an active connection to launch, because in my opinion it is really misleading.

In effect, during the alpha/beta and the PR campaign, it was clearly said FS2020 is using online servers to stream terrain data (photogrammetry and/or textures) but it will also provide 2 options:

  • local cache to pre-download an area and therefore not requiring to stream data again,

  • non-Bing Data mode where the simulator is using generic terrain textures and a terrain mesh (which most likely therefore is lower resolution than what you’d get online).

If the purpose of these “disconnected” options is indeed to use the simulator “disconnected”, it makes no sense at all requiring a connection to launch the sim.

Some will argue the connection doesn’t detract from using the simulator in what I call above the “disconnected” mode because they’ll say the main purpose of such mode is saving on download bandwidth, and this is as valid an argument as any other. However it makes no sense to me and the reasons for the online connection at launch are in my opinion somewhere else.

During initial launch, we were told the “Press Ant Key” was mandatory because it was necessary to “trigger” Xbox authentication. IIRC I’ve commented about this at the time in saying even if this would be a “check point” for authentication, it doesn’t prevent removing the prompt and instead of waiting for a user to interact with a button, it could do this automatically and behind the scene anyhow, therefore making the argument “need to click” kind of an excuse for something else.

When looking at the traffic between FS2020 and the servers it is clear the Xbox services are used to store into your profile the credentials to use the software. They can selectively and remotely enable or disable access to some features this way (this is all documented in XBox developer docs).

All this to say I believe the requirement to authenticate online, even though you disable all Bing streaming features and don’t intend to use any online feature (MP, etc…) is only because the entire game authentication architecture for DRM, DLC, and feature enablement is solely based on the XBox services.

Having said this, I believe this is wrong because it defeats the purpose of even offering a non-Bing data mode (offline mode) and I’d suggest Asobo and Microsoft do change this policy and let users launching the simulator even offline. Because not only server outage can occur again in the future, but in 10 years from now when the servers are shutting down, it will prevent the end users from using their program. Some might want to install their own local mesh + texture (ala XP11 ortho fashion) and might not want to use any online feature and this option shouldn’t be left out in my opinion. I believe such capability is also contributing to what differentiates an XBox game from a simulator for simmers.

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So, the actual answer is… Yes, you can fly offline. But you need to set it up ahead of time while you have a connection to the license server.

https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/game-setup-and-play/play-games-offline-on-windows-10-using-offline-mode

Once you do, you can choose offline mode any time you want.

To me, Offline mode is for when the servers are down, like they were today. Yeah, the scenery doesn’t look as nice, but, at least you can fly.

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Yup. This works. Just disabled my ethernet adapter and was able to play in offline mode. You will get a soft warning, but you can proceed and play.

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I didn’t try disabling my network yesterday unfortunately. My PC is already configured for offline mode already.

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Seriously? At least it’s not working for me… I’m using XGP but the FAQ said XGP user should be able to use offline mode for 30 days. The sim does no launch without Internet, even though offline mode is enabled in my MS Store setting. That’s why I think the sim did not enable offline mode.

Did you buy it on Steam or Microsoft Store? I probably need to buy it to own right now if that solves the issue…

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I also agree that the sim should startup with or without a connection to the server. If not connected to the server it should so indicate and provide the option to continue in offline mode.
The recent server connection issue caused the sim on startup to appear to get stuck on “Checking for Updates” for an extended period of time. The sim could have made use of available Windows 10 Xbox networking info to provide indication of the actual problem.

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