Old Guys thoughts

I have been looking forward to this new sim for some time. I must say I am very disappointed in the product. In my opinion it is far from user friendly, it looks very pretty with great eye candy, but there is no meat in the sim. No directions on how to change things, how things work, and so on! I get the feeling that in the long run, money is the only driving force with FS2020. There are few airliners, no skins, and I get the impression that any worthwhile add-on will will be cost driven. I will continue to monitor how things progress, but in all honesty I am not expecting great things from this sim. I think that one of the reasons for my cautious attitude is that I had to spend over 6 hours & 4 phone calls to Microsoft support just to get the program to load on my PC even though I have a top end machine, Windows 10 and exceptional internet speed! I hope I will be wrong, but only time will tell…

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As the heading above says, welcome to the community. From one old guy to another, I hope you are wrong already. Maybe I am just lucky but right through the alpha and beta and now with the release I have had no problems at all with downloading, and only 3 or 4 crashes, and being retired I fly every day. I can of course see the very many areas that need fixing and the very many areas where things need to be added/improved - very very very many areas! I will admit that I fly mainly GA and VFR as I do as a RL recreational pilot. But I am enjoying it so much, flying with friends already, seeing the world, and beginning to teach myself IFR. I see so much potential for this modern marvel of technology, and feel so sad that so many are having so many issues and disappointments and angst. Although I was happy enough to see it released already, and this is a major debate at the moment, now that it is released I do hope the development team will work quickly to improve things and also communicate more with us. Cheers, and again, welcome.

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Sir,

I do hope I am wrong! Thanks for the kind reply!

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+1

Agreed. For me there is no meat as you described. It is a quick feel good experience for the average person but this isn’t for genuine flight simulation. We all placed false hopes in Microsoft because this means so much to us. Anyone who tries to do a real flight from A to B knows it feels completely silly. Some things are great and even awesome. But the question is does it outweigh the bad? I don’t think so.

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I think MS should have released the sim as an Open Beta. There are too many issues to consider it otherwise. I’m very optimistic about the future. It will all depend on how responsive MS/Asobo are to the user base and how quickly things are based. Lots of us, including myself, have spent much hard earned cash upgrading our PCs and purchasing peripherals for this release. I hope I didn’t jump the gun too early.

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When you say old?

DIsappointed here. As a retired military pilot and flight simulator instructor and current private pilot, this is a game and not a flight simulator. Sure, the graphics are pretty, but that’s the extent of it. No multi-monitor support, no ForeFlight support, primitive flight planning, poor VFR map, unrealistic ATC simulation. I now realize how good XPlane 11 is. I got suckered in by FS2020’s graphics!

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Pushing 70 and pushing it hard…

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I’m pushing 75. I think that this sim will improve over time. However me not have a lot of time, lol.
I am not sure yet but maybe we will be able to import better flight plans.
This sim definitely needs a better selection of aircraft.

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Whilst I’m 20 years younger than you oldies I think I can safely provide some input here.

Default aircraft, have been and likely always will be on the simple side in any simulator. That said, MSFS offers the best default planes we’ve seen yet. Go compare the feel of the default XPlane 11 C172.

The G1000 needs work, but XPlane 11 didn’t get a G1000 at all at release, it took some time to get anything besides the Carenado effort. I’ll admit the 530 also needs work.

The airliners are by far the most unrealistic of the included aircaft but developing a fully working FMS/MCDU and all of the other systems takes a serious amount of time and effort. Asobo have been clear on this front that they’d rather put the time into the sim. It wont be that long before PMDG release the NGX and then who knows what’s next, hopefully FSLabs A32x & Majestic Q400.

On the airliner livery front, Asobo have said they cant get a response from any of the airlines to get approval to use them, I suspect the airlines have other priorities at the moment. However, liveries are available to download if you hop onto the official discord, livery channel, quite a few A320 liveries are now available.

The strength of this sim at the moment is in the pistons and VFR. Explore some of the far reaches of the earth that your old selves couldn’t possibly get to, go hunting down fauna in a bush plane and i’ll guarantee you’ll have a smile on your face.

Lastly i’ll say that Asobo/Microsoft thus far have been very responsive to user feedback in my experience. Yes, It’s released a little early but you have to bite the bullet and get your product out there at some point and I’m 100% sure we’ll see good things and positive change down the road. This is just the start of the journey with this simulator.

Cheers.

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I would like to find a manual of some sort on how to set up the sim, configure a flight and make it feel realistic. I think I made a mistake in purchasing FS2020.

I felt the same way, but the game will gradually make sense.

There are some great tutorials coming out on YouTube. Check out this one if you’re really new to fight sims

He’s doing a whole series.

Well at 81 and an actual pilot I am extremely disappointed with MS2020. The flight dynamics truly â– â– â– â–  and the sim itself is truly buggy. I will be sticking with X-Plane 11 till lots of things are addressed. How can you release a sim that has no way of calibrating yoke and rudders inside the game.

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As an Oldman pushing mid 70’s this all sounds alarming
Still busy trying to download the product since 18th non-stop 36,14Gib to go
I must say I might have wasted my money time will tell
Otherwise back to my P3Dv5 where I have spend a lot of money on additional scenery etc.
But one must give them (MS) time and hopefully the “bugs” will be killed at least it is not COVID-19!
As somebody said I was also interested in what might be “eye candy”

I too am somewhat disappointed. As an old timer whose been doing the simming thing since the early 80s, I find this new simulator to be very UN-userfriendly. It’s absolutely NOTHING like FSX as far a user interface goes. As many have mentioned, a manual would have been nice right from the start, or at least an online reference manual.

HUGE learning curves are not something real and sim pilots appreciate - and this sim seems to have an enormous learning curve.

All this said, I had absolutely no problem download or installing the program to a dedicated SSD drive. It’s been booting fine (albeit fairly slow with a fast internet connection). I am disappointed that the FMS systems on the heavies are not very functional, such as allowing for user editing flight plan fixes or other performance data. A direct to feature would be nice. Maybe all this will be remedied by PMDG and the likes when they put out compatible payware aircraft.

This sim absolutely has potential, but the intial shock of the steep learning curve is off-putting to many, as I see from previous posts.

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Personally I think that even if there are many things lacking right now and the sim doesn’t have the depth that it needs, it has the right potential. My biggest worry is probably that xbox console users will always have to be considered, which could mean that the depth and abitility to do more complicated stuff that a PC is way more fitted to do, will continue to be lacking. I hope I’m wrong.

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This game is a technical marvel, they’re not going to drop support for it for a long while, so I only see this sim improving over the years.

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I recall them saying this is due to Covid. They reached out to pretty much every single airliner out there and not one was able to get back in time due to them all being basically shut down. Hopefully this changes in the near future.

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Going to promote my own post on this

if airliner liveries something you need that much, you can grab some community made from MSFSADDONS

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