It hasn’t even been 1 year.
It’s been released for over a year, and was in a lengthy testing phase before that. And the Xbox’s were in development during that same time period. So, 2 years at least I’d say. It was always the intention for this to run on both PC and Xbox. It wasn’t like Asobo woke up one Monday morning a couple of months back and were informed by Microsoft to get an Xbox build working by July.
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I do agree to this open letter i am not a good writer in English sorry.
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About the first point, LOD and popping in;
I only notice draw distance decreases and popping in on photogrammetry areas. I don’t notice these things at all when flying in a non-photogrammetry area. There’s trees and buildings almost as far as the eye can see. It’s not noticably worse than it was before.
I also don’t see the popping effect outside of PG areas.
So, to me it seems that there have been some degradations on photogrammetry, lod/popping, but not on terrain in general.
Am I correct?
Agreed.
I feels like quite a setback. Really odd to see such poor quality actually be allowed to release.
And it’s not just us as personal gamers. More and more payware third-party developers are now making posts on their forums (Aerosoft CRJ, PMDG DC-6, JustFlight Arrow, etc) explaining that parts of their planes were broken with the SU5 build that was released due to undocumented changes right before release (They had been part of beta test builds in order to continuously adjust their planes to make them work on release. But that entire process isn’t worth anything if you then end up releasing undocumented changes without notifying the third-party developers anyways!). Some of these problems can’t even be fixed by the third-party developers themselves. They have to rely on Asobo to put it right again in upcoming patches…
It’s just extremely dissapointing to see that the patching practices are still basically terrible. Terrible QA, terrible undocumented UI and control changes, and terrible handling of third-party developers.
And the reason it’s so frustrating is because the platform does have so much potential. When it works it’s basically incredible. So it’s just extremely annoying on a selfish level to then see it be handled like this.
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no exsuse for this bad stuff.
dev sell his souls to capitalism
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Thumbs up man … well said.
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Agree, nice message
It literally hasn’t been out for a year. The release date was August 18th 2020. And unless you have some kind of secret information on when they started port development for xbox i don’t see how you could say 2years with such confidence.
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We always can go back to X Plane 11
I wonder if the bean counters at MicroSoft are more to blame for unwanted changes and deadlines than Asobo? Asobo may not have any choice in the final decisions made.
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I agree 100% with the content and with the tone of the request. I myself have a mid-range PC that benefited from the FPS increase (although I was happy enough with SU4 that to me was the perfect balance of graphic experience and smoothness of operation… no crashes nor large freezes whatsoever from the beginning).
But now I experience the loss in visual experience (as stated before, I don’t want to repeat here) AND suffer occasionally from the stutters, and worst of all, I had a few CTD that never had before.
So I add my voice to all the others, and ask ASOBO: give us PC gamers the game we had before SU5, the one you advertised well before launch date back in 2020, and that suffered a continuous loss of visual immersion every time an update was published
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I fully agree with you. All this “dumbing down” theory just to benefit the xbox is complete poppycock, imo. What you just said makes far more sense. They were pushed to get that Xbox version out and had to make sure it works. Jörg’s tone and choice of words also points in that direction: “Now that we got the Xbox release out of the way” (from an interview) You don’t talk like that about your love project 
And also, let’s just THINK for half second: why work one year to improve the PC version, if the one true goal was just to have a nice Xbox version?? Why not focus that entire year on Xbox and THEN start with the PC, if it was truly Xbox first? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. Xbox is a closed environment with no variability, unlike the PC, why go through months and months of feedback and adjustments, while knowing that the PC isnt your actual focus? None of that theory makes any sense whatsoever, not to me at least. The more one digs and connects the dots, the less sense it makes.
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great post, thanks for your summary. 100% agreed.
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I couldn’t agree more with this post and I would (naievly) like to see Asobo provide an open response to it as well.
I think the OP has hit the nail on the head with every point made. This is not about some bitter/twisted ‘PC users vs Xbox users’ hyperbole but rather about what the whole community wants and needs.
It may detract from the post a little, but I would add to these two points to the OPs list:
-
Asobo need to comment on the overall state of fidelity of the sim. The content feels more and more like a beta test with bugged, underdeveloped content missing key features since release. This has been acknowledged but not actioned in a year. I would like to see a plan or intent towards improving key features now Xbox compatibility has landed.
-
Asobo should not commit their dev team to arbitrary deadlines or cycles - this is not a route to success or user satisfaction, evidence would suggest the opposite.
To quote ‘Yes Mintser’ “if you are going to do this very silly thing, don’t do it in this very silly way”.
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I agree with this 100%
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Not only this but everyone is throwing all conventional wisdom right out the window and acting as if the xbox user base will ever reach the number of pc users. They somehow think MS and Asobo are going to drop everything and from now on only cater to the smaller group of users… Like how would that ever make sense??
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Wasn’t release on Aug 18. 2020?
And back then an Xbox Version was planned but what they said was, they only started to Port it to the console after release.
I rather think, thst they were given a release date that was broadly advertised and therefore DEVs had to delivered whatever was ready with focus on having it stable on the Xbox, as this is where press is going to look at.
They really should now reconsider any development plan or work on new content and feature ans rather first get it stable and with the option for visual quality that we’ve seen before.
And they shouldn’t stick to the 2 months cycle for big sim updates and instead constantly release small updates as soon as they are ready.
They can stop calling it hotfix, so it sounds less like troubleshooting but call it Microupdates that sounds more like an improvement, which might calm down MS marketing department as well.
- First thing has to be to get rid of those CTD.
- Then fix of essential functions like weather and traffic.
- Then they have to introduce options to the menu so users with high end pc or not so high priority on FPS can get the superior visual quality back, without manipulating config files.
This way, those happy now can keep what they have and those not happy should get it as soon as possible.
And only then, new features and content should
Be implemented, always with the main focus on testing that the stability and quality is not degraded, before pushing a mandatory update.
So generally spoken: when an update is mandatory, it has to work for all and may not degrade any aspect.
Alternatively make updates optional and revertable.
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That’s straight forward and zero compromise rational thinking. On point. Besides that, the REAL add-on market is on PC, lets not fool ourselves. The Xbox will NEVER reach the level of interest in add-ons that the PC will generate. The PC can run add-ons that the Xbox never will be able to. Xbox players might buy some planes, maybe, but not stuff like accurate airports, utility tools, map tools, procedure tools, navigation add-ons etc, just no…
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And there in lies the problem… It takes time to actually think.
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