This is what flight simulation looked like when I first started simming,
yes I go all the way back to Bruce Artwick’s flight simulator on the Apple II. I believe I have owned every version of MS flight simulator since then, and a few others along the way as well. So I have a little experience with flight simulators needless to say.
As for the state of MSFS2020 today? There have been tons of bugs to deal with,server issues, weather issues, VR problems, and my logbook has been broken since the last sim update.
So what do I think about MSFS 2020 in 2022?
It is the BEST experience in flight simulation I have ever had, hands down…Nothing else is even in the same league (IMHO). When I think back to my very first experience with Bruce Artwick’s Flight
Simulator (which blew me away at the time) and where Microsoft and Asobo have brought us to today I can hardly believe it.
Is it perfect? Far from it, but even with all the ups and downs I am so glad to be one of the participants in this adventure Called Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and I am for the most part enjoying it almost daily.
Oh I forgot to mention MSFS 2020 was my first experience in VR and all I can say is it is “MIND BLOWING”!!! even with its problems. I will never fly any other way again.
So having come from the very begining of home flight simulation I look at the whole picture and I am willing to deal with some problems along the way.
Thank you MS and ASOBO for bringing me this experience!
Certainly mindblowing and the best sim there is imo. Although i got/get a bit fed up now and then, especially on long flights with ctd’s. They were gone in my case for a long time, but after SU9 it came back…
Like I have mentioned in several other posts, It’s like they bought an old, delipidated house (FSX) and after some biege paint and new carpets, are going to totaly renovate it . Doing one room at a time (World Updates) and modernizing the electrics, heating etc (System updates). Occasionally they will have setbacks when someone puts a drill through the main water pipe, but in the end it will be a gorgeous place to live in.
Yes, I know it’s annoying having paid rent and then not have hot water for a month, but you know it’s a work in progress. Asobo are no fly-by-night builders out to scam people. They have the skill and ambition to see it through. It does take a lot of money though so they need to attract as many people as possible hence allowing people to camp in the field out the back (Sorry Xbox guys, that’s you. ) . This is a world beating simulation.
I don’t think it’ll be dead - but certainly more niche that it already is… they’ve never had more than 20% of the flight sim market and that was pre-MSFS.
I plan to check out XP12 when it’s out, but mainly out of curiosity and R&D… looks like some interesting stuff - but their terrain, buildings, roads are getting pretty hard to look at
Yeah, XP will definitely become niche again. Even in the FSX days when XP was niche, XP sort of had an advantage in that Microsoft only bothered to do 2 updates for FSX, and then left FSX to rot after that. Microsoft didn’t really put too many resources on FSX back in the mid to late 2000s, and that gave XP a chance.
The difference is, this time, Microsoft is willing to spend resources, time, and money, to make MSFS the best flight simulator. So Microsoft is actively pushing MSFS, including spending more and more money on it, to make it better. This is much worse for XP compared to the FSX days when Microsoft didn’t really care much about improving FSX and didn’t spend much money on making FSX better.
This is why XP is in a really bad spot, and if XP 12 isn’t revolutionary, I think it could be the end of the XP franchise.
Since MSFS came along I’ve only used FSX a couple of times. I doubt I’ll remove it, mainly in reverence to the many hours spent refining the experience, but when the time comes for a new computer it will go!
MSFS is not perfect but it is nonetheless pretty amazing, and I like the way Microsoft/Asobo are constantly endeavouring to improve it further, the update schedule is unmatched by any other simulator and looks set to continue. I’m interested in what X-Plane 12 will bring, and have no doubt in some ways it will better MSFS, we’ll have to see whether it will be more than a niche addition as others have said. Prepar3D will lose market share I think, and become only of interest to those who have invested time and money into it, in the same way some folks are still perfectly happy with FS 2004.
XP12 will be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It will likely re-invigorate developers to uplift their existing products to the new standards, probably selling them as brand new products. But the market is likely a mere fraction of what MSFS currently enjoys.
I think new flight sim people using msfs is the way to go. Those using basic XP or P3D msfs may be a good way to go but msfs still has a long road to getting all the features with multiple monitors and custom cockpit that XP or P3D has. Those that have invested tons in XP and P3D may not change over more so if XP and P3D released new versions which I suspect they will.
There is no doubt that the scenery is better but once over 8000 feet it doesn’t matter. With the mesh and scenery addon I have, P3D looks pretty good. But it depends what a person wants. Some are very focused on the scenery, outside the aircraft features and such. Others, focus on flying the plane and looking out a window from time to time.
I am happy to see Microsoft return to the flight sim world and I used it for my GA planes. With my custom setup flying Boeing 737,747, and 777 will be P3D.
I would like to see better mesh on the ground textures like flying over the Arizona desert when high in the sky. I noticed that in the 737-700 on a test flight I was doing. Keep up the great work on this new simulator
I agree with the OP, MSFS is mind-blowing (in both a good and a bad sense)
Regarding X-Plane you must not forget the B2B market where MSFS, at least in its current state, can’t compete with XP and Prepar3D. Even if the SDK one day reach the same level of maturity the online nature of MSFS prevents many companies from using it.
Unfortunatelly I can´t fully agree with the original post because now MSFS is behind other platforms in many technical aspects. The only thing that really made a difference in the market was the addition of the entire globe in game and that running on the cloud, and for that MSFS is the winner. But even that was not new. ORBX, among others, had many photorealistic scenarios for FSX, Prepar3D and X-Plane years ago but you needed to run them locally and they were handcrafted. And the quality of them is still quite close to what MSFS offers. There were 30cm resolution textures and 2m meshes. Pilot´s even published an entire globle mesh also years ago.
Buildings photogrametry is also where MSFS wins but that the globe is fully reproduced according to Bing maps is something I saw also for FSX many years ago with Google. That was an experiment at that time and not close to what we have now, but there was a mod that downloaded the satellite tiles in real time as you where flying and injected them into game. Dynamic weather is not new either. It has been improved sure, but that existed also in FSX natively and other third party tools existed that injected it live and with quite good quality. Icing effect neither… And so on. Even FSX had helicopters with sling loading since Acceleration expansion.
On the other hand Prepard3D, for instance, is more complete than MSFS as of today in some aspects. It includes radars, NVG and FLIR and also weapons or carriers, which I now are not going to come for MSFS in the game baseline, but well, hopefully one way or the other they will appear. And the avionics in MSFS… Guys… I don´t know what you understand as an authentic experince but they are simply not working. Many systems have failures while they are well consolidated in the other platforms, or at least let´s say they are more mature than what we have now in some cases because here every month or two something stops working.
So if you want to enjoy VFR and get amazing landscapes yes, MSFS wins, but if you want to use the procedures, the systems and the navigation MSFS is not really the best option right now. I will be in the future, most likely, but not really today. Opposite to what many people think I´m afraid MSFS has still a very long way to go. I´m the first one that doesn´t like that, because despite the errors I think it´s the real future platform for this simulation, but after having seen the results in the past 2 years is not really fully reliable now. Many things still need to be improved and many features still need to be added that the other simulators have. I just hope this is achieved before the project dies of success.
) . This is a world beating simulation.
