This sim may not be doing enough to make sure casual users are not excluded or left behind

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It is widely accepted that the flight sim community is very enthusiastic about achieving realism and are willing to spend a lot of money to give them an experience, as close to the real thing. That’s not up for debate - Indeed, it is welcomed to sustain the future of the simulator.

I do suspect, however, not enough is being done to aid and encourage users who appreciate a more casual experience, perhaps they are the future - improvements need to be made to make sure it is as user friendly as possible.

Just a few things that need addressing immediately:

  • 3rd party aircraft that have low or poor compatibility with the Xbox controller or core sim functionality, such as the World Map should not be passed on to the marketplace. It is not reasonable to expect a family to pay £16-20 + for an aircraft that is not sound to fly from the comfort of your couch, or otherwise. Everyone should get the same experience, regardless.

  • Core-sim assistance functionality desperately needs updating - no updates have come since it launched. Firstly, they need to be much more compatible with marketplace aircraft! Things like dodgy AI Pilot not doing things correctly, AI trim etc. They all need improving one way or another.

  • If the sim begins to leave people behind, or isn’t welcoming to new players it will only be painful in the long-run and none of us want to see that.

Appreciate sensible discussion.

IMPORTANT: Please refrain from spreading misinformation over things like the XBOX Gamepad. It is more than capable, if done correctly (Works well with keyboard/mouse). Thank you.

This extends to other things too. Please think before you reply.

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This is a hugely controversial topic.

My personal opinion is that the sim needs to continue to evolve into a more complex and realistic sim, returning value for those of us who have invested $$$ into more powerful PC’s and associated equipment that are capable of running add-ons in ways that greatly enrich the SIMULATION.

The casual users (Xbox’ers who just want to pick up a controller and fly) are, in my opinion, not the future of the sim. And should not be. I guess opinions vary as to whether this is a sim, or a game. I recognize the value of those who value the latter - a game for casual gamers.

I only wish Microsobo would release two separate versions - one for PC, and one for Xbox. Of course the in-house and 3rd party developers would have to do more work if they wanted to sell their products to both groups. Or, they could choose to focus their efforts on one group or the other, and stop making compromises that satisfy neither.

I’ll probably be of the minority opinion here, since I’d bet there are far more Xbox casual gamers here than PC folks with deep pockets. I’d just hate to see MSFS crippled to satisy those people. Selfish? Maybe.

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MSFS or flight simming in general has always been a niche market. Since the release on Xbox however (which I think is great) gave rise to those who think it should be like any other ‘game’, jump on the couch and chill while playing GTA V. Certainly, you can do that with the aforementioned default planes. Flight Simulator has never been about that though, which is why you’ll see ridiculous setups, yokes, cockpit setups with multiple monitors etc. It’s a hobby in its own right.

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I have to respectfully disagree — I think the sim is increasingly appealing to casual simmers and traditional gamers. You can turn most of the realism off… to the point that you can nosedive a 747 at 500kts into the ground and simply bounce back into the air! And even if you don’t get the right ‘bounce’, at the press of a couple of buttons you’re back at 3,000ft, unharmed! If that’s not appealing to arcade gamers, I don’t know what is.

When the ATR was first released I tried it with the Xbox gamepad, despite having a HOTAS. Yes, it’s a touch more inconvenient but this notion that it’s unplayable with the device is false — I had no trouble with the throttle and it’s actually pretty easy to fly, with all the realistic flight dynamics turned on. Not like using something more advanced, like a HOTUS, but the sim was never really intended to be played using the Xbox pad anyway. I’m really glad it’s available on console (that’s how I use the sim) but the Xbox has to tailor itself to the sim, rather than vice-versa. If you want to play solely with a pad, you must realise that you’re going to be unable to experience the sim’s full potential.

Much of the vitriol directed towards the ATR has been the result of user error, or unfamiliarity with the ATR as a real-world aircraft. That’s not to say it’s perfect, because it certainly needs a number of quite urgent fixes, but I’m more than satisfied with it; particularly given the price.

The sim has to strike a balance between the requirements of working pilots and, at the other end of the spectrum, folks with just a passing interest in aviation who perhaps fancy looking around a few cities from the air. And of course everyone in between. A job I personally think it does admirably.

Is it perfect? No. But you have the option now of an Xbox version which, in its base form, is practically identical to the PC original. We get free updates every few months, adding improved/new physics and plenty of eye candy to increase the immersion. We have an army of third-party devs who are committed to making the sim more realistic. And we have a team within Microsoft that seems to genuinely take on board simmers’ critique.

A friend of mine’s lad, who’s only 9, absolutely loves it (on PC) but hasn’t the first clue about IFR flying or flight physics. If the sim can appeal to a nine-year-old who wants to learn the ropes, while doing a bit of leisurely flying, it can appeal to anyone. Contrary to the comment above, there exist causal users on PC too — because I personally know three.

The future lies with no particular group. That’s just elitism seeking to divide people by mostly arbitrary factors. Microsoft is a business, and so the future of MSFS is down to how many people buy and continue to invest in the sim. I don’t know of any other current flight sim that does an equal job in appealing to such a diverse range of customers.

Sometimes I think our expectations become too high, and we end up giving MSFS an unnecessarily hard time. I remember first getting the sim and being totally blown away — yet two months down the line I’m increasingly finding small things to moan about. Familiarity breeds contempt, so they say.

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Before this thread gets too far along, especially since user communities can be a divisive topic - a reminder:

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Carry on, but properly folks. Thanks.

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Those new to the sim should not be left behind … so the sim should supply enough help and information for them to advance and catch up. (ie Youtube Videos, pdf manuals, user guides)

Everyone has to start somewhere, and learn the basics, but if you want to “Play the game”, you should at least make an attempt to learn the rules of the game.

If you don’t at least make some effort to learn, and invest some time in some self education, then you will most probably just end up with just “messing about with the game”, and never appreciate what it truly has to offer.

Which is fine as well, plenty of other games you can play on your PC or X-box, that may be more your cup of tea.

Not everyone was born to be a pilot.

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MSFS presents a bit of a mixed prospectus to the entirely new user.

On the one hand it is remarkable that it is available on a console at all and that Asobo and Microsoft go quite far to ensuring is widely accessible (guided checklists, tool tips, many assistance settings, mobile access, WASM for Xbox ). It has a UI that is designed around a console user (much to the chagrin of some PC users but given that coders generally come up with awful UIs if left to their own devices, I think this is no bad thing…) . There are many stock aircraft of a wide variety of complexity and you get free DLC (world updates). So far so good.

But on the other, the new user is presented with some pretty bewildering things within the UI - eg the graphics settings. Easy to navigate. Hard to understand. This is compounded by the lack of well organised resources native to the sim. The lucky ones come to these forums and find the user guides, or perhaps the aircraft manual section of the website. Or they may be less lucky and fall into the black-hole of confusion and misinformation that is YouTube or reddit or (haha!) Facebook. There is masses of information for the new user out there. It is just extremely badly organised.

And then there is expectation management. 3rd party add-on planes by their nature tend to be more complex than stock ones (but not always and some of the stock ones like the CJ4 are getting pretty high-fidelity). There are some developers who may make their aircraft easier to operate/less true to life, but generally speaking it’s better for them to go the other way and then allow the assistance options to do the job of making it more accessible to the more casual simmer.

So it’s an easy world to get into but a (very) hard one to understand or master (because the same is true of IRL aviation even at its most basic). But I think, on the whole nobody is being left behind and I personally welcome the fact that so many more people are discovering flight simulation. But it desperately needs a manual! (or that official wiki we are expecting soon?)

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I find it very hard to believe even the most hardcore simmers don’t occasionally take time out and challenge themselves to land large airliners at places like Lukla or Courchevel. The beauty of MSFS is that it can become a true ‘game’ instantly, without too much tinkering. I mean, who didn’t have a blast flying the F/A-18 through the various canyons in the Top Gun: Maverick pack?

In that sense, it appeals to an enormous variety of people. But making it too ‘gamey’ would perhaps be counter-productive. I think the current balance is right. The gripes about Xbox controllers aren’t really valid, in my opinion — you can fly every single one of the default Asobo aircraft competently with the gamepad — however you can’t expect a sim that has provision for literally thousands of key combinations to be restricted to a single device.

There’s only so much you can do to appeal to regular gamers, without seeming to appease them at the expense of your core customer base.

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I don’t agree this is a controversial topic - maybe the long-standing perception is. But that is simply not true.

The fact is both can co-exist. However, in the interest of fairness, there needs to be as many updates to the casual experience as to the simulator itself, but neither should be excluded. Thus far, on all the evidence I’m seeing, it is falling below the ‘experience for all’ mantra that Jorg so proudly wants to recognise - actions speak louder than words.

Major changes are not required, but improvements to what is already there, most definitely are. In the years since launch, they remain absent.

It’s not about changing the user experience, it is making sure improvements that make it easier for the user are improved and not forgotten.

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Which is exactly why I advocate two completely separate versions. One for the casual gamer, one for the hardcore simmer.

I don’t believe the needs and wants of those two groups overlap. There’s no way to make the software satisfy both groups.

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is there another open real world program of this detail on the console? the two new to flight sim friends were blown away by the detail and now have moved from forza to flying.
i would like to see more tutorials in the sim aimed at rookie flyers to help them out.
other than flight dynamics which have to be learnt , the other main issue is that the aircraft in the sim a lot of the time dont match the aircraft flying. how many of us have seen the stock F/A 18 labelled but when get close see an airbus?
i think a bigger problems is rookies being overwhelmed by choices the sim already offers.

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Not only would this make no financial sense, but it would affirm the elitist attitude beginners and casual gamers no doubt already perceive.

Being restricted to either a ‘proper’ or ‘casual’ MSFS leaves little room for a bit of fun every now and then, and certainly does away with any flexibility we all currently enjoy — as I asked previously, who doesn’t enjoy trying to fly 747s into airports that clearly aren’t capable of handling them?

I think we’re over-analysing FS here, and maybe expecting a little too much. I’d describe myself as a middle-of-the-road simmer, in that I understand fairly well aircraft systems and certainly flight physics — I’m perfectly happy to coexist in the same universe as those who want to barrel-roll 747s over downtown Los Angeles (and even partake now and again, if I so choose).

The more dedicated simmers will always want less ‘game’, and the casual/novice players will always want less ‘sim’. I’d hate to be the one making the decisions in order to strike the balance necessary to appease both sides (plus everyone on middle ground)!

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All - My largest complaint aside from no manual on settings/controls and how, is the splitting of this game into TWO parts, one for the PC group and one for the X-Box Group. I am not programmer, so aint got clue on how that is done, but after it was done, all kinds of issues with various facets of the sim which failed to work like they did. My flight controls had to be reinstalled, and then they did not operate like they used to. IMHO, this sim was “dummied down” for the XB platform, and that made it less exciting to me. PMDG had previously released a DC-6 plane into sim, when it was (Sim) changed for XB folks, that plane had to be pulled and reworked so it would work in the PC part, took several weeks IF I remember, and for those in XB, it just was recently released to them. It should be noted, every single SW and WU update, changes something which causes plane designers to go back to square one and fix their products and then release updates to them. That again, is important to note, core sim code should be fixed, tested, re-fixed, and then locked down so designers are not reinventing the wheel each update. This to me is a sad way for the ship to run.

That reduced my appreciation and playability of it, so I purchased X-Plane 11 and flew in that because, it’ just worked. That again is still mostly true today, it’s easier to install, it’s easier to configure my flight devices and setup the graphics, like maybe 10 things to set instead of hundreds. It sees my devices immediately, and makes me calibrate them and then they work same every time. I don’t give a hoot about graphic visuals but, here where I live, did flight into small airport local to me, it was December, trees and ground was brown, because it’s winter. MSFS on the other hand even though it knew it was December, kept everything spring and summer like. So which sim is more real?

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i mean…if you don’t do meme stuff like this you aren’t really a flight simmer, casual or otherwise :rofl:

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I think it’s a matter of user expectation more than an issue with the sim.

Outside of high end, complex 3rd party aircraft that were designed to be at or near study level, the sim is extremely accessible to everyone of any experience level. You can’t expect to hop into a high end study level complex aircraft, spawn on the runway and fly in 3rd person mode and have a good beginner experience, regardless of the platform. And conversely, an experienced simmer looking for a high fidelity flight can’t expect to hop into a low end Capt Sim plane and expect to have a high end simulation experience.

Not every plane is going to be suited to every player. You have to pick and choose what’s at the level you want to play. Third party devs are under zero obligation to dumb down their premium products to make them suitable for beginners. It’s their product, and they have a target audience in mind. That’s who they market it to. If you’re not part of that target audience and buy it and have issues with it, that’s 100% on you, not the sim nor the 3rd party dev.

Microsobo have made every effort to make MSFS as accessible to anyone and everyone, including disabled folks. They’ve bent over backwards making the experience as good as possible on console, even at the expense of the experience on PC in some cases. One could potentially argue that making it everything to everyone potentially hurts it overall. But it is what it is.

The Xbox controller is far from an ideal controller for flying. From the simplest default planes to the highest end 3rd party, it’s not a good controller. Do yourself a favour and get a mouse. That right there will alleviate most issues. But keep in mind that high end 3rd party planes are developed as all-out SIMULATIONS, not gamer planes. If those are the planes you’re complaining about when you want a gamer experience, you’re flying out of your self-imposed league. Capt Sim may be more your speed.

If you’re not willing or able to invest in proper controls for your simming, unfortunately, that’s on you.

They’ve made a lot of changes to it since launch. Even the AI Co-pilot has received some major updates and new functionality. If you think it’s bad now, you obviously didn’t experience how it was before. It’s not great now, but mostly works. It was plainly unusable prior.

If you’re looking for a pure gaming experience, then perhaps MSFS isn’t right for you. Or you need to adjust your expectations of what products you should buy. It’s right in the name. It’s a SIMULATOR. It’s mean to simulate flying. And at it’s best, it’s a fairly high fidelity simulation experience. Flying is a complicated activity requiring a lot of depth of learning about many different things. This is the reason it was always a niche hobby in the past. Not everyone either wants to or has the capacity to learn all this stuff.

If you think MSFS is intimidating or non-welcoming, you should try Xplane or older versions of MSFS for reference. That will show you exactly how far MSFS has gone in making their simulator experience cover such a wide gamut of players - from the most hardcore sim fanatics, all the way to the casual gamer.

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Many years ago I wrote a blog article on Flight Gear, which is/was an Open Source/FOSS flight simulator.

Back when I was experimenting with it, it was unwelcoming to the extreme.  The forums were elitist, you were looked down upon if you weren’t willing (or able) to program fixes for your problems, or didn’t want to write documentation in pure LaTeX raw code, and a simple request to make it more “accessable” to the novice user was greeted with jeers of “Go play MSFS!!!”.

If you didn’t want everything to be ultra-realistic, you weren’t welcome.

My answer?  You do you, and I’ll do me somewhere else.

I agree that making a “game” that is supposed to ride two different horses at the same time isn’t an easy task.  I remember working for a company that created tax preparation software for both Windows and Mac - and it was a challenge to say the least!

However, not everyone is going to have a multi-thousand dollar gamer beast, but an X-Box?  Possibly.

And don’t forget that, at least, some of the X-box “gamers” may become so interested that they build out a respectable cockpit, or move up to a more capable system and start really learning what’s what.

So, there are those who might want to play the sim like Mortal Kombat meets Duke Nukem flying Sci-Fi space warrior aircraft?  So what?  It’s their sim, their system, their money, and their idea of fun.  (And there is a are “Sci-Fi space aircraft” available too!)

There may be things that don’t apply to the X-box, and there may be things that don’t apply to a PC rig.  (Like needing an X-box controller to effectively manage the drone camera?)

But that’s the way it is, for better or worse.

As for me, I think that being able to reach both crowds is a definite plus for everyone.

What say ye?

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I have always had a pretty simple opinion on it:

Build a flightsimulator, not a flying game. Then everyone will benefit.

There is a simple reason for that: physics are given and are the same for everyone. A plane that flies correctly can be learned and understood. If I play a shooter or an RPG I always have to learn the controls to play well. I have to learn my combinations whether I play a soccer game or whether I fight with swords. But I understand it much better if the ball flies a phyiscally correct parabola versus a simplified phantasy trajectory. Same for aircraft: a plane that follows valid physical laws is easier to understand and handle than the often mentioned „GTA“ airplane.

Second: an XBox or Playstation or whatever controller is not a good flight control. This has NOTHING to do with the console but with the purpose of this thing: its axes are THUMB axes, short way, controlled with one finger on their top. And STILL MSFS can fully be used with this kind of controller.

If anything the whole amount of simplifications and assistants make it more difficult for a beginner. I claim that MSFS wouldn‘t have lost ANYTHING if they had left them out and rather supported the development of inexpensive (not cheap) joysticks to support the already available xBox controllers. An XBox FS edition coming with such a stick, well… it‘s not the case but still the more realistic a flightsim is the easier it is to use it. It‘s not difficult to fly a Cessna on a screen, it takes an hour of practise or two.

Asobo however built a flying game at first, they underestimated the job entirely. Now they struggle massively to correct this mistake but they do a great job making their way through a jungle of new challenges.

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A few thoughts here: I think it’s a mistake to try to divide MSFS between being a “game” and a “simulator” that somehow isn’t a game. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.

Second, it’s a mistake to think that casual or “serious” simmers break down cleanly between the platforms. There may be some correlation, but there are plenty of serious Xbox simmers who have dedicated setups and fly realistically, while there are PC users who are more casual too.

Third, having two separate versions would not only make no sense on the economics of the product, but it feeds into the second mistaken view that PC users only desire a high-fidelity simulation and Xbox users are just couch-flying casuals.

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I get your point, but I disagree. I fly rather casually on Xbox (even though I have some previous experience in sims) and I’m generally having a blast.

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I respectfully disagree. I’m actually looking forward to the release of the PMDG 737 on Xbox and I’m certain that the target population is not the casual simmer. By your logic, this model should not be made available to the Xbox and I should therefore have to go out and buy a $3000.00 PC to access it?

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make sense.

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