All,
A couple of weeks ago I very nervously purchased my first product by MK Studios (KPHL). I had heard a lot of negative things about them, including some performance issues with many of their airports (including the smaller ones), but I was very pleasantly surprised by KPHL. Decent ground textures, nice terminal interior, good levels of detail both airside and landside and, best of all, smooth and stable performance on my Xbox Series X.
The problem in the MSFS development game is that your work going forward will always be judged by what you put out previously. Understandable, given that we’re dealing with real money, and no one wants to back the unknown horse. But I also think it’s important to realise that devs often grow, and so their early work shouldn’t always be trusted to be indicative of their current capabilities.
Which brings me to a relatively new dev I’ve had my eye on lately; a dev whose work impresses me more with each release: Fly2High. Their early work (EPWA, for example) had some bugs yet their latest projects — Jeju and Belgrade — appear to be right up there with the best. How they perform is another matter but if they’re stable and smooth, these guys are going to join the top airport dev ranks pretty quickly.
I wonder which other relatively new devs have unfairly gained a bad rep amongst the community, based on their fledgling releases? Everyone has to start somewhere — Pyreegue is considered somewhat of a gold standard in scenery design yet his early work just 24 months ago wasn’t anything particularly special.
Who do you think is currently and unjustly underrated based on just one or two airports? And who do you think will be the next Pyreegue or FlyTampa?