VR in 2024 is much worse than in 2020.
They’ve only fixed one issue it seems at the same time as making many more.
What they’ve fixed:
- Toggling buttons, keys, switches and dials seem to function better. Flipping a toggle doesn’t move in the opposite direction as you intend like in 2020.
EDIT: They did not fix this. It works better in the c172 but in other aircraft, it still does whatever it wants.
What they’ve broken:
- There seems to be a problem where spontaneously, the game will not let you grab the flight controls anymore mid flight, requiring a restart of the flight.
Edit: this happens when entering a menu or pausing the game. After doing so, the VR controllers can no longer interact with the flight controls.
- The yoke still flashes bright yellow endlessly while holding it with seemingly no way to disable this. This was one of the main issues I was hoping they’d address from 2020. boy, was I not surprised to see they don’t care. Try flying at night with a bright flashing neon sign in your face, it’s super annoying, distracting and immersion breaking. If there’s a way to turn this off, I’ve never seen it and I checked everything dozens of times in 2020. Let me disable all glowing buttons and flight controls… I’ll know if I grabbed it or not based on… get this…if the object moves or not.
EDIT: Somehow in career mode, I encountered a bug which stopped the yoke from flashing yellow until I landed… It was heaven.
- Walking… HOW TF DO YOU TURN? In photo mode, the right stick lets you rotate the camera, but when walking, there’s literally no way to turn. Trying to map the thumb stick to the camera always just says “scan cancelled”
Less experienced VR users will assume you just turn with your body… This isn’t role play, I’m not standing up to walk around my plane just because I’m doing a walk around in game. When I am playing a sim, I’m sitting down, I’m not going to stand up just because my player is standing. Rotating the player camera is rule #1 in a game. Shameful and embarrassing that no one even considered this, but only justified their lack of foresight with excuses like “they’ll just rotate their body, IT’S VR!”. Why allow camera rotation in photo mode but not when walking?
EDIT: You can manually map one direction of spin to the thumb stick. Trying to assign the thumb stick for both look left and look right does not work, only one direction worked for me, so now I am always just doing full left spins if I want to go right.
EDIT 2: I mapped the “turn right” to “vertical thumb stick” so now I can push left to turn left, and have to push down to turn right… Still garbage, but better than constantly turning left.
- My favorite plane, the Daher doesn’t even have an interactable yoke… I only tried a few planes, I’d hate to see, really how many of the planes aren’t supported fully. This is basically like not finishing the game. I incorrectly assumed that since they were planning VR support from the start that MAYBE this time they would have made sure all the planes in the base game work with VR… Again, I was not surprised to see they don’t care.
EDIT: Many, MANY of the planes do not have interactable flight controls. I tried many of them recently and only 2 worked fully while the airbus 320 was hit or miss, as well as throttle not working enough to be playable.
EDIT 2: Turns out lots of the helis and vehicles with flight sticks seem to work with the VR controllers, but very few with yokes seem to work.
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Trying to fly the airbus a320neo was an absolute sht show. I found they have also broken the throttle levers. You can only manipulate one lever at a time unlike in 2020 where it worked properly. On top of this, the throttles now have the same problem the toggle switches had in 2020. Trying to throttle up or down just does whatever it wants. Moves in opposite directions, doesn’t move at all, moves a couple of millimeters… This is not acceptable. It looks like mostly everything is literally unplayable other than the basic Cessna.
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No pause button. In 2020 you used to be able to hit a button on the controller to pause the game. This was very valuable since I constantly had to tweak settings in the game, or return to the main manu. Now the pause button just makes you exit the plane. Sure I could probably remap this…at least I hope I can, can’t make any assumptions with msfs though.
EDIT: the “home” button on the left quest controller pauses the game now. Note: you must be using VDXR to free up this button’s mapping. In virtual desktop using steam VR, this button will just open the steam VR overlay. With VDXR it will be free to use what the game has mapped to that button.
Their design choices seem to point to the fact that they assume people will play in a specific way. Instead of covering all the bases and making sure the game works in any scenario, they justify their laziness with excuses. They assume you will play only using the headset as a monitor, will have a peripheral yoke or hotas, will have a keyboard and mouse next to you and will have space to easily get out of your chair and walk around. In VR, you can’t see around you, I don’t want to look for my keyboard every time I have to pause the game or do any other thing they didn’t properly plan for. I’m not going to pick up a different controller to walk around my plane and I’m not gonna touch the mouse for any reason. Everything should be accessible and controllable from within the VR headset using the controllers.
I hear many of you saying, just use a yoke or hotas peripheral… I have a yoke and hotas but prefer the VR controls. They are much smoother than using my yoke and I can play while sitting in my bed instead of moving to my sim chair…which btw, I don’t know about the people at asobo, but my sim chair isn’t extremely easy to get in and out of. Assuming people will get in and out of their sim rig while essentially wearing a blindfold just to walk around their plane is absolutely mind numbingly ridiculous. It only takes one attempt at using this feature to realize it doesn’t work, so I’m going to have to assume they never actually tried even one full flight completely in VR, seated and without a peripheral.
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scrolling is clumsy. You used to be able to use the thumb stick to scroll through menus. Now, they’ve disabled that…genius. the only way to scroll is either by grabbing a TINY bar on the side of the menu which is extremely difficult in VR, or to click and drag the menu. This wouldn’t be that bad, except that if you click on an actual setting while scrolling, even though that setting might be off the screen now due to scrolling past it, it will still select or toggle that setting. This leads you to having to go back and check what you accidentally changed. In other menus it will open a separate menu for the setting you clicked on even though that’s not what you wanted to click on. This means you have to hit b to go back, and then start scrolling from the top of the list again. Undoubtedly, you’ll click on the wrong setting again at some point while scrolling, leading you through this possibly endless loop of clicking on the wrong setting, going back, and doing this all over again. If you want to scroll without accidentally clicking on something, you have to make sure that you click on an area with no settings options… This isn’t possible in every menu, only some of them, and there isn’t always a space visible without settings due to what position you’re at in the menu list.
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performance hasn’t changed. There’s no improvement in my experience from 2020. I have a 3070 and the game is only on medium settings with things like light shafts and ambient occlusion turned off, raymarched reflections turned to low etc… I would assume that there would have been minor improvements, but even in 2020, the game would go from acceptable one week to extremely poor the next. I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but they need to hire a real VR developer and stop watching YouTube tutorials on how to implement VR.
EDIT: for virtual desktop users, I switched to using VDXR (virtual desktop’s own runtime) and have never had a better quality experience in MSFS. Forget about steam VR or the oculus desktop app. This is the winner for me.
EDIT 2: this seems to work for me for a while, but eventually the game becomes so stuttery that I have to restart. Upon restart it seems to run fine again… Maybe some kind of memory leak somewhere or maybe it’s a problem with VD, I don’t know. Sometimes the poor performance seems to possibly be linked to entering menus and changing setting. Even just changing controller mapping could result in a stutter fest after re-entering the game.
- EDIT 2: I also noticed that there is an entirely separate graphics menu for vr. I didn’t notice it before, but I guess none of the graphics settings I was changing were doing anything because I was in the wrong graphics menu. This is rather confusing and I can’t really tell if anything is changing the quality of the game… Even though I boosted quite a few setting, it still looks like hot garbage. The worst problem is the render distance. You’ll never see anything like the great shots in the trailer where you can see a city skyline off in the distance. It will just look like a jumbled mess of only a few triangles pointing out of the ground that are supposed to be buildings. Objects don’t seem to render to full resolution until it is right below my aircraft. Nothing I change seems to improve this aspect of the graphics, but maybe I just don’t know what setting actually affects this…even though I’ve tried all of them. A little more clarity on what settings do what would be nice.
Seeing as how none of the persistent issues with VR were fixed in 2020, I can only assume that ZERO of these issues will be addressed in this version of the game. We’ll likely have to wait till 2028 for them to address one more issue, so by the looks of it, maybe by 2040 we’ll have an acceptable VR flight sim experience from microsoft.
Prove me wrong asobo/Microsoft.
