I look at a vanilla flight sim to be a Jack of all trades and a master of none.
So things like ATC and perfect weather don’t bother me so much, a 3rd Party can improve them, but out of the box I can plan and fly VFR and IFR flights at no added cost, and I get a rough approximation of current weather conditions.
Same goes for planes. I don’t expect study level from
a vanilla package. 3rd parties can add that immersion if I want it.
What I DO want is gliders, helicopters, and missions… as those have traditionally been a part of every major MSFS release right out of the box. This one feels… lacking because it doesn’t provide those aspects of flight for people with the vanilla game.
And a robust SDK for third parties to fully flesh the world out. For those of us who want that type of experience.
Particularly, I’d like to see ray traced reflections in cockpit interiors, as the current screenspace method isn’t solid when the cockpit is reflecting in the windshield but isn’t actually visible (the reflection cuts out).
Ray traced global illumination in cockpit would also be nice.
Those two features would go a long way to providing quite photo realistic interiors with the right modelling and texturing work (Fenix A320 is looking amazing, for eg).
DX12 DLSS to bring back performance
Apart from this, anything to enhance weather really. Brownish smog over polluted cities, a greater diversity of cloud formations(?, already very good), etc.
New fluid dynamics stuff looks very promising.
Already very happy with the way things are. MSFS already offers so much, looks gorgeous, and there are some great community mods that improve things like avionics to a high degree. Most stuff I thought lacking more than a year or so ago is here now.
I would love to have it so that there is some kind of career mode I don’t know how it would work, and I also know that this is probably not going to be possible for this game at least.
My real problem right now is the fact that the replay is kind of broken at the moment because when recording a camera track for external and showcase it just focuses on a random point and does not work.
Early Alpha night lighting, better aerodynamics (more inertia, less twitchy), the flight-visibility controls / native support for all cloud-types promised almost 2 years ago, and the addition of the many missing functions to the garmins.
Dreaming on… thx @Hester40MT for the reopen. MSFS has beautiful water masks, that is in the coastal regions and lakes, you find colors resembling real world algae,
… however MSFS water masks often have a narrow palette. There’s green, blue and yellow, sometimes with a shade of orange or purple, but you always find a single hue, and a desert-like texture. In the real world, these colors can vary, in swirling shapes, depending on the type of algae that grow in the water. Now suppose… MSFS could map these algae species to specific locations, also in the open sea there are algae… below the Southern Atlantic Ocean, phytoplankton
Bing has gathered a lot of these images and Bing is an MSFS parner.
Check out the Bing overview
The thing that would make the sim complete again is to have varied winds on ground to make the landings more challenging. It’s too easy to land right now with constant windspeeds over ground. I really hope the improved air flow model in future updates will fix this issue.
Some great suggestions posted already. I’ll list my top suggestions (in no particular order).
Better aerodynamics on user aircraft
Better ground handling
Better ATC (for user and AI aircraft)
Better AI aircraft dynamics (flights modeling, air flight, landing, taking off, taxiing, etc.)
AI using real-world liveries on AI aircraft
Accurate taxiway signs/designations
Able to open/close user aircraft doors.
Better cloud renditions, especially removing that “volcanic gray” color…
Allow user to set the distance for showing other online players.
Find a way to fix AI traffic on the ground from slowly spinning in place while they’re holding position.
Not have the session end when you crash. Some of us are sadistic and would like to see how damaged or destroyed the aircraft is on the ground , or see how it broke up mid flight from over stress, and include damage to whatever else was impacted by the aircraft.