Be Excellent To Each Other

https://connect.microsoft.com/site1134/ ... -BRQX-BXTB

(taken from RPS news piece today)

Sign up to be considered for the beta of forthcoming return of Microsoft Flight Simulator! Don't you dare get in if I don't.

I signed up

New info on Flight is out, on YerpGonks, RPS and Flightsim.com.

http://flightsim.com/main/notams12/flig0104.htm

Flight is a free to play game, featuring only Hawaii and the Icon A5 (below). All other content will, it seems, be DLC.

What a colossal step backwards. The last time Flight Simulator was this short on content was in SubLOGIC Flight Simulator 2, circa 1983 for the C64 and Atari 800. We've now gone from having every airport in the world and 27 planes to one region's worth and so far only one plane.

Yes, Flight Simulator is largely about adding in the more detailed versions of airports and planes you want via third party addons, but the base game was still so vast you could spend hundreds of hour just playing with the default stuff!

I am so upset, I actually held off buying FSX when I bought my new computer almost two years ago as I knew Flight was coming. If I knew it was going to be this lightweight piece of fluff aimed squarely at the casual market (Flight Simulator never suffered for not explicitly chasing this market before; indeed, it was often the only "game" a lot of non-gamer PC owners had) complete with gamertags and achievements... aaaargh! I am probably going to go straight to PC World tomorrow and buy a copy of FSX Gold Edition.



The Icon A5. I love flying boats and amphibians (my favourite plane ever is the PBY Catalina) but I am not sure I like this thing.

I like that thing. But I agree with what you say, although I guess it comes down to how forthcoming and expansive (and expensive) this DLC actually is.

I do enjoy FSX every now and then, spent hours and hours soaring in it and the helicopters are decent too.

Sounds a bit like Railworks. That has lots of expensive DLC and achievements.

Yup. Indeed, over on AVSIM's forums someone just compared Flight to Railworks, noting the recent sale price meant a lot of people with no real interest paid the £2.99, played for a little while and then erased it as being stupid/boring/4 ppl of teh fagort perswausione

They might get some of those people who might otherwise have not tried it to stick around, but so far they've almost completely alienated the vast, wealthy and fiercely loyal Flight Simulator community who are feeling a bit like Nintendo fans watching themselves get sidelined in favour of selling Barbie Horse Euthanizer on the Wii to bright orange chavettes.

#disqus_thread" class="postlink">This thread on IGN is being held aloft as indicative of the sort of players they seem to want to attract: many of the comments are about crashing into buildings, terrorists, this is boring.

http://flyawaysimulation.com/news/4317/ ... t-studios/



Why are they even bothering? AVSim users are rightly pointing out that anyone who wants to pay for more will likely see FSX and its huge range of better, cheaper addons, and drop Flight immediately.

Wait, so I can crash a plane into buildings for free? Awesome!

Seriously, I can see the spods who are Boeing fanboys may like not having to buy the planes of their enemies, the Satan Of The Air, Airbussss. Yes, there are people like that.

I've taken a look at this, and it actually seems a better model than previously. I'm not a massive flight sim spod, but I'd fancy giving this a go. The hardcore nerds will still be able to get plenty of content, I guess the nub is down to the price.

Something that opens up a niche genre to casual users cannot be seen as a bad thing, as long as it doesn't lose the things that the hardcore fans enjoy (ie flying planes about in a realistic manner).

From looking at the new trailer I fear it may lose focus and end up not really appealing to anyone. There are any number of flight based games to satisfy those with a casual interest and probably with a lot more for them to do than this has. New iterations of Microsoft Flight Simulator should use advances in technology to become ever more realistic, that's what they've always done and why the franchise has lasted so long.

Screw Microsoft Flight Simulator, I want current-gen Sky Odyssey.

I would love Microsoft Driving Simulator, so I could cruise down Route 66 in a Ford Mustang.

Freaky, I was thinking the same thing. I even looked at a couple of videos of it on YouTube to remind myself of its awesome.

There is "Driving Simulator", published by the same German company who do Farm Simulator and Bus & Cable Car (& streetcar & trolley bus) Simulator. It's probably cack.

The only barrier to entry for Flight Simulator has always been whether or not civil aviation interested you in the first place: the game always was very very customizable for your skill level and the flight training is extremely comprehensive if you want to learn properly.

Flight Simulator is an industry in itself - there are thousands employed around the world making addons for it. By closing their doors they are going to drive people away. The 1st party content has always been adequate in terms of terrain and aircraft, that's all. Keeping it all in-house is a huge mistake.

Civil aviation sims are an odd duck really. I really don't get the 'fly the Heathrow to LAX route, with stopovers, in real time' crowd, but otherwise it seems like a huge sandbox with nothing to do.

Because it's connected to Live, it's no secret - I'm in the Beta.

That's all I can say, though, as it's NDA'd.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02 ... more-93082



Or, Just buy FSX Gold for almost half the price. That leaves you with £10 left over to put towards buying a proper addon.

Here are some suggestions:
-Ultimate Traffic X, which brings the game to life with TONS of air traffic.
-The PBY Catalina flying boat will take you anywhere.
-UK2000 makes the best addon UK scenery and is worth the money!
-Flight 1's preposterously detailed B767 if you're feeling flush. Remember, you already have the entire planet, every airport and dozens of planes.
-First class membership to Flightsim.com who have a file library of more freeware planes than you could ever hope to fly, and now you can download them superfast with your membership

Or yes, spend your space Dimrills on Flight and realize the nice lilty music in the menu screen is the best part.

Thanks. I've been thinking of getting FSX and now I almost certainly will. Microsoft Flight must be the biggest piss take from Microsoft yet in a long and glorious history of Microsoft piss taking. Microsoft.

Bear in mind FSX has performance issues and isn't quite sure how to fully utilize multicore systems. That's a large part of the reason the community are upset: a new Flight Simulator that added nothing except updated hardware support would be welcomed.

Just had a go of this and I like it so far. It clearly isn't a successor to Flight Simulator but it's not really billed as such and in any case it seems that X-Plane is now the sim of choice for proper spods so why bother competing with that? It runs well on my modest PC and there's some fun stuff to do in there. It all feels more like a game than a sim but quite a nice game. It's a shame they couldn't get it onto the 360 really, although hopefully it'll be on the 720.

X-Plane isn't the sim of choice. FSX still does a great many things better than it. X-Plane 10 gets a fairly decent review in PC Gamer this month but apparently the autogen scenery which looks so nice in the screenshots (wow, actual individual cars and trucks on the roads!) is only convincing if you're flying over the US. Everywhere else, from London to Berlin and every disco you'll get in (in, say, Mumbai) also looks like you're flying over the US. Most airports have no buildings, the Air Traffic Control is still very poor, many landmarks are missing, what on earth have they filled those eight DVDs with?

Flight is a stupid lightweight piece of nonsense mistakenly aimed at the mainstream by including all the things that mainstream games apparently need, namely collect 'em up quests, DLC, irritating handholding and leaderboards. The default plane is a stupid ugly flying crossover, the bonus free plane for signing into Live (the Stearman) is a bit more fun but the controls for looking over the side of the cockpit to see where you're going are terrible and you can't save a second viewpoint in this 'looking over the side' angle (unless they took the suggestion I submitted via the beta feedback site). Plus you have a nigh-on unskippable tutorial narrated by an annoying, nasal woman, and bollocks 'missions' like flying to the nearest fast food joint for a burger, except that's only available during the day and I'm fucked if I could find a way to make the in-game clock advance.

For my active participation in the beta I have been gifted the P-51 Mustang and Maule M-7-260C (the nearest thing to a normal civil aviation aircraft in the game) for free.

The two good things about Flight are:
1. You can land anywhere, and get out of the plane and walk around. I haven't tried landing the Icon on the water yet to see what happens if you then get out.
2. The nice lilty music on the menu screen. Unfortunately, every time you restart an activity it plays on the loading screen and the opening chord gets tiresome.

Coming soon: an Alaskan DLC!

With Hawaii, I don't know what happened if you just tried to fly off into the ocean forever, because none of the planes were capable of crossing the ocean and would run out of fuel. What happens in Flight's Alaska if you try to fly to Russia or Canada?

It also won't be possible to fly Hawaii TO Alaska, even if they were to add a plane capable of it. That's not the dev's plan. They want to sell you isolated chunks of the world at outrageous cost.

Some in the community reckon they've painted themselves into a corner with this model: hoping to sell casual gamers yet another mountain region with yet another selection of GA and vintage warplanes to fly through yet more hoops and on silly burger bar missions? Eventually the interest will run out and the product can't do anything else. Not even with the rumoured helicopters.

Perkies is going to ejaculate in joy/rage.

It is the death of a game nobody wanted in the first place. Silly Microsoft.