After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.
The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.
I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run
You’re saying you don’t wanna buy a season pass for your new triple AAA game that costs $50 and gives you a new cosmetic skin every month for the next 2 months?
Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.
This is one of the most dumbest Parts of this game, everyone’s complaint of the last iteration was the massive download times, and the inefficiencies in the game causing it to lag even on high end systems. And their solution to that was to increase the specs that it’s required to run the game and require a high speed internet on top of that? They more or less made it so anyone running satellite internet can’t buy their game and anyone that lives in like 70% of the US that still has absolute dog shit internet speeds couldn’t even imagine playing it. My mom still has a 5/5 mbit/s, that’s the fastest anyone offers in her area, even downloading the previous game took ages there’s no way in hell I’m going to recommend her buying this game
Kinda wild that their previous flight simulator was met with near flawless reviews across the board, then the complete opposite for the immediate successor that probably shares 90% of the same code.
I think the issue was precisely that. They didn’t plan for the surge of users coming in on day one and whatever cloud hybrid system they have for this game got overwhelmed. We’ll get to know about the game’s actual quality a week from now I guess.
They shouldn‘t have added it to GamePass on launch day but wait a few weeks or even months to stretch out the server load.
I bet there are tons of causal and first time players that are already subscribed to gamepass that wanted to try out MSFS24 just because they have access to it. Now those people are pissed off even though they would have waited longer to get a better experience.
I’m sure the Microsoft executive that made the decision is absolutely drenched in the “Azure scales infinitely if you give Microsoft more money” kool-ade.
Sims are a captive market: all enthusiasts just buy it once, and there’s limited number of enthusiasts. Companies either have finite money and resell the same sim again and again with a different coat of paint, or over promise and under deliver. Long gone are the days of a company that doesn’t need to be profitable (like Microsoft with the early flight sims, made at a loss to showcase and sell their OS), and games are more expensive to make nowadays, not less.
To break a captive market you either increase customers (not gonna happen, in fact simmers and interest in aviation is trending down compared with the 80s and 90s), or remove the market part altogether.
Removing the market is the solution: be need an open source sim for the community by the community. Sims and libraries that can aglutinate all work done in academia, gaming, and different styles of sims under one umbrella, bringing a symbiotic work that is way better than the separate parts. We need to pull a Blender.
We are in 2024. Sims suck. They are barely multi threaded. They reimplement all planes again and again, losing all info in what they falsely call themselves “a sim museum”.
Something with a cutting-edge game engine like Bevy: Entity-Component-System architecture, Rust, immensely multi threaded, new graphic tecnhiques like Meshlets (same as nanite tech from UE5, the other only game engine I know that has it), physically based rendering, highly performing, customizable, with good multiplayer capabilities, using new techniques of software engineering (it’s not the 90s anymore).
Something with a community that embraces collaboration and the new tools (again, it’s not the 90s anymore). Git forges, chat platforms, RFCs.
Something that from the game engine to the flight models is open to be reused across academia, different types of sims such as land vehicle sims, civil aviation sims, combat sims. Something that wants to foster that kind of relationships.
All of this is possible, but not particularly easy. It doesn’t need to start big, just with libraries and utilities for academia and developers that one can build on top of.
Hence why I think the formula is “Bevy + Blender + some Copyleft licensed parts (GPL) + Community”. I’ve given quite the thought to the topic, and a custom ECS engine is paramount. One that is designed for working collaboratively and not by in-house devs with UI tools for it. One that is massive in the cutting edge of tech and at the same time easy to collaborate on remotely. That is Bevy: the shortcomings (no UI tooling l for now) don’t matter for Sim games, as we normally need just one model in Blender, rigid animations, and no level editors. It also is written in Rust, is performant, a bliss to work on iteratively and grow the size of, and people are actually looking forward to work on for free, contrary to C++.
Whatever we do, the best we can do with fellow enthusiasts is recognise that sim games are a captive market. This way we can change the Zeitgeist, and move away our attention from the hype and drama of this companies (Microsoft, DCS’s eagle dynamics, IL2’s 1C), and into collaboration.
Whatever the result in, I wish there won’t be over-moderation that too Western-centric.
Not all swastika are Nazi (I live in a country where swastika is simply symbol of religion and peacefulness). Not all words that too similar with offending word in English are bad (some games literally banned Indonesian for having “nasi goreng” as their name, too similiar with Nazi they said.)
Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, "intense scrutiny" from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren't going to see this as a problem.
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