Flight Simulator 2020

[Lee]

That dude is a hoot in his Control Tower role videos

[Wrathbone]

Some first impressions:

Good
The scenery is beautiful from up high.

The cockpits look even better.

Navigating between various instrument panels and views is simple and more intuitive than I’d expected it to be.

I’ve no frame of reference for how a real plane handles, but it feels authentic. With all assists turned off, there’s more nuance than any other sim I’ve played.

Setting up a flight plan and conditions is quick and simple.

The ability to change the weather on the fly without having to load again seems like voodoo.

Each plane has full pre-flight checklists with prompts for the relevant instruments. I’ve still not figured out how to get it to stop auto-completing certain tasks as it skips through some of them before I’ve finished reading what they are, but they’re nevertheless very useful for doing a full startup.

Bad
The installation. I left it going all day and at various times I found it had simply quit or crashed and still had huge amounts left to download. I’m lucky in that it eventually worked, whereas others have apparently had a far worse time.

One CTD during one of the tutorials. No obvious cause.

AI-generated scenery is ropey at ground level. Even at low altitudes there are some curiosities, like a static waterfall at the end of a flowing river that I encountered in a canyon. It’s a fascinating blend of exceptional technical achievement and occasionally jarring ugliness.

FPS drops are intense in dense cities and handcrafted airports. Worth noting that in all other areas I’ve had perfect performance on high settings.

Planes are not necessarily feature-complete in terms of the controls (e.g. half the non-essential buttons on the Airbus A320 are not interactive). In some ways this was to be expected given that MS have allowed for the usual sim thing of third-party content, but it’s still disappointing. Simpler planes like the Cessna 152 seem to have more or less everything to fiddle with, though.

Outside of the basic tutorials there is very little handholding. There are optional generic flight advice notifications which are more annoying than helpful. This is where YouTube will become essential, but it wouldn’t have hurt to have some advanced tutorials for things like starting from cold and dark, ATC procedures and VFR vs IFR.


Like any wildly ambitious game, it’s a flawed masterpiece. There is room for improvement and expansion while remaining overall as impressive as I’d hoped it would be.

[Snowy]

It has also been getting a kicking review-bomb wise. Apparently when you install it, you fire up a small installer application that downloads something like 90Gb, however as far as Steam is concerned, from the moment you start the application the game is being played, so by the time you have installed it you are already past the 2 hour refund window should you have any issues.

[Wrathbone]

Yeah, mine had clocked up about 5 hours by the time I could actually play it. I’ve seen comments that you can’t even install on a drive other than C:\ either, which is really shoddy. Teething problems for something this big and complex were inevitable, but these were avoidable issues.

[Lee]

It has also been getting a kicking review-bomb wise. Apparently when you install it, you fire up a small installer application that downloads something like 90Gb, however as far as Steam is concerned, from the moment you start the application the game is being played, so by the time you have installed it you are already past the 2 hour refund window should you have any issues.

It also seems to download a bit of it then unpacks so in the meantime it stops downloading, which is increasing the time. That can't be right? and who thought that was a good system to use. Pretty bad launch overall.

[Wrathbone]

That's what happened with mine - I set it going first thing in the morning and when I checked it at lunchtime it had closed, and when I started it again there was another 30gb or so still to go.

On a more positive spin, I've taken today off work to play it and I've been having a blast. I've completed all the tutorials, and the final one is a solo navigation with a couple of checkpoints. There's something immensely satisfying about being able to use proper visual references (a road in this case) and understanding the instruments to the point where you can navigate and land properly.

I also tried one of the challenges, which was a landing in bad weather at Lukla, regarded as one of the most dangerous airports in the world. The first attempt was a disaster as I had no idea where I was going and the windows froze over. Went straight into a mountain. On the second attempt I realised that the airstrip was marked on a map in the cockpit and I managed an arse-clenching landing partially off the runway where I braked just enough to bump casually into the stone wall at the far end (yes, Lukla has a helpful wall and then a mountain at the end of the runway, and when you take off there's a sheer drop at the other end). There's a scoreboard for the best landings. I didn't come very high...

[Rusty]

It really is going to be a case of in an actual flight emergency there'll be 30 spotty teenagers all able to land the plane easily due to this game

[Animalmother]

It really is going to be a case of in an actual flight emergency there'll be 30 spotty teenagers all able to land the plane easily due to this game

Only as long as the control tower changes the planes call sign to DongLord420 apparently.

[Lee]

Steam is omitting the time to download for the refunds so that is good news all round

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-says-the- ... -requests/

[Mogster]

Yeah, mine had clocked up about 5 hours by the time I could actually play it. I’ve seen comments that you can’t even install on a drive other than C:\ either, which is really shoddy. Teething problems for something this big and complex were inevitable, but these were avoidable issues.

You can install wherever you want, it does default to C. If you buy via Steam you may need to set up a Library on your chosen drive though.

So far I’m impressed. Performance on high is very decent, although it does get a bit choppy sometimes when it starts to feel like FS of old. The lighting is great and the auto gen does an excellent job, although it does seem to go a bit pine tree crazy. It’s refreshing to be able to fly anywhere in the world and have very decent scenery without spending a fortune on add-ons. The feeling of flight doesn’t match the best from DCS or X-Plane but the flight models seem credible enough without obvious weird stuff, they just don’t feel particularly dynamic, especially in turbulence.

I do find the lack of visible landmarks and photogrammetry in the UK disappointing. Everything locally in the NW I’ve looked for is missing, the auto gen is very credible but a few very visible landmarks would make the cities feel less generic. It’s more disappointing because the overall feel of the environment is so good, you’re immersed then you fly to Manchester and there’s no Beetham Tower, no Central Library, Blackpool and there’s no Tower, no piers. Oh and the controls mapping gui is horrendous...

[Raid]

I'm not sure you can really fault them for not including many local landmarks in a flight simulator that covers the entirety of planet Earth. I think what they ought to do is open up the game to enthusiasts who can model said landmarks for submission (and checking). There's no way that a single team could do that much work.

[Drarok]

I'm not sure you can really fault them for not including many local landmarks in a flight simulator that covers the entirety of planet Earth. […] There's no way that a single team could do that much work.

This is Microsoft you're talking about. They have offices the world over. They could have spent a bit more cash and/or time and done capital cities for each of the countries they've got people in relatively easily. I'm not expecting literally the whole world, but I've flown over Oxford now a couple times and don't recognise a single thing. I'll pop down to London to see if there's anything there, but I suspect more disappointment awaits.

This'll be better for sight-seeing American cities and landmarks, I guess.

[Raid]

You're not expecting the entire world but you're expecting recognisable landmarks in a city of only 150,000 that 99% of the audience won't have visited. It's not even in the top 50 cities by population in England, and there are thousands of cities in the world with more people.

I agree that the game needs recognisable landmarks, but the scale of this game is absolutely staggering, and it just isn't practical for even a rich company like Microsoft to create that amount of content.

[Mogster]

I'm not sure you can really fault them for not including many local landmarks in a flight simulator that covers the entirety of planet Earth. I think what they ought to do is open up the game to enthusiasts who can model said landmarks for submission (and checking). There's no way that a single team could do that much work.

Aye I think it says a lot about the quality of the product that these things are so grating. I’m not suggesting they model the whole of Manchester by hand, just one or two structures that are visible from altitude. I think the pitch that they’ve modelled the whole world comes home to roost a bit also, there’s only specific detail where Bing has photogrammetry data and currently outside the US that’s not a lot of places. What’s frustrating is that Google and Apple have much better coverage it seems.

Asobo are supposed to be releasing regional updates as events, we’ll see what happens. From what they’ve said they want to spent time polishing photogrammetry results rather than modelling structures from scratch as it’s a lot faster.

Anyway FS2020 is an exciting revolutionary product, that’s not something I thought I’d be saying just a couple of years ago...

[Wrathbone]

It really is excellent. I've been playing it since release and have very few complaints. The landmarks thing hasn't bothered me at all, partly because I've not been to many cities (I like to explore the wilderness) and partly because the ones I have seen have been great. It's also easy to forget that the planes are just as impressive as the scenery, not just in terms of handling but in terms of how damn pretty the flight decks are and how much better the camera is than in previous games. Being able to easily and intuitively move between different zoom levels, seat positions and control focuses makes a huge difference in terms of learning how to fly them properly. It should speak volumes that most of the training I've done so far has been on youtube videos of real planes rather than simulators - i.e. the simulation is good enough that real world flight skills and controls translate into the game.

I stick by what I said originally in that there is room for improvement, but my overall reaction to it over the last week has been overwhelmingly positive. This is a great game.