Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

I wonder if the game will ever come to Steam before I put too much money into the Windows Store version. I could imagine those 75% off sales will do wonders when there's $1000's of dollars worth of DLC's. It may be way cheaper overall in the long run even buying a 2nd time on Steam assuming it ever makes it there.
 
I wonder if the game will ever come to Steam before I put too much money into the Windows Store version. I could imagine those 75% off sales will do wonders when there's $1000's of dollars worth of DLC's. It may be way cheaper overall in the long run even buying a 2nd time on Steam assuming it ever makes it there.
I doubt it. Microsoft created games support the microsoft ecosystem, which is growing due to game pass/ms store exclusive titles.
 
I just got my 32gb kit. Eyeing a 3800x next....

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Just ordered another 16gb of ram for this. It's REALLY ram hungry.

I noticed Microsoft dropped the earlier recommended specs from 32GB back down to officially 16GB but I believe people like Vega said the game was using like 29GB RAM. Wondering if this is the first PC game that actually needs more than 16GB RAM to have max details. I'm ready but I know most people aren't.

Edit: Never mind. Looks like the Microsoft store only lists minimum & recommended. The 32GB comes from the older "Ideal Spec" slides that aren't listed on the website.
 
I noticed Microsoft dropped the earlier recommended specs from 32GB back down to officially 16GB but I believe people like Vega said the game was using like 29GB RAM. Wondering if this is the first PC game that actually needs more than 16GB RAM to have max details. I'm ready but I know most people aren't.

Edit: Never mind. Looks like the Microsoft store only lists minimum & recommended. The 32GB comes from the older "Ideal Spec" slides that aren't listed on the website.
as of today, that slide is still valid and on the preorder faq:

https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015204020
 
Can somebody explain the airport selection to me? Standard edition includes 30, so does that mean I can only take off and land at 30 different airports? I thought this game included the entire earth and thus every airport on earth? Unless it means 30 hand modeled airports?
 
Can somebody explain the airport selection to me? Standard edition includes 30, so does that mean I can only take off and land at 30 different airports? I thought this game included the entire earth and thus every airport on earth? Unless it means 30 hand modeled airports?

If it's anything like the previous Microsoft Flight Simulators, every single airport in the world is in the game (37,000+?). All of these airports should be fairly usable, accurate, and detailed. These are just the "premium" airports which every single part is handcrafted to match the real world airports. There may be some additional functionality like actual working gates & ground crew only at these "premium" airports.

I'll admit the team did a bad job. Unless you knew how the previous flight simulator games worked, you would think your only getting 30, 35, or 40 airports only. They should really fix this.
 
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can you land anywhere? Like a highway? If you can land at any airport in the world, some of which might be in terrible condition, I would guess you can land anywhere big enough to set a plane down, but I could be wrong. I've never played a flight simulator but am looking forward to this one on day one.
 
can you land anywhere? Like a highway? If you can land at any airport in the world, some of which might be in terrible condition, I would guess you can land anywhere big enough to set a plane down, but I could be wrong. I've never played a flight simulator but am looking forward to this one on day one.

Gosh I haven't played Flight Simulator in almost 10 years but yes you can technically land on a highway or even on top of skyscrapers (in a helicopter) unless they changed anything. It's pretty much google maps but in a flight simulator. You can fly to any place in the world on a 1:1 scale. It's just now 100x more detailed & accurate than before using bing maps. This was a really big deal back in the 90's growing up when most games are just closed / linear experiences.
 
I'm actually surprised they made this game honestly. The gaming crowd is much different than it use to be. I would assume a flight simulator is "boring" to 99% of the audience today. Microsoft tried to get into the "casual" crowd before and made a game called Microsoft Flight (notice missing the simulator word). It was a complete disaster and a cash-grab at best. It became unsupported & forgotten quickly.

Flight Simulator is more of an open sandbox game where you make your own adventures or challenges. You're not going to get cut scenes, explosions, quick-time events, romance options, RPG elements, etc. like you see in almost every game today. Some things I remember doing fondly was like island hopping in the Caribbean, landing a large aircraft on a small runway, trying to fly/land in horrible weather, flying low through dense cities and avoiding skyscrapers, landing on an aircraft carrier, flying where my house/town is, just learning how to control/master the larger planes, etc.

Another big thing was the mods. You could download practically every single aircraft in the world, airline skins/liveries, fictional/realistic scenery, sound packs, high res texture packs, custom/more detailed cockpits, buildings, missions, flight plans, etc. Most of these were free too. This was back in the 56k era. Think of it like Gary's mod but with aircraft and an open 1:1 world experience. There were also true mods that cost anywhere from $1~$150 each that took the modding to the next level. Fun memories.
 
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I'm actually surprised they made this game honestly. The gaming crowd is much different than it use to be. I would assume a flight simulator is "boring" to 99% of the audience today. Microsoft tried to get into the "casual" crowd before and made a game called Microsoft Flight (notice missing the simulator word). It was a complete disaster and a cash-grab at best. It became unsupported & forgotten quickly.

Flight Simulator is more of an open sandbox game where you make your own adventures or challenges. You're not going to get cut scenes, explosions, quick-time events, romance options, RPG elements, etc. like you see in almost every game today. Some things I remember doing fondly was like island hopping in the Caribbean, landing a large aircraft on a small runway, trying to fly/land in horrible weather, flying low through dense cities and avoiding skyscrapers, landing on an aircraft carrier, flying where my house/town is, just learning how to control/master the larger planes, etc.

Another big thing was the mods. You could download practically every single aircraft in the world, airline skins/liveries, fictional/realistic scenery, sound packs, high res texture packs, custom/more detailed cockpits, buildings, missions, flight plans, etc. Most of these were free too. This was back in the 56k era. Think of it like Gary's mod but with aircraft and an open 1:1 world experience. There were also true mods that cost anywhere from $1~$150 each that took the modding to the next level. Fun memories.

Flight simulation gaming slipped away from the mainstream not because "gamers are just different now" but because we went 14 years without a single high-quality entertainment focused flight sim.
 
Flight simulation gaming slipped away from the mainstream not because "gamers are just different now" but because we went 14 years without a single high-quality entertainment focused flight sim.

This is part of it as well. Ace Combat even went downhill and aside from spin offs was MIA from 2007 to 2019. The flight game genre died, and the middle of the road flight sims that were complex but not fully detailed have disappeared, with one exception (Flaming Cliffs 3). Now days, it is pretty much Ace Combat 7 or DCS and P3D/FSX/Xplane. No in between.
 
considering the average price of full airport sceneries in XP11 go for 20-30 dollars a piece 120 bucks for all those airports before even considering the planes you get is cheap. the autogen airports are still good though, you just don't get all the auto gate features and what not that come with the scenery airports. there will likely be 3rd party freeware stuff down the line though, it's the only way they'd be able to survive against XP11. because the reality is the vast majority of enthusiast in this market are the same people using bestbuy prebuilds that won't be able to play FS20 at the graphic settings that'll make the sim look any better than xp11 and the many freeware scenery addon's available to it.

I think for them to survive they need to be able to deliver a great experience for a lot of users and the auto gen stuff should be really solid compared to previous entries. I think I was hoping that more airports would have a few gates or options that you could get some of those features at to increase immersion and then give you the full airport as DLC. That way those looking to dip in can do so with a great experience similar to previous offerings in the series without needing to go full X Plane as a lot of people will likely be turned off by having to buy airports without really understanding what the auto tech will do.

If they could deliver partial airports in greater quantity and allow DLC for people to buy full ones they can hit the part time players and full time sim enthusiasts. Longer burn but a larger install base would likely be more willing to add DLC in areas they want vs having to buy the delux to get an airport they want up front. I'm sure they'll allow more selections at a higher price down the road.

I'm still in and looking forward to it a lot and going to enjoy the hell out of it.
 
This is part of it as well. Ace Combat even went downhill and aside from spin offs was MIA from 2007 to 2019. The flight game genre died, and the middle of the road flight sims that were complex but not fully detailed have disappeared, with one exception (Flaming Cliffs 3). Now days, it is pretty much Ace Combat 7 or DCS and P3D/FSX/Xplane. No in between.

combat sims have never really been that popular.. you either get HAWX/AC7 arcade style fun for a couple hours and then never touch it again or you get full sim DCS/P3D spend more time pressing buttons then actually flying.. and then you have stuff like warthunder that try to walk that middle ground between arcade and sim and people just don't enjoy it because you need have a basic understanding of flight physics.
 
Europeans are getting a physical release, and it comes on 10 DVDs! The discs contain the 90GB of mandatory offline content for the game to save you some bandwidth when downloading the game and its updates. The game program, itself, still needs to be downloaded.

https://www.aerosoft.com/en/flight-simulation/simulators/3039/microsoft-flight-simulator-standard

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as cool as that kit looks, who has a disk drive? I mean I do but that's not the point...
 
Europeans are getting a physical release, and it comes on 10 DVDs! The discs contain the 90GB of mandatory offline content for the game to save you some bandwidth when downloading the game and its updates. The game program, itself, still needs to be downloaded.

Crazy but understandable due to specific country legal reasons and access to poor internet or capped bandwidth.

I think this is a wake-up call though that you're "living in the past" if you choose to fumble around with 10 DVD's just to install a game which still requires additional internet downloads & connectivity anyway. Optical drives have been obsolete for almost a decade now. I think consoles only still have them to appease to 3rd world countries and to their Gamestop overlords via physical trade-in's which I'm fairly confident will be bankrupt after this holiday season anyway.
 
Everybody does? But I have always used disk for hard drives and disc for optical drives.
Crazy but understandable due to specific country legal reasons and access to poor internet or capped bandwidth.

I think this is a wake-up call though that you're "living in the past" if you choose to fumble around with 10 DVD's just to install a game which still requires additional internet downloads & connectivity anyway. Optical drives have been obsolete for almost a decade now. I think consoles only still have them to appease to 3rd world countries and to their Gamestop overlords via physical trade-in's which I'm fairly confident will be bankrupt after this holiday season anyway.
I'm curious how much data the game will use per hour.
 
Discs? lol. I think I have an old USB DVD reader in the closet somewhere. Now that they don't really do physical manuals anymore, no point in getting a boxed version of a game.

I remember when I got Falcon 3.0 back in the 90's and it had a glorious thick manual. Now that was something...

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I have thousands of hours in that sim as a teenager.
 
Discs? lol. I think I have an old USB DVD reader in the closet somewhere. Now that they don't really do physical manuals anymore, no point in getting a boxed version of a game.

I remember when I got Falcon 3.0 back in the 90's and it had a glorious thick manual. Now that was something...

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I have thousands of hours in that sim as a teenager.
I do miss beautiful, detailed instruction manuals. I wouldn't even care if the box only came with a download code these days. If effort was still put into the manuals I'd still be buying physical copies.
 
This a great preview and rundown. And holy hell the eye candy - this seems to go beyond just best flight sim graphics and may be best graphics of any computer game period.



I'm kinda glad now that VR support is delayed or not happening - I would be scared I would just neglect real life and not see sunlight for months.
 
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This a great preview and rundown. And holy hell the eye candy - this seems to go beyond just best flight sim graphics and may be best graphics of any computer game period.



I'm kinda glad now that VR support is delayed or not happening - I would be scared I would just neglect real life and not see sunlight for months.

that video got me excited. Also got me thinking the next grand theft auto should feature the whole world as well :D
 
Certainly looking at it. $60 is a bit steep for me, but may just get it to mess around in. Just wish the 787 came with the base game, don't care for the others. Probably won't need a $60-150 standalone module either, the default game realism should be enough. Doubtful but maybe it will go on the Steam winter sale with a discount.

Edit: Just realized, no Steam release for now. Sounds like just the MS store...
 
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Since 1 year exclusivity seems to be the ongoing trend, I'll wait 1 year to see if it hits Steam before I start buying hundreds (possible thousands) of dollars worth of planes & airports. I'd hate to start putting a ton of money down on the Windows Store version just to waste it all and move to Steam instead. Steam WILL be cheaper overall in the long run with all their sales if you plan on buying mods, even with buying the game a 2nd time.
 
Wondering if there will be a sudden run on flight sticks and gear? ]Kinda reminds me of 2009 when street fighter 4 was about to release. Right afterwards there were no sticks, buttons, parts to be found for a good 6ish months after release.
 
Wondering if there will be a sudden run on flight sticks and gear? ]Kinda reminds me of 2009 when street fighter 4 was about to release. Right afterwards there were no sticks, buttons, parts to be found for a good 6ish months after release.

I wouldn't be surprised. There was a huge run on sim racing gear once the pandemic started, and with the big news of a new MS flight sim (especially if the review press is positive) I think you will see the same with flight sim gear. That kind of sucks, but on the other hand, hopefully the demand will drive some new products and innovations from the big names like Logitech.
 
I wouldn't be surprised. There was a huge run on sim racing gear once the pandemic started, and with the big news of a new MS flight sim (especially if the review press is positive) I think you will see the same with flight sim gear. That kind of sucks, but on the other hand, hopefully the demand will drive some new products and innovations from the big names like Logitech.

I miss the Logitech G940. It's the only complete HOTAS set (including Pedals) that had Forced Feedback. I LOVE forced feedback especially in the older WW1/WW2 flight sim games. It's a shame it was discontinued so long ago. I'm hoping this game + star citizen (yeah I know, lol), will bring about the next generation of complete HOTAS kits.
 
I remember when I got Falcon 3.0 back in the 90's and it had a glorious thick manual. Now that was something...
I played a good amount of Falcon 4, old manuals could take a while to read, set up references for keys and commands lol.
 
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