Not everyone can or wants to go to VATSIM for realistic ATC coverage, but the default one is just dreadful. Obvious phraseology mistakes, happily vectoring you towards terrain, asking you to descend 20k ft. in 2 minutes, and the only way to communicate with it is via a list of pre-determined options.
It contains tutorials on how to control the planes, but no storyline, no built in missions. If you are motivated by a narrative, this is not a game for you. It only does the simulation, but doesn’t really help people get into the game through a kind of narrative.
I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls. I might have that, if there was a reason for me to learn those things, as a motivating story that would drag me in. I think it’s an enormous missed opportunity in terms of making the game appeal to a wider audience.
I still hope it will be there in 2024 edition, but this interview didn’t give me much hope.
One example of such a tool would be Little Navmap which makes it possible to plan routes and use your iPad as a "GPS" device. There's some screenshots in my blog post about it, in case anyone is curious: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-my-ipad-for-microsof...
My impression is that they were much more focused on highly abstracted spaces designed to facilitate work and social interactions.
I want to see the hyper-realistic rendered world in as high resolution as possible.
I want to fly around the planet.
But I don't want to be limited to the detailed specifics (and speeds!) of real life planes.
Why can't we have a mode to make a plane as easy to fly as it is in GTA5. Or "superman" mode where I don't even have a plane, and I can just move around at (almost) any speed [i'm sure rendering would become a problem]
I hope not, as a greatly prefer the one time cost model with games.
It might not be correct the first time, but as we map the changes from prediction against the reality, we could adjust for factors that we hadn't considered.
It seems to me that we shouldn't be too far from accurate weather prediction and perhaps with huge amount of data capture having a digital twin of the planet in which we have enough confidence in to model potential climate impacts of policies, products could allow us to have robust discussions around where we're headed and what paths we could take to adapt or overcome the impacts we're already facing.
I got to a juncture in my life where I was wondering what I should do. I thought "well, I love flight simulators, let's take a introductory flight".
Drove to my local airport, flew it. I was already familiar with all the controls thanks to the MSFS.
That flight had me convinced. Got my PPL, went to college and got my commercial and all the other ratings, and that was all due to one thing ...
Microsoft Flight Simulator
This new version is far beyond anything I would have imagined it would get to. I thought once it died, it was gone.
Oh no, they brought it back ... and they were serious.