I'm usually a one trick pony when it comes to playing video games. And before I discovered BeamNG in late 2018/ early 2019, it was all about Flight Sim, and only Flight Sim for me. I had gotten bored of MSFS 2004, because the assets are so dated, and every time I got everything set just right, something would happen to my computer, causing me to have to reinstall everything all over again. It got old, so I said to heck with it. FSX, the newer more obvious choice, with its easy Steam DLC interface, was a shoe in, but it was unstable and finicky as heck, as I never really learned how to avoid those 'automationcore.dll' file errors. X-Plane was never stable enough to run on my computer, and I never really tinkered with anything on that sim beyond version 7-- which is really old... well, as old as FS2004. Prepared (Prepar3d)-- had some great effects, but ran like a slide show for me, and I never really got enamored with it. When I paid for version 2.5 in May 2015, and they moved ahead to version 3.0 in August of that year... giving me little more than 3 months of support, before requiring me to pay for the update... that really pissed me off; and I (on principle alone); refuse to do any more business with that company. So after a long hiatus from Flight Simming to pursue my interest in car sims in general, and more specifically BeamNG drive... I feel a pulse of excitement as the new sim is set to release on August 18, and I've preordered and am ready to go. Is anybody else anxiously awaiting its pending arrival? I don't plan on abandoning BeamNG... it's too new to me, and I'm enjoying it too much... but MSFS 2020 will certainly be competing for my time. What about any of you? I'd be curious to know. Thanks.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Hopefully it looks as good as the promo screens and doesn’t cost half a paycheck. Hopefully the stock terrain and planes don’t feel like penalty boxes because I don’t want to buy any overpriced DLCs.
Three payment levels, and it's not a subscription like Microsoft Office-- as some people feared. $60 for the low tier, $90 for the mid tier, and $120 for the high tier. Quality remains the same amongst all three tiers... the only difference being the number of default aircraft that come standard from the start, and the number of (what they call) "hand-crafted airports". That is to say, airports that get extra special treatment of looks and accuracy, versus the others that rely a little more on auto-gen and the power of assumption for gate and taxiway placement. Though the non-specials are still better out of the box than anything from the old days, I would imagine. So is that way too much money to spend on a sim? Well it's more than what I paid for FS2004 and FSX-Steam Edition, but the low tier is not as much as I spent on the PD3 "student tier". So it all depends on what's important to you. Yes, Microsoft and the aftermarket 3rd party software people are really in on this together, as Orbx has already announced 3 scenery packs, and the darn sim hasn't even been released to the public yet! But I think MS realized that 3rd parties being able to sell their wares for the sim, is vital for the continued creative development of these free thinkers, who add so much to the game. Because MS isn't about to do all that... and if these companies can't make the money to stay afloat, then they go out of business, and eventually there go our choices to choose from. No I don't want to spend $300 for 10m LOD terrain mesh for all of Russia-- as much as the next guy-- but I want the option to be there, in case somebody else does. So far I hear that MS has done a pretty good job with scenery and terrain mesh in house, so I'm thinking for the casual simmer, this should be good enough. Years ago, flight sims were never meant to be eye candy of the ground below. Rather, the most important things they were supposed to emulate was airports and their positions on the earth, distances from one another, and compass headings from one another. That way pilots could practice vectoring. And aside from that, instrument display and situational awareness, and as accurate a flight modeling that one was going to get for the early days. Watch youtube videos of first flight sims in the late 70's early 80's, and it's nothing short of hilarious to see what it was like back then. We really have become spoiled. --- Post updated --- Darn! I forgot to address your "penalty boxes" phenomena. As to the terrain... no that's supposed to be spot on, except at Antarctica, as usual. I don't know why in 2020 we still don't have satellites directly over the north and south poles to accurately render pole imagery "straight-down", without steep angle distortion that you get from satellites at the Equator, but I'm suppose scientists have their reasons. Flight modeling, I hear is better. Some really picky people beg to differ, but there will always be dissenters on the other side of the equation. I hear it's not like "flying on rails", which is the best description I've heard for the very phenomenon I think you're describing. Whether or not it's better than Austin Myer's Laminar Blade Theory, over at the X-Plane camp, I cannot say. I only used X-Plane for a short time between 2009 and 2012, and that experience, by and large, was a pretty frustrating one. But it was fun at the time, because that was my first sim, and that was all I knew.
