I used to do a lot of single-player (offline) flight simming but I’ve noticed a change recently where it just doesn’t grab me or immerse me as much as it used to. I’m finding that immersion instead with multiplayer (COOP) to the extent that I’d say MP now accounts for about 80% of my flight time while SP is about 20%. Has anyone here experienced anything similar?
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Pretty much the same.
And I blame the lack of good singleplayer content in games like DCS!
I have to play through Raven One again…
for me it always used to be 80% MP / 20% SP.
now more like 50 / 50, but overall the time I spend with flight sims these days is like 20% of what it used to be 2-3 years back.
I’d say 60% single player 40% multiplayer these days, though when work is busy that tends to swap ends, with my overall flight hours dropping.
My gaming time used to be mostly mission building and testing those missions with very little MP or SP time in comparison. It was nothing for me to put in 30 plus hours a week in the IL-2 1946 Full mission builder. Ever since the group I fly with transitioned from IL-2 1946 to Great Battles I only fly MP twice a week during group sessions. I gave up trying to figure out the Great Battles mission builder long ago.
Wheels
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I’d say 60-80% multiplayer 20-40% singleplayer. Almost all my time in singleplayer is spend building and maintaining missions.
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Agreed. The customer base isn’t what it used to be before the ‘air quake’ generation materialized, i.e.; attitudes, expectations, imagination, etc.
MP is not for me. I’ve tried it, starting in the mid 2000’s, a few times. In the end it always degrades into some version of Air Quake.
MP is not convenient for me. Imagine buying an E-book, a military tech thriller, with a flashy, fancy cover, where the pages only populate when I went online - and only when Manny, Moe, and Jack were available to log in with me. Or something like that.
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By “air quake” I assume you are talking about head to head dogfights? I always avoided that mode and stuck with Cooperative missions.
Single player 99.99%, in fact my last MP flights were… three or so years ago in MSFS and five or six years ago in DCS.
100% single player. Don’t have time or patience for other people.
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Mostly SP for me, with about 80% of my flying time spent in short bouts of “Instant Action” keeping current on my ride. 15% is fluing SP campaigns on the rare occasions that I can fly undisturbed for a longer while and I feel like I know the machine well enough. 5% MP, the fight club nights which often devolve into hilariously unserious bouts of airquake.
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From a flight time perspective, without any mod testing, I think I also fall in the 80% multiplayer and 20% solo flight. At times I find myself flying on our squadron server on my own, this is where the 20% come from 
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In Falcon BMS, all singleplayer. The campaign system and mass AI logic still suspend my disbelief after all these years. I honestly feel like I am flying with real friends and against real adversaries. I have enjoyed BMS multiplayer in the past but lately there’s been enough change within the core game that I am happy enough in my own world.
In DCS, the opposite is true. The server-side tools and brilliant community scripting have made multiplayer flying in DCS imminently interesting and repeatable. For me there is no more longing for a DC engine in DCS. It’s perfect now, honestly. The last SP scripted campaign I played was “Revenge” for the Mi24. Loved it! But that was a rare SP foray into that type of play.
IL2, which I rarely play anymore, is similar to DCS. The singleplayer Career and other content have never really held my attention for more than a few days. Like DCS though, the community have done a bit of magic on the server side to make a living battlefield that can last for days or weeks. Or at least so I’ve been told. The last two years have sucked nearly all the enthusiasm I once had for the game. Friends tell me that it’s better than ever.
So, long story long, I’d say that I am 50% BMS and 50% DCS. Which is exactly the same as saying that I am 50% singleplayer and 50% multiplayer.
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100% single player. And that isn’t just because I am reliant on a GEO satellite internet connection (ping is a killer). Like @SpaceGameJunkie - It is the people (present company excepted).
Combat flight sims (DCS & IL2 Flying Circus) it is Similar to @schurem - 95% instant action. The other 5% will be one of the included missions or one I have downloaded.
The only other flight sim I ‘play’ is X-Plane 11. That is pretty much the same. Mainly quick ‘joyflights’ of an hour or so at a time.
For the Christmas flights - On the long flights, once I have the AP set, I sit back with an ebook and occasionally glance at the screen to make sure I am not about to crash. I will fly the short (less than 1 hour) legs in VR.
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99.99999% SP, I flew MP one time to help a gentleman out with basic a2a on RoF 10+ years ago. Before that I flew aces high for about a year about 24 years ago, and F-15E Strike Eagle 3 on the LAN with my brother. I guess if leaving MP traffic on in MSFS as MP then I do have a decent bit of MP time then.
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Honestly if it weren’t for the 1~3 friends I fly online with on occasion, and general lack of time, I’d be 99.99% SP myself. I’m sitting on so many Reflected campaigns, Raven One, plus all the general “currency” flying and videos screenshots I used to do, but haven’t had the time or energy to go through.
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all MP
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He certainly did a lot in the past! IIRC the racing when he picked it up years ago was the new thing?
I do both. Mostly MP in DCS besides practicing new modules and features, mostly SP in Great Battles and the other older sims I still have.
I would define Air Quake as the model of Air Warrior. A game where people flew planes against other humans with no regard to having any sort of realistic scenario or rationale behind it. Jump in a plane, take off, hunt for another human on the other side/team/whatever, fight till one is dead, rinse and repeat.
No realistic objectives beyond having a good kill/death ratio and possibly capturing an airfield/territory from the other side like a flying CTF game. Maybe you have traditional redfor/blufor planes flying on the same side with each other against a similar ahistorical mix.
MiG-29 and F-4E vs F-14 and Su-25? Sure, why not?
No SEAD, CAS, interdiction, CAP, none of that. Just the flying equivalent of a Quake Arena MP match.
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I fly DCS, BMS, and recently MSFS* much more than driving. But very involved with the PCA admin side (pcasimracing.com)
*my upcoming Christmas flight report will show what a noob I am to Civil Aviation.
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