Would have been nice to see shots of:
- The same exact location over different quality levels.
- Lowest quality level from areas where no tree data is cached.
The offline shot they provided is from Renton area - there is plenty of clips from the recent preview event, where they flew from Renton (with full online mode).
Here you have the offline mode shot
You can see there is no real world texture underneath just some generic replecement (like landclass in FSX probably) but you still get all the coastlines, rivers, buildings, roads, trees in the same places that you would get in online mode.
Take a look @ 4:43
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This looks good. Almost too good to be true.
It smells a bit like they strategically chose what to show, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
From the video:
The better the bandwidth, the better the experience
…the same for internet porn…or so I hear. 
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Do you mean video showcasting the offline mode or the previous videos from the “hands on” experience?
I mean… during the “hands on” session they let the guests fly wherever they wanted - though I am afraid they chose places they knew (so mainly developed world with good data coverage…?).
I would be interested to see places like remote parts of Asia (say mountains in Pakistan, south-west China etc) to have an idea how the engine wrestles places with less or less quality data coverage.
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Yes, this is what i meant exactly.
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Wait, there’s porn on the internet?
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Nope, just arguments about flight sims and misleading information about things. Been that way since the 1800s.
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Ah yes. My great grandfather had “Hot Air Balloon Simulator”!
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I belive this quote was by Albert Einstein actually…
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No, that was “You’re a Wizard, Luke. Live long and prosper.”
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…and… B O O M ! ! ! ! I’m all In!!!
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To me, this is anything but reassuring. It displays jaw-dropping levels of managerial and product marketing incompetence, even by Microsofts lofty standards in those areas. These idiots needed “customer feedback” to tell them VR is relevant to a flightsim being released in 2020?
Literally all of the competition has some level of VR support. Maybe it didn’t need to be there at launch, but it NEEDS to be there.
Also, you’re effing MICROSOFT; don’t give us any of this ‘well, we’ll try our best but something something resources’ BS. If all the scrappy flight sim devs competing with the platform can do it, you can do it.
This is very, very bad.
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While I don’t agree with your level of…urgency
I do agree with the sentiments of your post.
Is that a PC way to put it…? 
Valve is reporting exponential growth in VR users on Steam and MS should have the confidence to understand that releasing a major title like FS, with VR support, will push VR HMD sales to the next level. In fact, they should co-release a VR HMD with FS2020 and make a killing!
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With MS being out of the game industry in many ways for so long, along with their focus on Xbox and a typical unhealthy dose of “we don’t care what other people are doing, we do what we do” I can very much see how VR was overlooked.
If anything (assuming they can) maybe they just polled the Windows diagnostic data and found that 0.0001% of Windows users have VR or something and considered it a niche fad.
For me this whole thing wreaks of Microsoft acquiring tech that wasn’t intended for the consumer market. I seem to remember that the engine runs on DX11, so its roots are before VR was as big a thing as it is now. They could be dealing with lots of work to bolt on proper VR, that’s probably why they want to do it after launch.
Really? Didn’t know that. Could explain their stance then.