Definitely tempting… Holding off is going to be a challenge. I keep hearing the Borg, “Resistance is futile.” 
Yes, at least the seasons thing popped right into my eye. I didn’t notice the trees to be honest.
seasons yes, trees yes. my only question is if the ‘custom’ trees were only part of the various POIs or they will be widespread.
Yeah, the trees blowing in the downwash was pretty cool.
1 Like
Updated FAQ on the 3rd best sim out there… 
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 FAQ - Microsoft Flight Simulator
5 Likes
Which is pretty darn good, considering it hasn’t been released yet! 
Looks like a lot more will change in MSFS2024 than just the title.
1 Like
The announcement looks promising. I will probably hold off purchasing and wait how it all shapes up.
Just watched the MS/Asobo presentation on YT.
In the terrain department they want to go from this
to this
Hmmm… 
6 Likes
I see what you did there! 
It looks incredible, but I don’t doubt they will succeed…
Yep, I believe it as well.
One would appreciate it low & slow only… which is exactly how I like to fly 
Exactly. My guess is that the only way they will be able to have such detail is if it’s a very limited area, so my only concern is how they solve the detail popping in and out.
A decent interview with the MSFS 2024 people, with some new info.
Basically they got to 12 million people (!) that have played MSFS 2020, felt good about that and doubled the team size to 500 people now. They then felt they needed to re-architect some things so that people won’t end up with 1 TB installs due to the explosion in 3rd party add-ons (3000 of them in a couple years) etc and how things were trending with the next steps of the level of detail they want to do.
So the three main things would be:
- Aviation careers (fire fighting etc)
- Core Tech Upgrades (stream more detail in of what you’d use, rather than preinstall, new GPUs etc).
- Physics, ‘Living World’ and other stuff upgrades.
They’ll support 2020 but they are hoping people upgrade. The 2024 minimum specs will be similar to the 2020 as although more stuff they are hoping various rewrites get things more efficient.
7 Likes
That is impressive! Especially considering there’s not much game in MSFS… I wonder what those numbers will look like after 2024, which seems to have a lot more focus on the “game” element.
Or…am I wrong! Do people actually enjoy the hoop flying and landing challenges that are available already?
I think that some exotic pilot careers will attract even more simmers.
Will be interesting to see.
MSFS2024 seems to be a substantial upgrade and I can’t see why people would stay in 2020.
Sure, they will continue to support it, but my guess is that it will wither and die a year after 2024 is released, much like FS95 after FS98 and FS2002 after FS2004.
4 Likes
Yep, the audience must be pretty varied. They guess it at ‘3 million casual - heh my house, kool!’, ‘3 million hardcore (how dare you have fun)’ and the other 6 million probably a bit of both… They talk about it in this bit:
Vasco: Yesterday you talked about how MSFS has now reached 12 million users. You said there are three million who are casual players and a similar portion who are more hardcore users. How do you balance the needs of each of those audiences?
Jorg: That’s a great question. What we call the customers is the core audience, and we spend most of our time making sure that the core audience is heard and that we are doing what they need from us. So, we collect feedback, we engage in Dev Q&A, we have a lot of systems in place to actually listen, and that’s mostly for the core simmers because they go to our forums and they’re very engaged.
We also look at the behavior of gamers. Gamers are typically taught to do something. In games there are always goals. Simmers are the exact opposite. They actually don’t like goals and set their own goals. They know what they want. I always compare it to a sandbox and the simmers come and they know what they want to do in the sandbox.
Gamers are more used to, “Hey, there are toys and there’s tracks where you should do something.” And they need that. They need a bit more purpose. The nice thing about the situation we are in is, as we were listening, even the core simmer said “Hey, it would be nice to have some stuff beyond what we have right now, beyond free flight.”
We felt like there was a huge agreement, which is why we made that feature number one for the new sim. Everybody wanted more to do, and then for the lots of people that are more casual and actually quite afraid of airplanes, we added things like the Balloon and the Zeppelin and something called the Jetson One, which is a sort of ground vehicle to give people an accessible entry point into flight simulation. It’s not as daunting as saying, “Hey, you have to be in the 152 to 172. You have to go to an airliner.”
We are trying to find the right balance to ensure that the customers are listened to, that we can show the improvements that they want to see, and then also give the others something to do that they may not be as conscious about, but we have heard them and we feel them.
Vasco: You said yesterday that MSFS is not a game…
Jorg Neumann: It isn’t.
The first refuge of those annoyed by more people getting into sims with MSFS is just to go for the lazy ‘It’s just a game, people just look at their house on a couch’ like it’s some sort of insult. Basic gate-keeping won’t go away with 2024…
4 Likes
This is true, to a certain extent, IMO.
I used to set my own goals back in the days too. I was content in my own imagination pretending to fly for the RFDS (yes, this was my childhood dream) or flying in and out of Tempelhof as part of my imaginary Berlin Airlift.
But I needed these flights of fantasy, as it were and I think most simmers do. No, some don’t need others to create the fantasy for them, but they need some kind of goal, even if they set it themselves.
Back to the age old question; is it a sim or a game? Depends on how you look at it, I guess.
Simmer or gamer, I think everybody will welcome more variety and more stuff to do, because that’s also more realistic.
Hardly! 
Good to see developers in tune with their customers. No, they won’t be able to please them all, but they are evidently pleasing quite a lot of simmers and gamers, as it is.
1 Like
how do they distinguish properly between the core audience and the vocal minority !? thats the question
1 Like
That’s a good question. I imagine it’s analytic’d up the wazoo, in that they have good data on install, playtime etc. So if someone like me is just staring at the cockpit of the PMDG 738 for four hours while someone else is flying the airbus inverted into their house with a controller then we’re probably ‘focus grouped’ in to different buckets. It’s on gamepass, so lots of that 12m has to be drivepass peeks as well, but even 3 million casual or serious is good going.
I think sims are basically a sandbox, so a lot of us that make up our own A → B stuff won’t mind some careers and missions stuff as well. I quite liked the landing challenges and stuff, but if I had to choose then I’d skip anything GA ish and just fly big things with lots of buttons. I’ve also (confession) developed a bit of a VATSIM habit recently, which I never thought I’d do. 
. It’s weird as there are probably people that are exactly opposite to what I do, but we’re both still in the ‘non casual’ bucket.
Basically they can’t really win, in that someone will always be upset about something.
3 Likes
Sandboxing starts scratching less and less itches after awhile unless one is gifted with either youth or one hell of an imagination. What’s great about pre-made challenges/goals/campaigns is that they highlight the errors in one’s flying. If the game tells you that your landing sucked and why, you’ll practice correct skills to improve your outcome. Armed with proper skills instead of guesswork and poor technique, whatever you do in the sim is more enjoyable. The other benefit of pre-made content is that no one knows the sim better than the developer. They know what conditions work best and refine a parcel of local terrain to show off the sim to best effect without bringing the xbox to its knees. 3rd-party creators are more PC focused and don’t really care much about the console’s limits.
1 Like
Yeah, it’ll be interesting how much they want to ‘high res’ in terms of just mission areas or the whole damn world. They gave the impression everything, e.g. that 4 Petabytes of Bing data was getting redone again using AI for 3D rocks etc. Dunno, we’ll see.
The brand name (gotta have a brand…) is ‘Digital Twin’, so that they do everywhere but stream things better, e.g. don’t have an install with 45 different types of tree, but have 900 types of tree online and then it downloads the 10 different types in the area you’re flying in. Before they couldn’t do that, while with 2024 they want to try. They say it should use ‘less bandwidth’ as currently it brings down 4K textures all over the place and it doesn’t really need to.
4 Likes