Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

It's fair to say that the reviews are mixed. For those with high-end PCs and superfast broadband, it's the huge leap that was anticipated. Not so much for the rest of us.

I had no end of problems with the download and gave up. Complaints to Amazon and Microsoft have left me quids in with vouchers, so money gained rather than lost.

The issues concealed in the previews are now apparent in YouTube videos. Most PCs are struggling for frame-rate and the amazing scenery tends to be blurry. Some cities have major issues. Bergen in Norway, for instance, is full of sky-scraping houses. In London, the Thames has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster. The default scenery is mostly iffy, and the paid London add-on from ORBX is just a transference of their old product from Flight Simulator X, which was released in 2006.

My PC is four years old. It was perfectly decent when I bought it, and still serves its purpose. But it's the bare minimum for the new flight simulator (if I'd been able to download the bugger). To upgrade to the recommended spec would cost me £1000+. Not an outlay I can justify to my wife when both of us - through no fault of our own - have seen our earnings slashed due to the pandemic.

Looks like the divergence has been reached: for the past thirty years, technology has been coming down in price. Now it's going up. Unless you reinvest in ever more expensive hardware every couple of years, you'll be left behind, and the best new software will only be available to those who can afford it.
 


It's fair to say that the reviews are mixed. For those with high-end PCs and superfast broadband, it's the huge leap that was anticipated. Not so much for the rest of us.

I had no end of problems with the download and gave up. Complaints to Amazon and Microsoft have left me quids in with vouchers, so money gained rather than lost.

The issues concealed in the previews are now apparent in YouTube videos. Most PCs are struggling for frame-rate and the amazing scenery tends to be blurry. Some cities have major issues. Bergen in Norway, for instance, is full of sky-scraping houses. In London, the Thames has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster. The default scenery is mostly iffy, and the paid London add-on from ORBX is just a transference of their old product from Flight Simulator X, which was released in 2006.

My PC is four years old. It was perfectly decent when I bought it, and still serves its purpose. But it's the bare minimum for the new flight simulator (if I'd been able to download the bugger). To upgrade to the recommended spec would cost me £1000+. Not an outlay I can justify to my wife when both of us - through no fault of our own - have seen our earnings slashed due to the pandemic.

Looks like the divergence has been reached: for the past thirty years, technology has been coming down in price. Now it's going up. Unless you reinvest in ever more expensive hardware every couple of years, you'll be left behind, and the best new software will only be available to those who can afford it.
Is your PC below the recommended min spec or is the spec wrong ? Also do you need a joystick to try it ?
 
Is your PC below the recommended min spec or is the spec wrong ? Also do you need a joystick to try it ?

My PC is minimum spec. Don't know how the game would run on it because the download failed (a common issue, apparently. I originally ordered the discs, but they appear to have been recalled by Microsoft). With previous flightsims I've always been able to get by perfectly well with a keyboard.
 
It's fair to say that the reviews are mixed. For those with high-end PCs and superfast broadband, it's the huge leap that was anticipated. Not so much for the rest of us.

I had no end of problems with the download and gave up. Complaints to Amazon and Microsoft have left me quids in with vouchers, so money gained rather than lost.

The issues concealed in the previews are now apparent in YouTube videos. Most PCs are struggling for frame-rate and the amazing scenery tends to be blurry. Some cities have major issues. Bergen in Norway, for instance, is full of sky-scraping houses. In London, the Thames has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster. The default scenery is mostly iffy, and the paid London add-on from ORBX is just a transference of their old product from Flight Simulator X, which was released in 2006.

My PC is four years old. It was perfectly decent when I bought it, and still serves its purpose. But it's the bare minimum for the new flight simulator (if I'd been able to download the bugger). To upgrade to the recommended spec would cost me £1000+. Not an outlay I can justify to my wife when both of us - through no fault of our own - have seen our earnings slashed due to the pandemic.

Looks like the divergence has been reached: for the past thirty years, technology has been coming down in price. Now it's going up. Unless you reinvest in ever more expensive hardware every couple of years, you'll be left behind, and the best new software will only be available to those who can afford it.

The download process was the worst part for me. After the seemingly initial day 1 issues and 25 hours of downloading, apart from a few bugs which I expected, it has been fine since.

The beta test process annoyed me, they were keen to pass on copies to streamers and the like without any previous FS knowledge or interest, as opposed to experienced people.
 
It's fair to say that the reviews are mixed. For those with high-end PCs and superfast broadband, it's the huge leap that was anticipated. Not so much for the rest of us.

I had no end of problems with the download and gave up. Complaints to Amazon and Microsoft have left me quids in with vouchers, so money gained rather than lost.

The issues concealed in the previews are now apparent in YouTube videos. Most PCs are struggling for frame-rate and the amazing scenery tends to be blurry. Some cities have major issues. Bergen in Norway, for instance, is full of sky-scraping houses. In London, the Thames has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster. The default scenery is mostly iffy, and the paid London add-on from ORBX is just a transference of their old product from Flight Simulator X, which was released in 2006.

My PC is four years old. It was perfectly decent when I bought it, and still serves its purpose. But it's the bare minimum for the new flight simulator (if I'd been able to download the bugger). To upgrade to the recommended spec would cost me £1000+. Not an outlay I can justify to my wife when both of us - through no fault of our own - have seen our earnings slashed due to the pandemic.

Looks like the divergence has been reached: for the past thirty years, technology has been coming down in price. Now it's going up. Unless you reinvest in ever more expensive hardware every couple of years, you'll be left behind, and the best new software will only be available to those who can afford it.
Saw this coming, typical Microsoft.
I remember when FSX got released the stories were eerily similar

also no matter what PC you have it won’t be powerful enough to run it at full spec and a decent frame rate


It didn't take long to crack. Crackwatch has says it took 0 days :eek:
Be shit without the azure content though
 
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It's fair to say that the reviews are mixed. For those with high-end PCs and superfast broadband, it's the huge leap that was anticipated. Not so much for the rest of us.

I had no end of problems with the download and gave up. Complaints to Amazon and Microsoft have left me quids in with vouchers, so money gained rather than lost.

The issues concealed in the previews are now apparent in YouTube videos. Most PCs are struggling for frame-rate and the amazing scenery tends to be blurry. Some cities have major issues. Bergen in Norway, for instance, is full of sky-scraping houses. In London, the Thames has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster. The default scenery is mostly iffy, and the paid London add-on from ORBX is just a transference of their old product from Flight Simulator X, which was released in 2006.

My PC is four years old. It was perfectly decent when I bought it, and still serves its purpose. But it's the bare minimum for the new flight simulator (if I'd been able to download the bugger). To upgrade to the recommended spec would cost me £1000+. Not an outlay I can justify to my wife when both of us - through no fault of our own - have seen our earnings slashed due to the pandemic.

Looks like the divergence has been reached: for the past thirty years, technology has been coming down in price. Now it's going up. Unless you reinvest in ever more expensive hardware every couple of years, you'll be left behind, and the best new software will only be available to those who can afford it.
Gaming has been driving PC technology for years. It has always been way head of what eventually becomes a standard motherboard for an office PC after a few years.

I’m not much of a gamer, but keeping up with the latest games does seem like a very expensive business. New PC hardware each year and it seems like most games have problems on day 1. I’ve only recent started playing games again in the last few months (after 25 years!), on an Xbox. Battlefront II is stunning, but quite a few of the forum posts suggest this was crap at first and it only really became playable after a year and some serious updates. That sort of thing seems common now.
 
Saw this coming, typical Microsoft.
I remember when FSX got released the stories were eerily similar

also no matter what PC you have it won’t be powerful enough to run it at full spec and a decent frame rate



Be shit without the azure content though
Son has just spunked just under £4K for a top spec Dell Alienware laptop just so he can get the most out of this game so I hope you are wrong about it not being powerful enough
 
Son has just spunked just under £4K for a top spec Dell Alienware laptop just so he can get the most out of this game so I hope you are wrong about it not being powerful enough
if you want to buy games don’t buy a laptop, same price desktop will always be A lot more powerful
 
Does that mean it's free now ?

It means if your that way inclined you can find it for free to download and install. As said above though it pulls a lot of extra data from Microsoft so I suspect a cracked version wouldn’t be able to do that meaning your missing out on quite a bit.
Son has just spunked just under £4K for a top spec Dell Alienware laptop just so he can get the most out of this game so I hope you are wrong about it not being powerful enough

Well by the sounds of it if you want to run it at anything higher than 1080p with ultra detail you need a RTX2080Ti, no (normal) laptop has a full fat one of them. I’d be sending that dell back and getting a much higher spec PC for the same money if this game was your primary focus.
 
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If you scroll to around 20 minutes in on this video you'll see the stadium of light from the Skies. This fella takes off from Newcastle, flies along the North East coast and lands at Durham Tees Valley.

The controls required to operate your plane on the simulator are mental and it takes up an unreal amount of storage to run it but it's great for youtube videos. :lol:

 
Clever stuff!

it gets even better. You can turn on 'live traffic' and as he's preparing to land (around 29 mins) he finds a couple of planes which he searches for on the flight tracker on his phone. One of them is a plane flying to London and one of them is KLM to Amsterdam. Planes that are actually in the sky.
 

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