Monty Pigeon
Striker
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.
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.