Microsoft Flight Simulator is a time machine. Not only does it take me back to the glory days of flight sims, when a bookish civil aviation simulation from Microsoft was one of the biggest PC franchises in the world, but it also turns my gaming desktop—with its formerly unvanquished Nvidia 2080 Ti—into an old Pentium PC where the glories of Flight Simulator for Windows 95 unfolded like an interactive slide show whose long pauses were as nerve wracking as any aerobatics.
My rig barely meets the min spec for Flight Simulator and now I’m getting worried if even Rob’s setup is brought to its knees. And I don’t even know that the console port will look like when it eventually drops.
Technical issues aside, though, boy does this game look interesting. The escapist fantasy of flying anywhere in the world is hitting me hard right now after 6-ish months of lockdown.
I’m going to gamepass this game and see how much it absolutely destroys my pc. I haven’t even checked the specs to see if I qualify, but for free who cares? I mainly just want to fly by all the places I used to live and see what there is to see. I remember playing the old versions my dad would buy where the ground was just a pixelated mess and only a few major cities had any buildings at all. You could “land” basically anywhere. I also remember only the Cessna having any real damage and it would just disintegrate into polygons and crumble on crash, whereas every other plane would just freeze in place with a message you crashed. Intentionally crashing was about 75% of what I did in that game as I damn sure couldn’t find any other airports.
The pre-install is only a 1-2 GB installer file. There’s going to be a 100 GB “patch” on day one. Also, PC Gamepass is only $6 CAD for the month, so even cheaper!
I used to take a short hop from the Toronto Island airport to Ottawa in a small prop plane for work quite a bit so it’s a route that I’m familiar with and it only takes just over an hour. Should be an ideal trip for a first journey before I consider intercontinental sojourns!
170 is not that bad. A lot of HOTAS are over $400. Especially if you want pedals too. But that tends to be for combat, not commercial flights
I’m going to end up buying one of the Thrustmasters sincr they’ve worked for me in the past.
Arguably $170 is a bigger ask when you’re using it mainly for one game. Lots of games will accept a racing wheel, unless you want to get deep into even less accessible flight sims, your options are very limited.
My PC took a very socially distanced trip to New Zealand yesterday, and I got some time in on the sim. On my Ryzen 7 1700, GTX1070, 16 GB RAM and an NVMe drive the performance was very acceptable at 1080p. I just used the default graphics options. Looking at GeForce Experience, it wants to turn the settings down - but I’ve not tried that yet.
The initial load into the main menu is very slow for some reason - but going from the menu to flight hasn’t taken more than a minute for me. I’ve got a lot of bandwidth - that might explain the load times.
I’ve had one consistent crash - loading into Keflavik crashes the game. I’ve also had one other random crash. Other than that, it seems pretty good.
