Who else is excited for MSFS 2020? The videos look insane...and it turns out that those views are too good to be true on an offline machine. From what I've read, MSFS2020 will require streaming data to fully function, in excess of 25Mbps.  This would be okay news except that I live in the country and have a 4G cellphone connect that tops out at 6 Mbps. Will, I be able to fly MSFS2020?  I dunno!  But it will suck if I cant. I would expect Microsoft to have preload options but who knows. 

 

I know a lot of you are dedicated combat pilots with less interest in Civ flight.  What do y'all think about this?

It definitely looks impressive!  I'm really hoping that my meager computer will be able to run it.

I’ll buy it, certainly. At a minimum, I’ll use it for what I use Prepar3D for, now. Instrument approach practice in planes similar to the ones I fly now.

The weather systems are what really does it for me.  The storms look spectacular.  Seeing a storm roll in and cover NYC in snow in a timelapse was just stunning.  I can't wait for a game with actually good clouds (IL2 is terrible and DCS is passable) and weather systems.  Hopefully they integrate real-time weather downloads into the game. 

As far as PC specs go...there's this new thing where if your internet connection is good enough, you can essentially stream-play a game.  All the computation is done remotely, so your PC is rendering the game as it would a movie, not a full game.  I suspect that is going to have to be a large part of how MSFS20 works.  I saw a video claiming that the data for flying the whole globe is in the Petabyte range, so that has to be streamed to you. 

So while that's neat for urban/suburbanites, it totally blows for us country folk.  I can drop another couple grand on a machine if I absolutely want to, but I can never convince a cable company to spend a million dollars to service 50 new homes.  Microsoft is usually pretty good about making their products for the widest range of consumer, so I hope that they will allow something like selective pre-caching, so that I can decide to fill a 500gb SSD with a few areas of the planet I'm most likely to fly around. 

 

As nice as it looks, I prob wont buy into it, cause it sounds like its a purchase + monthly fee

It looks like the $5/mo Xbox subscription will give access to the game without any additional purchase.  I don't play any other Microsoft games, so that wouldn't be added value, but I will gladly pay $60/year for a comprehensive flight sim. 

This guy has some good perspective.  I also wonder how the hell Microsoft will make money from this thing, or if Bill Gates is just okay with losing money to make something great (highly doubt).