this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
Also.. this is the kind of game that kind of requires a "live service" element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
Leveraging something they already run makes a lot more sense than building a bespoke thing for streaming the data for just MSFS. (In my defense, it is a game and game devs have done much sillier things than doing something like that.)
I just have begun to accept that I'm not the market for games anymore, because I'm unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there's no more money to be squeezed out of it.
I'm just very opposed to renting entertainment because everything is temporary.
(Thankfully there's ~30 years of games to play that don't suffer from any of this live-service-ness so I'm not exactly short of things to spend time on.)
You must really hate going to the movies. If I spend $60-70 on a game and get 50-100+ hours of entertainment from that money spent that's a dub in my book.
If someone enjoys flight simming it's not really a question, they will buy this game because it's one of the best all-around sims.
Rant but mostly venting to the void - reply to both you and parent comment, my thoughts:
I have games that are 20+ years old that I'm still clocking gametime in. Games with dedicated communities, still-going multi-player, mods, game improvements...
If a game becomes intentionally unavailable, I - and everyone else - should get a full refund. Full stop, no exceptions, no bullshit store credit. Money back in my account. You don't expect someone to repo your phone, car, or house after 3 years of "ownership", why is literally anything any different?
In current times, I'm super pissed at The Crew getting axed, and I plan to only yarr content published by ubi now. They can't be trusted, so it's not my fault, but theirs.
I have unannounced/anticipated games on my radar that I'm already planning on 'wait, see' or 'only the base game' because I see the shift to 'lease ownership' and 'everything is a bundle of parts'. Current games that I have thousands of hours in, but due to bugs, cheating (with no response from devs), added after-purchase 'packs' when I bought the fancy bullshit version to have the "whole game", etc that I now value at 1/5th of the full asking price I paid - I'm tired of this garbage. Being a "beta" (alpha, in some cases) early access guinea pig is not a fucking perk. Promises of content later is not a fucking perk. Always online is not a fucking perk.
Game time isn't the only metric; for me, at the bare minimum, the game has to be good - I shouldn't fight a game every step of the way to draw enjoyment from it (related: stop trying to use players' in-game creations to prop up the game itself and it's core content) - and it has to remain mine, forever. Maybe I'm getting old, but at least I'm not a fool. A purchase is a purchase, not a temporary allotment.
And (because why not) I fucking despise going to the theater. Other people are annoying, can't pause the film to take a piss, sticky/cum-soaked floors adhering fuck-knows-what to your shoes, noisy phones going off, $12 for a midday showing + a snack and drink is another $9. If you go to a fancy theater, you can order a microwaved burger and fries right from your seat for only $31. They cannot go away fast enough.
Games used to be $20, you got the full game, forever, sometimes with multi-player that you can host yourself, forever, sometimes with free DLC, forever. Now they want $80 and are trying to say that they have the right to take it back and still keep the money. Fuck em all. Except indie devs. But I'm watching you.
Anyway. That was cathartic. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Why would they hate sitting in one chair for more than an hour, looking at a wall with picture projected there, and with the darkness around whispering, sighing, laughing, squealing, grunting, sneezing, farting
Most games still aren't like this though and this is really one of the few games where it's justifiable because of the nature of the technical challenges in letting players explore the real world.
I'm big into the retro and preservationist movements, and while I'm certainly not capable of providing a good answer as to how you could implement the features they have, it makes it where the game is, effectively, dead and not salvageable as soon as Microsoft decides to pull the plug.
Sure, you could maybe do a reimplementation of it on your own and host all the data and such, but realistically it's a cool thing that'll eventually vanish from usability.
(I also don't expect most people to care, but it's still a case where it's built in a way you really can't preserve it as it is right now.)
I'm certain Soviet General Staff maps turned into a flight sim map, with a few thousands of buildings being modeled and textured individually and the rest with similar (like buildings made of hexagon modules in some games have variety, but the separate components are not too numerous) procedurally-generated repeated kinds of meshes, textures and shaders, would take weigh little enough that you wouldn't notice download times.
What else do they do for flight sims?
Weather data? A lot, but not that much.
I just can't imagine what would need 64GB. I think it's an intentional waste for the purpose of this game not being playable after its end of life.
A bit like Heinlein's "Door into summer" future economics. Only there such stupid things are done to reduce unemployment, while here they are done to keep markets predictable for corporations and controlled, so that they wouldn't, you know, die, as they would in a normal market because of competition.
Which reminds me of one important thing I've already changed in my life to not support such malicious actions. I don't buy products that are intentionally made this way.
I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt -- and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo's (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.
Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you're already several grand deep on your sun rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn't any big deal to you.
Gonna take strong issue with that sentiment.
People are people. Some people buy the three season passes for the annual CoD game. Some people buy every single stardew-like. Some people have a monthly subscription to WoW or war thunder or whatever. And some people buy one or two planes for DCS per year. It boils down to spending money on entertainment.
What confuses people is that they look at the Steam page for DCS and lose their god damned minds. Which "makes sense" when you are used to games that have conditioned you that you need EVERYTHING or else you will miss out on everything and be a loser and Josh Duhamael will think less of you. But a given plane in DCS is so high fidelity that it basically is an entire game in and of itself. Same with the super complex train DLCs for those games. You aren't buying every single plane. You are buying an FA18 because you want to spend an hour or two learning the startup procedure and another couple hours training yourself on the electronics so that you can then spend a few more hours on...
As for hardware setups? I am a scrub so I "just" have a HOTAS with pedals (separate stick and coupled throttle+pedals. Probably 250 USD total including the mods I made to the throttle) and a chinesium sled so that I don't have to mount and unmount them from my desk (like 30 USD and half a can of WD40). Yeah, that was more than a questionable purchase (and let's not talk about the sticks I iterated on to get to this setup...) but it is a once a generation, if not once a lifetime, purchase. And sure, others go a LOT farther (because they are the cool kids who go on a roadtrip to get a real scrapped cockpit).
But a quick google says that a call of duty skin is 20 USD. And people buy those every year because activision have keyed in on "people don't want live games. they want to buy the same shit every year and lose features every fall". Others will buy big supporter packs for their live game of choice and so forth. It, again, boils down to spending money on entertainment.
You shouldn't have to download the entire planet though.
The game 100% should support installing local specific areas you wanna fly around, that anyone could then keep a copy of.
If a user wanted to cache an entire 8 TB of the entire world on a drive, they should be able to just do that (and thus have forever support without worrying about internet services staying online)
At least, as a snapshot of what the world looked like in 2024.
I don't see why users shouldn't have the option to locally HD save the data if they want to, to avoid maxing out their internet bandwidth in one sitting.
You do cache what you use as you use it
The issue is with this being a forever game. If there are no servers there is no streaming. Hence the need to somehow host a one off entire world download indefinitely.
Call me when it's a really good game forever.
Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn't mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money
FS 2020 reportedly already used 2 PB of data as it's base. Good luck downloading that!