A one hour Q&A now available on YouTube covers a wide variety of community questions for the Asobo Studios team as we close in on the official release of Microsoft Flight Simulator. One of the most anticipated questions that people have been asking about for a while is the inclusion of helicopters.
Highlights
The interview progresses through several stages with one big message – there’s a lot more to come! Asobo Studios appears prepared to support the product in the long haul with constant updates. This is a common theme but it’s clear that features will still be developed and added to the sim after launch.
Here are some highlights:
- Flight model accuracy is focused on ensuring that speed and performance values are met. Some problems have cropped up and are iteratively being fixed. They are matching POH data but sometimes the data and the real aircraft doesn’t always match. They may add the ability to make minor adjustments (representing new and old airframes).
- Systems modeling is very detailed on GA aircraft, priorities on airliners are focused on everything that’s needed for a flight, more features may be added later.
- Liveries are coming and Microsoft/Asobo are looking to license liveries for different airlines in particular.
- Replay functionality is on the backburner but something they would like to do
- Helicopter support is coming, they will make a collection of helicopters (possibly 4-8) and base functionality for helicopters will still be coming (I assume meaning you don’t need the helicopter DLC to buy another helicopter from the marketplace)
- Developer roadmap will continue and something meaningful will come once a month including real world updates, regional updates will continue with
- Tools are being added to the SDK and everyone can have access to the tools, over 700 developers have already reached out
- Many autopilot bugs have been resolved from alpha and beta
- Cloud types may be expanded later to include other types than the ones currently represented
- There is no XBox release date
- Multiplayer is connected across Steam and Microsoft Store versions
Watch the interview
Those are some of the highlights but I also encourage everyone to watch the full interview if you’re interested. Either way, this is a very exciting set of news on features all across the board on the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. We’re just days away and this interview is just another indication of how much effort has gone into this sim.
Stormbirds 
One question that left me pondering was on the availability of career mode / missions, maybe because it could be subjective. Jorg said they rejected the idea a career mode because it wouldn’t be realistic and would force a path where simmers know what they want to do [and be free of doing it].
It was unfortunately very short for an answer (even though “they discussed it a lot”), and probably a bit confused and beside the point. There are products which are famous and appreciated for some of related features, like A2A’s airplanes for their persistence (and other reasons, of course), Air Hauler, FSPassengers and others to give a purpose and economics… then there are all the tools to prepare flights.
So I think there is a demand for purpose and planning in a flight simulator, even though a share of the simmers just want to explore freely and nothing more.
To say a career mode is unrealistic because it forces someone to follow a predetermined path is, in my opinion, incorrect, and maybe based on a wrong perception of what a career mode could be. For example, that could be a “start from scratch” with optional training for a PPL licence, then progression to CPL while having to explore a number of sites and airports, maintaining one’s aircraft and paying the fees from some sort of revenue (unlimited or not). That would seem pretty realistic to me, more than starting in-flight sim sessions at random.
Austin Meyer (X-Plane) also rejected any kind of mission or scripting, because “it’s arcadish” and against the sim philosophy. IMHO it requires an acute limitation of imagination to say that 😉
Flying at random is nice, but after a while I find it poorly motivating, and a benchmark to measure against, or some kind of challenge would spice this up a bit. Both are necessary to keep the interest.
Or do they do that so the interest in only maintained by buying new aircraft? Sometimes I wonder.
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Some sort of career mode option would be nice and I agree with both your assessment and the rejection of their statement that it wouldn’t fit the sim experience.
If they forced a career or economy system into the sim, that would annoy flight simmers and the desire for a sandbox, but if they made it an option I think there would be great interest.
A few have speculated that they are saving it up and there will be some sort of career mode that arrives around the time of the XBox launch for the title and that they want to save up some hype for that.
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