I’m glad they’re moving the world update and other massive downloads to something in the cloud and on-demand. Anything between 10-40% of my “play time” on steam was actually downloading stuff.
I read the download size is like 150GB. That’s why I didn’t buy it on sale.
that’s MSFS 2020
Ah okay. I saw it on Steam listed as just MS Flight Simulator. Assumed it was the latest one.
Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
That’s exactly what they’re doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.
Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.
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.)
But it is a really good game for the time being
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!
Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
Your 32gb can do a lot and will still let you do a lot for a reasonable timeframe. No need to worry.
this situation reminds me of this interesting study: https://www.eoblab.com/_files/ugd/06b6e1_2e2b75f5053f40729dea921c758b8fec.pdf
That’s not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.
They’ve also talked about massively leveraging cloud computing and streaming, it’s likely a lot of actual scenery isn’t part of the offline file size unless you cache the areas for offline play (if that’s even an option)
Yeah. That was admittedly the big issue with Australia. With VFR it was useless unless we used Orbx in the days
I wonder if it’s going to take several hours to download all the world content before allowing you into the menu screen like MSFS2020 does.
I wonder if they’ll insist on using MS servers for the content and will be kept at MS server caps at 5MBPS, meaning that it will take 20+ hours of downloading before you can even play, pulling you outside of the 2 hour Steam return window.
Afaik Steam does refund games if you tell support that you spent time troubleshooting or waited for the launcher to download the actual files.
Though I only think to have read about it. No concrete proof.Yeah fucking MSFS2020 was such a bust for me living in Australia. It took days to download then I finally got it working something went wrong with install files and had to dick around. In the end I played 3 hours of it but have hundreds in download time.
Fuck MSFS
I was seriously hyped for it and waited years until I had a good gaming rig and then when I downloaded it I couldn’t even get past the loading screen. Unable to establish connection to Microsoft servers. I ended up buying Xplane 12 and Aerofly FS4 instead.
