M$ "Flight" is the biggest blunder since Spore

[Moach]

today, we mourn another inglorious decision that enters the gaming industry halls of infamy....

it was declared that M$ Flight will no longer feature an SDK - meaning no more user made addons - no more of the very thing that kept the Flight Simulator series thriving for 25 years...

it seems there wasn\'t any room for that which was once heralded the heart of the flightsim community in their new and despicable 'free game, pay for content' business model - so it was ruthlessly murdered

as a game programmer, today i feel shame in beng involved in this industry - this is a dark day that shall be remembered as that of the worst decision since EA killed Will Wright\'s original Spore (see GDC 2005 video)

putrid amounts of hatred and cess ridde filth befall them! - in a single, highly conteptable business move - they turned a promising comeback of the FSX legacy into a flop before it was even released

come to mind, Spore was comparatively a 'honest mistake', since in that case there was plenty of room for error as the developers ventured into a completely novel type of game

with 25 years of solid success behind it, Flight was supposed to be a sure hit -- and then, in a single bad move - they missed

let us mourn the day when another once grand series fell victim to corporate business thinking -- i shall cease my programming for the day with a heavy heart, in the shadow of this unspeakable atrocity that befell the very series that got me into making games in the first place

after giving in to furstration after months of powering on the 'campaign to make spore better' - it pains me to say, this is far worse... i gave spore a chance and paid to see if it really was as bad as forum posters were saying....

i shall not give this a chance - it has died right here for me, months before release... i suggest you save yourself the frustration and do the same - X-Plane 10 is looking quite promising :

so much shame this day.... curse them, curse them all!

[HarvesteR]

This is sad news indeed. FS addon-making was the very thing that put me (and Moach) in the course towards game development.

I haven\'t felt this bad since MS pulled the plug on FS11... now, I kinda wish they had left it at that.

[C7Studios]

Is it just me. Or in the trailer did everything look really really arcade? Also the line that the game is designed specifically to be enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse... Seems like they are going the route of a shiny game without any real 'simulation'. I used to love those games.

[Moach]

we all did.... and now it\'s dead....

they did say things about flight procedures being simulated to the same extent as before... this sounded promising and would have been warmly welcomed if the arcedeish parts of it were kept in the form of missions as FSX did so formidably....

but then they took our addons away.... i hate them now....

must.... murder..... kill...... do general violence things..... destroy......

[Luigibro606]

Addons.

ADDONS. Must have.

*hands Moach a kill-o-matic*

[Spoot Knight]

Is it just me. Or in the trailer did everything look really really arcade? Also the line that the game is designed specifically to be enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse... Seems like they are going the route of a shiny game without any real 'simulation'. I used to love those games.

I had the same vibes as well.

I did try the X-Plane 10 demo, I had some odd polygon tearing from objects near the horzion, which may have been a driver issue as far as I know, but it was pretty good. Though it was pretty hard on my system.

[C7Studios]

I think the only reason they killed the modding is so they can charge for planes, locals, mission packs, custom hats for your pilot.... You know, things like that. I must say, I give my props to the indy studios that are keeping the dream alive. Look how much Skyrim and bethesda games benefit from an active and vibrant modding base. Even Tf-2 at least allows the Mann-conemy, allowing mod makers in on money printing machine.

[Sordid]

Ah, it\'s always sad to see a long-running and beloved series go down like that. I was never a hardcore civilian sim fan, but I feel your pain nonetheless.

must.... murder..... kill...... do general violence things..... destroy......

The Force Unleashed, mate. I fire up that game every time I have an irresistible urge to smash someone\'s face in. There is something incredibly cathartic about electrocuting a hapless, defenseless stormtrooper with your Force Lightning and watching him spasm and writhe in pain as you hold the button down even long after his health bar is completely gone.

I think the only reason they killed the modding is so they can charge for planes, locals, mission packs, custom hats for your pilot....

Yeah, that\'s exactly the reason. I wonder if people are going to just hack the game and find a way to mod it even without an official SDK. Plenty of games have been modded that way, so who knows.

[HarvesteR]

I find it interesting that all MS Flight discussions end up as XP-10 discussions... If MS would heed the community\'s feedback, they would probably notice their decision was NOT a popular one.

I feel bad for the developers who made the game though. It\'s not their fault, they had to follow the orders coming down from above. They probably all know how much value a strong modding community adds to any game, and were helpless to do anything about it.

Goes to show how little they actually care about you, the flightsimmer. They have destroyed the one thing that made FS the success it\'s been for 25 years in a single spurt of shameless, undeniable greed. They have also hurt an industry of payware addon developers, who will now migrate away to continue to make a living, and take all their communities with them.

It was indeed a stupid decision.

But then again, this is the same MS that was against homebrew Kinect applications, completely oblivious to the fact that those people were buying kinects too. They turned around eventually and released a Kinect SDK... So who knows?

Cheers

[Reflector]

Looks like mainstream gaming trends also hit the sim world. Joy oh joy, time for some more DownLoadable Cash releases eh?

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

I find it interesting that all MS Flight discussions end up as XP-10 discussions... If MS would heed the community\'s feedback, they would probably notice their decision was NOT a popular one.

I feel bad for the developers who made the game though. It\'s not their fault, they had to follow the orders coming down from above. They probably all know how much value a strong modding community adds to any game, and were helpless to do anything about it.

Goes to show how little they actually care about you, the flightsimmer. They have destroyed the one thing that made FS the success it\'s been for 25 years in a single spurt of shameless, undeniable greed. They have also hurt an industry of payware addon developers, who will now migrate away to continue to make a living, and take all their communities with them.

It was indeed a stupid decision.

But then again, this is the same MS that was against homebrew Kinect applications, completely oblivious to the fact that those people were buying kinects too. They turned around eventually and released a Kinect SDK... So who knows?

Cheers

I wish ACES studio was still doing it.

Looks like mainstream gaming trends also hit the sim world. Joy oh joy, time for some more DownLoadable Cash releases eh?

I hate downloadable content. It killed the expansion pack, which you got better value for money with. Just look at Obivion and its dlc\'s, and then look at the shivering isles expansion.

[Reflector]

Mainstream gamers love DLCs, their attention spans are match the content so well.

Who wants a proper sequel when you can have a few more 'new maps' and 'Holiday Special Items' eh? Oh wait... 'Horse armor.' Right, right, Oblivion.

[Sordid]

And the worst thing is that people have grown used to it, even people who really should know better. I was frothing at the mouth when I read reviews of the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2 and everyone was saying how it was good value. Yeah, it\'s a lot longer than the previous DLCs and very well written, but when you actually crunch the numbers and compare its content-to-price ratio to that of the original ME2, you find out that you\'re paying something like five times more per hour of entertainment than you did with the base game. That\'s not good value, dammit, that\'s a shameless money grab! And nobody called Bioware out on that. Instead they praised them for making this particular money grab slightly less shameless than the previous ones. Good god.

[Reflector]

Bioware is dead to me. They can only make Mass Effect (Yes SW:TOR uses the same damn animations and other items) based games these days on the Unreal Engine 3.

Thankfully, I won\'t miss them since they don\'t make anything like their older games.

Welcome to the new dawn of modern gaming, lowered expectations for an audience that doesn\'t want to know any better and would rather have instant gratification through ego stroking from 'achievements' like 'breathing through mouth 50% of the time' and 'not dying within a second on Easiest.'

[Sordid]

Well fortunately we have Squad and other indie developers who still know how to make games properly.

Though on the topic of achievements, I\'d quite like to see those in KSP. Properly hard ones, I mean. Like if we had two rock arches on the opposite sides of the Mun and you got an achievement for getting into a stable orbit that goes through both of them, effectively requiring you to circularize your orbit some five or ten meters above the surface.

[venku122]

Ah spore! It was my most ANTICIPATED GAME OF ALL TIME. I started reading gaming blogs, read spore fan pages daily, watched Will Wright speeches, and watched every single goddamn spore preview on the interwebs. I got the collector\'s edition, I have TWO spore posters in my room, got the creature creator stand alone game, creepy and cute, and galactic adventures. Spore brought me into the online gaming news culture and I\'ll never regret it. Without that connection, I would never have found KSP on kotaku all those months ago.

Im guessing Moach and HarvesteR were fans of spore as well? The VAB screams spore

[dbellmo2]

Wow, didnt even know this.

I did notice that the final version of spore was decidedly different than the video will wright released.

But no user generated content? That\'s the worst idea I\'ve heard since 1992 when jumping off the roof with a bicycle sounded, 'fun.'

[NovaSilisko]

*hugs copy of FSX and promises nothing bad will ever befall it*

[thorfinn]

Damn. Flight sims are really fading out, it seems...

...because of KSP I will probably buy my first new joystick in YEARS. I would have liked to try my hand at realistic flying once more, civilian and military. But combat sims are also terribly arcade, from what I gather.

Well, let\'s hope that some Russian SH will make a decent 'Sukhoi T-50 Stealth' or something like that soon. My last hope.

And let\'s hope I won\'t have to buy a new computer to play it, buy then....

[C7Studios]

I remember when I bought spore. I got the special edition version of it, I was so excited for the release. I played it for a while, and got progressively less interested, all the while feeling profoundly disappointed. I didn\'t exactly remember why, but I put it on the shelf and haven\'t looked at it in more then a year. Seeing the GDC videos, it all makes sense now....... I\'m going to go mourn the industry for a bit. I think I know why Will quit working for the studio after this. They had the game so much further in the beginning then in the end. Its like watching the slow death of a dream. Keep making awesome indy games and fighting the good fight.

[NovaSilisko]

I remember when I bought spore. I got the special edition version of it, I was so excited for the release. I played it for a while, and got progressively less interested, all the while feeling profoundly disappointed. I didn\'t exactly remember why, but I put it on the shelf and haven\'t looked at it in more then a year. Seeing the GDC videos, it all makes sense now....... I\'m going to go mourn the industry for a bit. I think I know why Will quit working for the studio after this. They had the game so much further in the beginning then in the end. Its like watching the slow death of a dream. Keep making awesome indy games and fighting the good fight.

Let the mainstream suffer. We in the underground will thrive! We just have to watch for the radioactive sewage the big guys invariably dump down on us...

[comradephil]

FS98 was the first game I ever bought with my own money. I quickly amassed over 300 planes from flightsim.com

I\'ve owned every iteration except FSX since and many other flight sims on the side. Flight sim, you were the love of my gaming life. You will be sorely missed.

Die in a fire, microsoft.

RIP Microsoft Flight sim.

[comradephil]

Damn. Flight sims are really fading out, it seems...

...because of KSP I will probably buy my first new joystick in YEARS. I would have liked to try my hand at realistic flying once more, civilian and military. But combat sims are also terribly arcade, from what I gather.

Well, let\'s hope that some Russian SH will make a decent 'Sukhoi T-50 Stealth' or something like that soon. My last hope.

And let\'s hope I won\'t have to buy a new computer to play it, buy then....

Try IL-2!

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Damn. Flight sims are really fading out, it seems...

...because of KSP I will probably buy my first new joystick in YEARS. I would have liked to try my hand at realistic flying once more, civilian and military. But combat sims are also terribly arcade, from what I gather.

Well, let\'s hope that some Russian SH will make a decent 'Sukhoi T-50 Stealth' or something like that soon. My last hope.

And let\'s hope I won\'t have to buy a new computer to play it, buy then....

There is a good list of ones that I could recommend. The Il-2 series is good. The latest one looks quite good but there apparently were some bugs with it.

If you are looking for a modern one, the best way to look is Lock on Modern Air Combat and the expansions.

[dbellmo2]

Damn. Flight sims are really fading out, it seems...

...because of KSP I will probably buy my first new joystick in YEARS. I would have liked to try my hand at realistic flying once more, civilian and military. But combat sims are also terribly arcade, from what I gather.

Well, let\'s hope that some Russian SH will make a decent 'Sukhoi T-50 Stealth' or something like that soon. My last hope.

And let\'s hope I won\'t have to buy a new computer to play it, buy then....

I haven\'t dusted off my copy of spore since my laptop died. In some sort of absurd anti-piracy idea the dumbfckus at EA games decided to only allow 2 installs per registration key, EVEN IF IT\'S THE SAME REGISTERED OWNER INSTALLING THE GAME. I basically said, 'F. U.' to EA at that point. My external HD died (that\'s where I kept Spore) I reformatted and re-installed everything, and then the laptop died a horrible death (along with the HD). So instead of bending over backwards to play a game I legally bought and registered just to fluff someones scrotum at EA games I said enough with it.

Thanks EA Games, get fckued.