Over five months have passed since the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the critically acclaimed latest iteration of the long-standing series which has brought the genre back under the mainstream spotlight — perhaps, to its greatest extent ever.
Yet, there is much more to come: another release is coming up, with the Xbox Series X|S version in the summer, which promises to garner an even wider audience of new players on console. On the other hand, the PC version is receiving large monthly updates.
To know more about what Microsoft has in store for flight simulation enthusiasts and gamers alike, and to gain a better appreciation of the enormous complexity involved with running such a large piece of software and consistently updating it, Twinfinite spoke with the Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann.
Giuseppe: Five months have passed since the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator. How do you feel about it now that things had time to settle at least a bit?
Jorg Neumann: It’s been awesome. We announced at E3 2019 and I think it was a big surprise, but ultimately, as we opened up more and more between alphas and betas, we got a lot of input. A lot of that was positive and validation, but the proof is always in the pudding, really.
We launched and we knew that people were excited about the release, but then they played it and gave us a lot of feedback. The group that we always focused on is the core simmers because they’ve been here in many cases for decades and they know a ton.
Many of them were in the beta, but when you’re out in the market you get even more feedback and I oftentimes say that it’s incredible and a blessing that there are so many people who truly care about flight simming and that they’re so interested in sharing their knowledge to truly make the platform as good as it can be.
Most of those people don’t think about us as a sim or as a game. They think about us as a platform. With that comes a lot of responsibility. We are central to their hobby and in many cases, this is their main hobby in life, so it’s critically important for them and for their happiness.
Having a good relationship with the community and also with third-party developers has always been at the top of our list of priorities to make this really right, and I would say that’s going great. Flat-out great. We feel that the community is really caring and I think they embraced us even if maybe there was initially some skepticism: “do these guys know what they’re doing?” But I think they see us work hard. They see us listen, and we try to communicate this as well as we can. I think that’s really appreciated and builds trust over time.
That’s what’s happening and I’d say the same is true for third-party developers. Many of them were a little “who exactly are these Microsoft people? They’re not the same from Flight Simulator X back in the day…” At least from what they tell me, I think they’re pleasantly surprised about how open we are. We’re genuinely just trying to make it work and make the hobby great and the platform great.
Giuseppe: A complex flight simulator on consoles has basically never been done before. What are your expectations for the release on Xbox?
Jorg Neumann: I think there are going to be millions of people who will have their first experience with a flight simulator. I think the opportunity is fantastic to grow the hobby and we bear a lot of responsibility to make that great.
In general, to back up a little, when you talk to simmers, they’re all very particular and know a lot, and have a lot of expectations, and they all tell me that they would really like the hobby to grow. A lot of them have been at it for decades, and they all look forward to the next generation of simmers.
That was one of the goals on PC, and I think on PC we actually accomplished quite a bit of that, and people see that new blood is coming in, which is great, bringing great energy in the ecosystem and new thoughts. New companies pop up and groups like the FlyByWire guys and Working Title that didn’t even exist. They’re wicked smart and making great contributions.
I think, with Xbox, that is also a very dedicated audience that obviously has been with Microsoft and Xbox since the beginning. There’s a real opportunity to bring millions of people to take a look, and then we need to earn their trust because people always have choices and so we’re focused quite a bit on making sure that it works well on Xbox. It needs to have a good frame-rate and to look great. There’s no question about that.
We’ve made the decision long ago that we will never dumb down the sim. That was a no-no. Instead, we went on the path of giving assists, so if you’re not familiar or don’t have any idea of what IFR even is, you press a bunch of buttons and it helps you, very similar to how a flight instructor would help you.
On Xbox, we anticipated that many people have flat-out never flown a plane. Maybe they’ve flown planes in action games, but it’s not really the same at all. So we’re going to try to make it as elegant as possible.
Again, we’ll never dumb down the sim but there are some onboarding parts that we can do better. We look at the tutorials quite a bit: so many people play them and they’re quite accessible, but we can probably do a better job there to make it even less scary for a newcomer, give them bite-sized things to really learn. You also learn by repetition, and I think that’s also something that we’re looking at. How we give people confidence that they truly learned something that they can apply going forward.
So those are areas that we’re clearly looking at. There are a couple of other things we’re doing that I think are going to be helpful in that space, but my expectation is that the sim will look virtually the same. Depending on which Xbox you bought, it’ll just be like having PCs with different video cards, but you can make adjustments. It’ll look great. It’ll perform great and it’s also cross-play which is nice, so you can play on Xbox and with your cloud saves you can move on to PC and keep playing.
There will be newcomers and we want to be as friendly and as inviting as humanly possible.
Another thing is that to become a simmer, you need the right equipment. The gamepad works fine. Mouse and keyboard work fine, but fundamentally, if you really want to sim long-term, you probably want to get something like rudder pedals and a yoke, and I’m excited that there are several peripheral makers that are going to come to Xbox. Being tightly integrated with them is also important, as I think that’s the path of going on the journey to becoming a simmer on consoles over time.
Giuseppe Nelva: What do you envision for third-party add-on support on Xbox? Is it going to be the same?
Jorg Neumann: The same. We obviously won’t ever force anybody to do anything. There is some amount of work just like we have to do some work. Just even on the interface side, it’s slightly different to make sure that you can control the cockpit, for example, on the plane.
We make it optional for third-parties. It’s pretty clear that everybody is excited because they will meet consumers that they never met before. I think people really want to be on the marketplace because it reduces friction.