Recent reviews by StevenOBrien

Wanted to add a few updates to this review as of July 2022:

I managed to get updates working properly. The solution was to turn off every other wi-fi device in my house to get the download to be stable enough that it doesn't just restart constantly. This is very inconvenient and shouldn't be necessary, but it is a workaround.

I've only been made to download one 12GB update since January 2022, so they seem to be doing a little bit better about introducing massive mandatory updates.

One thing that really bogs down this game for me are the load times. If you like doing things like landing challenges which involve trying things over and over again to get a better score, the fact that it takes about a minute of loading time to move you back to the start point kills the game for me. The frequent crashing and the 3-5 minute startup time for the game doesn't help.

I don't find myself playing this very often for the above reason. I spend more time waiting for things to load than actually playing.

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I've barely been able to play Flight Simulator since it was first released in August 2020. Don't let the 60 hours of playtime (which, incidentally, disqualifies me from getting a refund) fool you. I've managed to play this game for a total of about 3 hours, and the rest of the so-called playtime was spent downloading or updating the game.

Some background: I have an 8mbps down ADSL connection, which I understand is fairly slow by modern standards. To download the 110GB base game, I'd expect it to take about 48 hours to download. I bought this knowing full well that the base game download time would be significant, and I have no problem with that. With modern AAA games, it's to be expected.

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The problem is the updates.

Expect a 20-40GB update to be released every few months. While it's wonderful that the game continues to be supported with seemingly massive content updates, there are many reasons why this is going to be a significant problem for most people.

If you buy this game through Steam, expecting it to utilize Steam's lightning fast servers and seamless background updating process, you will be sorely disappointed.

When an update is released, once the 1GB launcher (yes, really) is downloaded via Steam, and after you wait several minutes for the launcher to actually start up, and for several unskippable logo FMVs to finish, you will be greeted by gratingly cheerful background music (which can't be disabled), a nice picture of an airplane, and the text "Checking Updates", which will occasionally inform you that you need to download anywhere from 4GB to 110GB to continue playing the game.

These updates are _mandatory_. They cannot be skipped. If you try to play the game offline, it will not let you in.

I understand that the game is dependent on streaming satellite imagery for the best experience, however, to not give the player the choice to use what is already in their rolling cache, and to just disable features like online multiplayer, is an awful user experience and utterly ridiculous.

If you haven't been manually checking for updates regularly, and just wanted to have a casual playthrough of the game you paid $60 for, well, you're out of luck.

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Now, onto the update process itself.

Firstly, it needs to be mentioned that the updater uses 10% of my GPU (1080 GTX) and 10% of my CPU (i7 3930k) while it's running. The only thing the updater is doing is rendering a static image of a plane, and some text.

Surprisingly, this is actually a significant improvement from when the game first launched, where the updater would consistently use about 40% of my GPU. The original version of the launcher also had background music constantly playing, which could only be disabled by muting the game in the Windows mixer panel, but mercifully, in newer versions, the music is muted when the window is not in focus.

The fact that the updater needs to be run through Steam also prevents me from playing any other game while it's running in the background.

The updater, when downloading files, will not tolerate connection hiccups at all. Unlike a competently made download manager, which will dutifully attempt to continue from where it left off if interrupted, the Flight Simulator updater will immediately delete the file and start again from the beginning if interrupted for more than a few seconds. Given that some of the files are _30 GIGABYTES_ in length, you may find that a file will get to ~95% completion after hours of waiting, and restart from the beginning for seemingly no reason. God help anybody who has data caps.

If you think that having gigabit fiber will help you, I've heard many reports that people will still only get download speeds of around 4mbps. One solution often posted to solve this is to use a proxy which will force the updater to use a different server location, which may yield you a whopping 30mbps of download speed.

For me, all of these problems have made updating the game impossible. The updates will simply never complete for me. The only workable solution for me has been to download "pirated" updates for the game through bittorrent. This process forces me to download tens of extra gigabytes that I don't need, but it is still quicker than trying to use Microsoft's actual updater. This is utterly ridiculous.


(Also, as a sidenote, never run "Verify file integrity" on this game through Steam, as it will inexplicably delete all 110GB of the game without any warning. Yes, really.)

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I also have to question if Asobo really couldn't compress the game's size down any further to make life easier for those of us who do not have the luxury of having access to gigabit fiber.

As an example, I spent several hours watching the updater download a large collection of tutorials that I knew I would never use. It would be nice if there was an option to customize your installation to exclude these (you know, like you could do back in the 90s to save disk space, when this was a standard feature).

To add insult to injury, looking through these 1-2GB tutorial folders, I notice that voiceovers for the tutorial in every language are included. Thanks Microsoft, I'm happy that you wasted hours downloading tutorials in a multitude of languages I don't speak.

The voiceover audio is formatted as 32-bit wav files. This is a higher quality format than any music is distributed in. I guess because we _really_ need to hear the flight instructor talking over engine noise in immaculate quality? I'm sure _so_ much would have been lost had these been encoded as CD quality 16-bit wavs, which would have half the filesize, or high quality mp3s which would be about 10% of the filesize.

But the absolute cherry on the cake is that half of the language folders just contain duplicates of the American English audio files. That's right, you are forced to download these same lossless audio files for each tutorial about 10 times. Great job Microsoft! These inefficiencies mount up quickly, and turn what should be maybe 50-100MB of tutorials into gigabytes upon gigabytes of wasted bandwidth.

If these sorts of senseless inefficiencies can be found in something as basic as the tutorials, I have zero confidence that Asobo and Microsoft have made any real effort to reduce download sizes to the minimum possible. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the download sizes are deliberately jacked up to make the game seem more technically impressive than it actually is.

(Incidentally, I played one of these tutorials out of curiosity, and it turned out to be completely broken for me. The flight instructor seemed to be suffering from some sort of brain damage, and was convinced I had crashed off of the end of the runway any time I successfully took off, and would reset the tutorial for no reason, making it impossible to progress.)

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Microsoft, fix your damn game.

I've been supporting and following the development of Titanic: Honor and Glory since 2013, so when I saw they released a Britannic game, I bought this straight away and was more than happy to give another $15 to support the development of the former and see how their modeling of the Olympic class ships were progressing.

I'll start with the positives; The ship is beautifully and meticulously modeled. The team developing this game care deeply about putting every rivet on the ship in the right place, and, if you watch some of their development logs on YouTube, you'll see the insane lengths they go to make sure they're doing things right. I'm glad to finally be able to explore the exterior of the ship and check out suites unique to the Britannic. The (exterior-only) real-time sinking simulation is a very exciting preview of things to come.

Now, the negatives. Apart from the exterior, and two suites unique to the Britannic, and of course a real-time sinking simulation, there is little new in this game that can't already be found in the most recently available tech demo of Titanic: Honor and Glory from 2017 (which can be downloaded for free). In fact, there seems to be whole areas from the free tech demo, such as the dining room, smoking room, Scotland road, Cafe Parisien, restaurant, etc. that aren't even available in this full paid game, which I find a bit confusing. I was expecting a lot more to be available after three years, and I'm now a little confused as to what was actually in the 15GB I downloaded.

Combine this with annoying bugs such as the settings not persisting between loading zones (I mean, come on guys...), the game straight up crashing without any feedback if you run out of memory, very clunky movement controls, and the game just dumping you to a default location on the map whenever you move between loading zones instead of putting you outside the door you just exited, it's an underwhelming and slightly immersion-breaking experience. It feels like a beautifully and meticulously modeled ship with the actual immersive exploration aspect thrown in as an afterthought. I hope in future updates and in the final game we've all been waiting for, this aspect of the experience will be much more polished. As it currently stands, this is not at the level of quality I would expect for a full paid game, and I think marketing it as such to people who aren't already familiar with the Titanic project is a little bit dishonest.

If you are coming into this with the expectation that you are getting a tech demo in return for funding a separate full game which will eventually be released, absolutely go ahead and pay the $15, but if you're expecting a full, polished experience with every nook and cranny of the ship fully available to explore, maybe skip this one.