I don’t think requiring online functionality is the death knell of a game in the year 2024. Personally, I’m excited. Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install and I hated MSFS2020 taking up a quarter of my game drive.
The fact that you started by comparing it to GTA 5 makes it obvious you don’t know, but okie dokie, at this point I have to assume you’re just trolling.
Yeah, you’re not getting the goal. They are using actual data from the areas you’re flying over. You’re suggesting they look at it like a game, where the reuse textures and models. Their goal is the opposite, to have the game look like the real world.
Even in MFS2020 my house roughly look like my house, and the taller structures look like they do in my city, they aren’t just #skyscraper93781 and #bridge12381, they are all unique structures that uses the bing maps data to look just like it does in real life. The landmarks in my city are my cities landmarks. They aren’t just generic buildings.
GTA 5’s entire game world is just the San Andreas area. The point of MFS2024 is that you can literally see your real world house from the air. It’s so, so, so much larger than GTA 5’s < 100 km2 it’s a totally unfair comparison.
It’s not weather, it’s terrain and textures. It’s a high resolution stream of where you are flying over so you don’t need to keep the earth on your PC. The base install is supposed to be only ~30GB data, that’s not enough to see your house.
Because GTA has 99.99% of the data on disk. MFS2024 is trying to keep the install size from being 500 GB, so rather than having the whole world on your PC they are streaming it in. GTA doesn’t do that.
The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.
Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.