Those fine simulating folks at Dovetail Games are moving on from trains and fishing to rocket into the air with flight sims, and have two in the works for 2016. The first is Dovetail Flight School, which they plan to hit in April, while a full Dovetail Flight Simulator will get the all-clear some time in the second half of this year. Both will use Microsoft’s technology to let you pootle about the skies to your heart’s content.
Perhaps these will fulfil the simulation quotient of our best games of 2016 list.
Dovetail Flight School intends to act as a tutorial experience to those who haven’t tried the genre before, hoping to bring in as many fans as the various more modern truck and train simulators have. Meanwhile, it will still be a very realistic simulation, flying real aircraft, and have a free flight mode for after you’ve worked through the tutorial missions or if you’re already an expert.
They haven’t detailed how the full flight simulator will be different, but we’d assume a bigger world, more planes and more complex tasks to complete. Their main goal with this project, according to CEO Paul Jackson, is to bring the genre forward from the “core experience” established in Microsoft Flight Simulator X ten years ago. He points out that today’s gamers are used to a little more hand-holding when it comes to learning, “Consumers today expect a much slicker experience across all genres. They want simulations that are realistic but also accessible. They want to be led to a place where the focus can be on reaching great levels of accomplishment, rather than struggling to get to grips with the operational aspects. And that’s precisely what Flight School will deliver.”
It’s never going to be simple, of course, but simulation titles have benefited greatly from the internet’s pooled resources to help less experienced players get involved without having to read a thousand page manual. In turn, developers have started to introduce better teaching tools into games themselves, and we’ve seen a boom in the genre. Flight Simulators are obviously more complicated, dealing with a more alien control scheme and set of rules than driving on a road, but everyone wants to fly and these sort of improvements should make it accessible for those people.
No more specific date on either part of Dovetail’s expansion into flight, but we should have more news as we approach April.