Microsoft Flight Simulator is coming down the pipe, and while the actual release is still some distance away, the insider program and playable tests are soon getting underway in earnest. We got a gorgeous new trailer among the X019 news, but there are still a lot of questions about the features of the latest in plane games – including mods. While we still don’t know specifics, it seems that community creations are pretty core to the team’s plans.
“We are a platform maker,” production head Jorg Neumann tells us. “Our responsibility is to the community who wants to make content.” Neumann says he stays in contact with some of the community’s most dedicated modders – including one who books vacations at airports for research. “He takes 20,000 pictures, and then he builds airports for a year. That’s his hobby.”
Neumann says “I want those people to have all the tools. I tell them, ‘tell me what you always wanted and you never had, so we can build it for you.’”
Many of the most prolific modders sell their creations, and Neumann says that’s affected plans for what will be included in the base game – “those people need to make some money,” so he doesn’t want to “put those fans out of a job.”
It’s about “giving them the right tools and the right platform to allow them to do what they want to do.”
Going back to Flight Simulator X, the series is “a game-as-a-service. Maybe it was the first game as a service, because that’s what they did on their own.” Looks like that won’t change with the next iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator.