I really enjoy simulations, which is why I wanted to set aside a day in my schedule to take the time to enjoy them. But I’ve come to something of a conclusion in more recent years: I’m not very good at knowing what to do with a completely free-form sandbox.
I’m not sure I ever was — though I did play a lot of SimCity and SimCity 2000 back in the day, and I played both of those in the sandbox mode rather than diving into the Scenarios — but I feel like this part of my brain has started to have real trouble in more recent years.
To whit, I was super-excited for the (now not particularly) new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator that came out in 2020, but after picking it up, I found that I haven’t actually spent that much time with it in total. Relatively speaking, I mean; I’ve still put 40+ hours into it to date, but compared to dedicated propellerheads that’s nothing.
Part of my problem is that I fire it up and I don’t really know what to do. I get hit with that exact same analysis paralysis I described when establishing the schedule around which this whole experiment is based. And once again, it’s entirely due to having too many options. There’s clearly a hard limit in my brain somewhere that says “if there are more than [x] number of options, shut down” — trouble is, I’m not entirely sure what that limit is; perhaps it even varies from day to day, which I suspect it does.
So earlier today during some downtime at work, I looked up some suggestions from other people online on Things To Do in Microsoft Flight Simulator. There are a lot of good suggestions out there, but one that caught my eye was a third-party program called NeoFly. This is a free program (with a paid option) that effectively adds a “career” to Microsoft Flight Simulator… kind of.
It doesn’t actually revamp the game itself; everything is done through an external Windows program, but that program is able to communicate with Microsoft Flight Simulator through its… API or however it works and keep track of what you’re doing in various ways. That means it knows things like what plane you’re flying, where you’re going, the settings you applied to that plane — pretty much everything about what you’re doing in the sim.
This allows NeoFly, as an external application, to do pretty much everything you might want from a built-in career mode, with only the mild inconvenience of having to Alt-Tab out to it between flights, and having to set your plane up manually to conform to the mission specifications, rather than it being done for you.
And it’s a surprisingly substantial affair, too. Beginning as a rookie pilot with a small amount of cash in the bank and one of several possible starting aircraft (I went for the classic Cessna 152, a Microsoft Flight Simulator mainstay) you can take on jobs, buy and sell goods to trade between airports, take on licensing examinations, buy, sell and rent aircraft and even, with the paid version, run a full-on airline company.
One forum poster I found enthusing about it described it as giving Microsoft Flight Simulator the Euro Truck Simulator 2 treatment — and that’s basically exactly what it is.
And it’s great! Flying with the added sense of “purpose” — helped enormously by the additional sound clips NeoFly adds into the sim — really elevates Microsoft Flight Simulator from something I’d just pootle around with for half and hour before going off to do something else into something I’m actually interested in engaging with more deeply.
I’m always in two minds about this sort of thing. I hold the opinion that “if you need to heavily mod a game to make it good, it wasn’t that good in the first place”. But at the same time, I’m also aware that this sort of “role-playing” has always been an important part of Flight Simulator culture; I remember back in the Flight Simulator II days for Atari 8-bit and Atari ST, my Dad had a bunch of books by a chap called Charles Gulick, and these books were filled with what were effectively “career missions” and “adventures” to perform in the sim. You’d tap in the settings Gulick provided, then follow his instructions in the text. The sim itself wasn’t any different, but your experience was.
That’s basically what NeoFly does, only in a more interactive fashion. And, on top of that, Microsoft Flight Simulator in its various incarnations has always been built with add-ons in mind. Pretty much every version from 4.0 onwards (possibly earlier?) had a thriving modding scene, and earlier versions had plenty of optional scenery disks for purchase. So taking the base sim and adding something to it has always been part of Microsoft Flight Simulator, so I’m choosing to declare my usual attitude to modding doesn’t apply here.
Besides, it’s already “good” without add-ons. I just found it hard to enjoy optimally.
But yeah! That’s been my evening with Microsoft Flight Simulator — with added enjoyment from my new HOTAS setup, which I traded in a yoke and pedals setup I didn’t get on that well with for earlier this week. It was a lot of fun, but mentally quite taxing — so I think before bed I might wind down with something a bit more lightweight. Perhaps some Hotel Renovator — more on that another time, though!
More about Microsoft Flight Simulator
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