Nice work, Microsoft... Nice work. I'll play around Hawaii, since you give me that for free, but don't expect any extra money out of me unless you drastically change your business model.
No, no...
From the article:
You’ll get the Big Island of Hawaii for free, but for 1600 points (£13.60 in the real world, or 6.7777 Peggles in the surreal world(or $20USD - Ray)) you can add all the other Hawaiian airspace with additional missions and challenges, and a new single-engine plane, the Vans RV-6A.
You can play around PART of Hawaii. Just the big island. If you want to unlock the rest of the islands, that'll be $20.
That seems... excessive. I mean, I guess I can see it as the basic cost to experience the game, but if just part of Hawaii is valued at $20, what is the Grand Canyon going to cost? Angkor Wat? New York City? etc. I can see the gaming costing hundreds of dollars just to get the majority of the globe and a handful of planes.
Sorry, I thought I mentioned that you only got part of Hawaii in there. Should have proof-read. You do get Hawai'i though, the proper name for the big island.
This whole business model also completely screws over most of the Vatsim community as well. A lot of their gameplay focuses around flying between two different, usually very distant Airports. Will they have to buy the land for each airport and everything in between as well? Will they even be able to do that until Microsoft gets done making all of the land they want to fly over? This is also ignoring completely that they haven't mentioned a single airliner, which is what the Virtual Airlines and Vatsim tend to fly more often than not.
I honestly wouldn't mind them doing this sort of business model if they first gave us a relatively low res world to fly around to start with. If they wanted to sell high res packs for certain areas, then that's fine, but to give us an artificial wall(or natural, I guess in this case, I believe they haven't mentioned releasing a single plane that could make a Hawaii to mainland trip.) is just ridiculous and completely beyond the point of a flight sim... Freedom.
As for the graphics, well, they're not bad. But most flight simmers are used to FSX and FS2004's quite dated graphics, or X-Plane's generic set of models and textures pasted over everything. Besides, at 20,000 feet, low res textures don't look all that bad. They're an upgrade to what we've got available, but if all we're upgrading is Hawaii, followed by other small areas to come later, then it's too little too late, in my opinion.