I'm not sure this is the right direction to make flight sims more accessible.

What I do notice that is lacking in most flight simulators is simply a good tutorial-one that lets the player interact and walk through the steps instead of simply being shown everything and hope they made a mental note of that in time. The interfaces and numerous features are quite imposing at first, and the developers don't think to make them easy to comprehend for those newer to the genre.

It's precisely the lack of a good in-game tutorial that resulted in me veering away from Falcon 4.0 and DCS: Black Shark while heading toward Rise of Flight and IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946. Even then, I still haven't really mastered complex engine management for any particular aircraft (fine-tuning mixture and prop pitch and radiator and all that), instead focusing on learning each aircraft's handling quirks first.

It's also quite telling that I learned a few things about Falcon 4.0 more easily when I had actual human players there with me to help explain the interface and subsystems, moreso than the training TEs and manual ever did.

Speaking of which, while the existing tutorials do a good job covering the general aspects of flight, it's always those specifics that are lacking. This goes double for WWI-era aircraft that have gauges that don't even clearly indicate simple things like Vne, ideal engine temperature ranges, or so forth, and for that matter, it wouldn't hurt to have some optional tooltips that point out what each gauge is and where they all are in the cockpit.

Sure, you can look all that up outside of the sim, but I find that unnecessarily kludgy. Just having that information directly in-sim, during flight, can help a lot when adapting to a particular plane.

Long story short, don't oversimplify things; instead, make it easier to learn while still keeping it as challenging to truly master, and the rest will follow.

I worked on engineering mods for aircraft like the A10,f18,B2,F117,C5B,F15 Japan,A6A, and others. Worked in a lot of
mockups and one sim F16. If your ever get to use a simulator with hydraulics go for the f16 a saddle on an engine.
I say this because ROF get it right. The people that like DCS A10 with all the button pushing should have come to my job
for six months. In 6 weeks they would want noting to do with it. Setup procedure after setup procedure, flight system failure
at 200 ft. " PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP " get redundant system on line, light out do we really have a failure, do it a hundred times over 48 hours. FUN!

Now DCS cliffs off fire 2 get it right for a sim. I love ROF it is what it need to be for the level of our technology.
Like we would say at work, were on the edge of tech can't be has to be something better somewhere?
And by the way the 360 gamepad is just as real as a stick it's called fly by wire and it very 21st century.
In a f18 you have 24 movable surfaces a human can not fly it with out there R2 unit.

When in game fly with the force (no need to look at gages) It works. S!

What he said!

I don't think a new super-arcade mode is required. I turned on all the pilot aids when my kidlets (aged 5 and 3) took their first flights in RoF. My 3 year old had the DFW airbourne for 1/2 hour without incident (granted he wasnt fighting anything but balloons and trucks). It was a similar story with my 5 year old who had the Brisfit up for a similar time interval. I can't remember if there is a general difficulty selector (easy/medium/hard) in the difficulty settings menu or not. If not, it may be something like that could be the the thing to make RoF more accesible for noobs.

Cheers,

Fafnir_6