I get this! However, if it looks this good, I could play as a Civvie pilot.

To each their own of course. For example, I don't understand at all the allure of playing something like "Farming Simulator" but several of my friends on Steam play it.

Let me 'splain it to you Lucy....

IF the Terrell TX or Rockwall TX Airfields are included, I would practice with the Cessna 172 doing landings, takeoffs, and nav.
Because my Buddy flies out of both with me in the passenger seat of the 172 he rents.

I think that would be pretty darn cool if it was realistic.
Then, I would pick a Air to Ground package and go after those wiley Oklahomans just norrh of the Red River!!

"If I can't shoot anything with guns and missiles,,,then where is the joy in this."

I'll 'splain it even better. You're obviously not a pilot, and you probably aren't all that interested in aviation. You're a gamer. You want to shoot things. People like me, who have a true passion for aviation love airplanes. Love flying them, love just looking at them fly. Navigating to a destination and finally seeing it right up there at your twelve o'clock, or nailing a landing (especially in a tail dragger) is the joy. Ya gotta love airplanes, or you just aren't going to understand. I'll be buying this.

Agree with Bill, if my local area is accurately depicted I could enjoy flying around home.

+1, Pooch. I'm not a pilot but my dad was. One time he explained how TACAN worked. When I finally decided to try it in FSX it was almost like he was sitting in the right seat. I used it to navigate from my home in Missouri to where my son was stationed at the time at Ft. Hood. Later, after installing MegaSceneryEarth, I did the same thing to get to my hometown's municipal airport in northeast Pennsylvania. There's a sense of accomplishment to follow your instruments over a long distance like that successfully.

That said, FSX is something that I do only when the mood takes me. So while I'm excited about the more realistic, regularly updated scenery aspect of this and the likelihood that it will be VR compatible (both things I've longed to see in a flight sim for two decades), sadly it's not going to be high on my list. Especially if my old machine won't handle it.

+1, Pooch.
I have been making do with Prepar3D and (some) of the Orbx TFX scenery.
If/when I get an upgrade on a computer or VR goes next generation, I'll keep virtual flying until I get a real aircraft or too old to do it.
I'm only 78.

Well, after my time in Star Citizen recently, I'm not sure why petabytes of storage space are required for a realistic looking world. Star Citizen is stunning--best looking game I've ever seen, and flying around planets and through canyons and city scapes and beyond has replaced all my flight sim time as of late.

Plus I can shoot things.

Because creating a high resolution fake world is not the same thing as recreating a high resolution representation of the real world.

Outerra is 40 gigs and the world is jaw-dropping.

Of course, there are no cities or houses., etc. but the terrain is gorgeous. Minus the fake paper mache trees, of course.

It's not just adding cities and houses that takes space, it's saying where to put each house, each building, each road, each bridge, etc... so that it matches it's real work counterpart. Not to mention the satellite imagery to cover the whole planet. The other games being mentioned use a library of textures that are procedurally pulled to create a landscape. FS 2020 looks to have the entire planet covered in satellite imagery.

There is no comparing something like Outerra to MSFS.

MSFS is now a hybrid of procedural generation based on real world satellite imagery...

About (if not more) complicated than getting Google Earth and FSX "married"...

The bar is high though, and this could fail, but I think they'll pull it off...

I have to admit that I'm a sucker for weather and in particular clouds in a flight sim. As far as that goes, it seems to be ticking my box

wow this is amazing.........and boring....now i have to actually chart and fly the plane.
please, a third party must make this a boom boom sim