[Zanarkin]

I too played FX10 and it was 'ok' but with a few planes to pick from and those being 'fictitious' airlines, it lost it's thrill after a weekend or so.

That's when I discovered mods. The game is massive so I cannot fault the devs for having to draw the line at some point but this is where modders pick up the slack tweaking, tuning, reskinning, and all the other additions mods bring to the game.

Soon after, I was flying routes for a virtual airline website along side other pilots online with other players working traffic control. I later saw on the news where Air Force One flew to Iraq so decided I wanted to and left Andrews AFB to do just that with a downloaded AF1 complete with fighter escorts. I eventually enjoyed flying cargo for UPS for a time and it was a thrill to approach a major airport and see Delta, American Airlines, and all the others taxing, parked, etc and then off to the east was the cargo area littered with various UPS aircraft.

The game was night and day. A game that would have been a cute distraction for a week turned into a year of fun for me as the addiction to add more and more mods to bring the world to life took over.

Any sim game, and I mean ANY, without the ability to add constant content to tweak the game to your interest cannot and will not hold anyone's attention. With that said, I do not consider DLC content like a 'plane for $9.99' or 'Indian Ocean campaign for $19.99' to be the content we crave. That content does not change the game but instead changes scenery and objects. We want to change the clouds, change the waves, change the wind, and change the sounds and those things will never change.

This is why any online 'sim' game will be a passing fad. There will be no flags on my U-Boat, no radio tuned to Berlin with urgent news interruptions, no realistic splashing up onto the conning tower, no realistic looking weather, no flares shot up from sinking ships, no accurate UI to replace futuristic (to 1940s) UI, no bypassing the silly magic abilities, no accurate flags but instead have a re-visioned politically correct German flag, no custom accurate identification books, no reskinned sub bunker, no custom campaigns to replace idiotic vanilla ones, no getting rid of chat bubbles over characters, no accurate maps, not any of the things that I enjoy most when I sit down to play. All that I will be left with is a generic sub with a torpedo shoot button and a crosshair. That will be fine for a weekend.

It will be a dead stale world much like FX10 was if played vanilla.