I find DCS to be the best of the bunch, and MSFS too gimmicky to my taste.
For those who want to simply have fun flying (in something of a combat setting) there is also Far Cry 5 or 6 - two beautiful games I can’t recommend enough.
3rd party developers can only do so much. 'Study level' just isn't possible in MSFS. For example, yoke position is not linked to control surface position. Move the yoke full deflection and you only might only see the control surface move 5% if you are at a high speed. If you model an aircraft in the sim accurately without these geared control surfaces then it will pull 20G turns at 200Kts.
MSFS gets the most basic parts of the flight model and controls fundamentally wrong.
(source: I have made multiple payware aircraft for both X-Plane and MSFS)
This is a limitation of the controller, not the simulation software. In real life, there'd be feedback on the flight stick or yoke due to all the air hitting the control surface. Most controllers lack force-feedback and so the sim treats controller deflection as "force against the stick", which yields different amounts of deflection at different speeds.
It's been a problem with flight sims since day one.
Each "controller" be it your mouse, a joystick, flight yoke, game controller, etc, all have a different amount of available deflection on the physical device, and that has to be translated into deflection in-game.
Take a flight yoke for example - you might have say 120 degrees of rotation available physically on the device, but the actual aircraft has 180 degrees. This means the sim-pilot doesn't have a connection with what is happening in the real-world vs what is happening in-sim, making minute changes a lot more challenging.
It's even worse for things like joysticks that have a very low available deflection already. Moving the stick a few mm's could result in an uncontrolled roll in-sim.
To help mitigate this, most sims offer a scalable conversion factor for controller input, but it's never perfect.
> In real life, there'd be feedback on the flight stick or yoke due to all the air hitting the control surface
Also, not all aircraft are direct linkage anymore, and most (all) commercial airline aircraft (your Boeing 737, 787, 777, Airbus A320, etc) will either have simulated feedback or no feedback.
Good catch. I wasn't sure if the newest variants were still mechanical linkage or if they had been "updated" with fly-by-wire systems. It seems it's still predominantly mechanical, with fly-by-wire sprinkled in here and there.[1]
The lack of immediate physical feedback (as opposed to visual feedback, which will lag even in a real plane) to small inputs can make linear response not optimal either. So there is something of a compromise to strike.
> The study-level aircraft have started coming to MSFS in droves. It's no longer a gimmick.
Yes, some extremely detailed aircraft have been released, but the underlying simulation is still lacking realism in some key areas. Many aircraft just "feel wrong" when flown. But it's a ton of fun, and the nice visuals really make it a joy to fly places. I find I spend a lot of time in MSFS these days, even though I still prefer X-Plane for the overall realism.
For those who want to simply have fun flying (in something of a combat setting) there is also Far Cry 5 or 6 - two beautiful games I can’t recommend enough.