After one year since its surprise reveal, Asobo and Xbox Game Studios have officially announced a release date for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024—November 19.
The next generation of the revived longtime franchise brings with it an A380-sized batch of new content, including enhanced visuals, to more complex and varied aircraft operations.
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Microsoft Flight Simulator boasts a massive array of different aircraft and mission types. From commercial aircraft operations to search and rescue missions, aerial advertisements, air racing, and lots more.
The Xbox Games Showcase 2024 trailer shows off a lot of new details that aren’t directly highlighted, but longtime players of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 should no doubt notice.
These details include significantly improved airliner AI traffic (with real-world liveries to boot,) quite a few new rotorcraft and other aircraft types that aren’t available by default in the existing sim, dense AI ship traffic, and even a hint at on-foot gameplay with a handheld camera mode.
Other new ‘blink if you miss it’ details include more varied weather and natural phenomena like aurora borealis and seasonal changes in vegetation, vastly improved visual effects, such as how tall grass now realistically reacts to the high speed of propellers.
Animated passengers also can be seen walking through a jetway onto an aircraft, and there are quite a few new character models and ground vehicles that populate the scene.
Speaking of “scenes”, the world data, from satellite-rendered cities to natural landscapes have all been given a dramatic facelift with more intricate, precise details above the existing simulator. This is thanks to improve AI terrain generation and more efficient data streaming pipelines.
PC players will also benefit from multi-threading support, which is expected to provide system performance improvements over MSFS2020. Of course, considering the sheer jump in graphical fidelity, it will be interesting to see just how the sim fares across all platforms.
“The sky is not the limit”
The new trailer shows off quite a lot, but there’s likely still more intricate details that Asobo is holding close to its chest until the new sim is closer to launch. That said, what has been put on show does appear to fulfill the promise of this being a truly next-generation flight sim experience; one that’s been built from the ground up with a new engine. This is why the team opted to move past MSFS2020 in the first place.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 release date is scheduled for November 19 on PC/Steam, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Game Pass.
