Asobo has formally pulled the curtain back on a ton of major details surrounding the forthcoming Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
The highly anticipated new simulator features an astounding amount of content, the most of any flight simulator to date. From an all-new Career Mode with procedurally generated missions dotted across the globe, to dozens of varied aircraft to take command of, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is set to deliver a plethora of experiences when it launches this November.
Skyward ventures
Arguably the biggest addition to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 over its predecessor is the inclusion of a fully robust Career Mode, as mentioned earlier.
Players will begin their new aviation journey from any airport in the world (such as their home airport!) and work their way up the ranks from a rookie to a fully-fledged seasoned captain. Beyond just simply completing a checklist of missions, players will be guided through an educational course in a cut-down format similar to that of real pilots.
As they learn different flight procedures and gain experience across a variety of different aviation career paths (VIP Transport, Firefighting, Search & Rescue, etc,) they will be able to take on more responsibility and handle more complex tasks.
On top of this, there’s essentially a management sim baked into the experience, as players will be able to buy their own aircraft and begin to manage an entire personalised fleet. This fleet must be properly maintained by the player, and their flying performance will affect factors like insurance rates.
Remodelling the planet
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 stunned the gaming world upon its initial reveal and continues to turn heads to this day. Yet, its successor has pushed the boundaries of visual fidelity even further with more graphical complexity both inside and out.
In addition to the ground environment being given an extensive upgrade to provide more believable scenes up close, weather effects, atmospheric lighting, cloud generation, and more have all been improved, resulting in an even more authentic digital recreation of planet Earth.
These improvements come as part of Asobo’s upgraded engine that’s powering Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Moreover, the physics of the sim have been given extensive upgrades as well, providing realistic flight dynamics and effects.
From the way aircraft handle on the ground, and in the air, and the different environmental effects that play into their behaviour—it’s all been given more realistic tuning.
Players will be able to comb through these improvements in significant detail, thanks to the added freedom of hopping out of the cockpit and fully exploring the “digital twin” of Earth on foot, both from a first and third-person perspective.
One of the other career paths in the aforementioned Career Mode is even being a World Photographer with the task of capturing different environmental scenes and up-close encounters with beautifully rendered animals. The Photo Mode has also received an extensive rework, with more tools that mimic a digital camera.
World detail has been given a boost in other areas too, such as global ship traffic roaming the oceans and rivers, and passengers moving inside airliners and throughout airport terminals, just to name a few.
Getting more out of less
All of these enhancements require an even more vast dataset. MSFS2020 already infamously requires “several petabytes” of data to power the full extent of its suite. With its successor, Asobo has streamlined the installation process and twiddled down the core installation size to a mere 50GB for the PC edition.
Cloud computing will once again play (an even larger) role in the process, as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be constantly streaming info from the cloud to populate the player’s flight path.
This more streamlined approach to streaming allows players to spend less time with downloads and more time actually playing the sim, as now only the data they need at the time will be acquired. The segmented releases of World Updates are being done away with. Now, data will all be housed on the server, freeing up dozens of local gigabytes on player devices.
Gold standard
Another key point of improvement is that of aircraft systems (avionics.) More advanced system simulation is being implemented into the new sim, allowing for even more complex operations across the fleet of default aircraft.
Not only has the list of default planes grown substantially, but the attention to detail for each of their systems has been fine-tuned.
Asobo has worked with aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and other support studios to help capture the full extent of different aircraft avionics. For instance, one of the new planes, the Boeing 747-400 LCF “Dreamlifter” is a new plane in the sim and has been designed with the help of Boeing itself to realistically capture its very unique flight characteristics and avionics suite.
These are just some highlights of Asobo’s full write-up of all the new details surrounding Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Its release is a few months away, arriving November 19, 2024. There are officially four editions of the simulator up for pre-order, ranging from the $70 Standard Edition, all the way up to the extensive $200 Aviator Edition. Check out our full breakdown of the different editions right here.
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