ALL-TIME HIGH

MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR takes ‘open world’ very literally.

- Phil Iwaniuk

Do you ever wonder how it’d feel to take a few years away from games, and then peek back through the curtain once you’d become out of touch? Quite often, Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like that peek. In its scope and fidelity, it seems to be visiting from the future, when it’s commonplace to have access to a photorealistic Planet Earth and the freedom to explore it. When you can hop in a plane and fly over your own town, in the same weather conditions and lighting you can see outside your window. When ‘open world’ truly means just that.

What a dramatic way for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series to reappear after years under Dovetail’s DLC-focussed stewardship, and what a towering achievement from Asobo Studio. We’ll be talking about the impossible detail of its 1:1 world map for years to come; reading retrospectives about how this piece of software changed environmental design; wandering around other games that harness petabytes of real map data and Cloud AI grunt as a matter of course.

This is a seismic moment for PC gaming then. But what’s abundantly clear is that this is very much the beginning of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s journey, one moment on a roadmap that includes regular content updates on a monthly cadence and should by necessity also include just as many to fix some considerable teething technical issues. Release day has arrived, but whether that represents the launch of a finished product or an arbitrary demarcation along its journey to full completion is certainly up for debate.

A total of 20 planes are included with the standard edition at launch, comprising three airliners, two jets, and fifteen props.