Coming in 2020 (next year!) Microsoft Flight Simulator is the next iteration of one of the most loved simulation games. Featuring everything from light planes to wide-body jets, you’ll fly highly detailed aircraft in an incredibly realistic world. Create your flight plan and fly anywhere on the planet. Enjoy flying day or night and face realistic, challenging weather conditions.
The game will support 4K and HDR, catering to next gen-consoles and high end PC gamers. Releasing on Windows 10 (PC) in 2020, and Xbox One at a later date, and also available on Xbox Game Pass.
It’ll be 14 years since the previous Flight Simulator release back in 2006 (not including the 2014 Steam release which was the same title). And from the looks of things, Microsoft has been hard at work at least some of this time.
What took so long?
As already stated, the game will enable you to fly all over the world. To pull this off, Microsoft is using data from Bing Maps, and highly detailed satelite imagery. It will be able to generate photorealistic 3D models of buildings, trees, and terrain. The game will also have realistic physics and utilise real world weather data. For example, if it’s raining somewhere in real life: it will be raining there in game. Invidual clouds will have their own characterstics, resulting in different impacts on the aircraft. There’s animals. And Flight Simulator will even populate roads with vehicles, water will flow realistically based on wind direction, trees will have individual leaves. The game, like Earth, has over 2 million cities, and over 45,000 airports.
The size of this game is way, way, way larger than you have the space for. But this hasn’t stopped Microsoft. Instead of downloading the entire game (more than 2PB [petabytes], or 2 million GB), you will stream the data from their servers. In the settings, you’ll be able to allocate a certain amount of storage to cache, and also pre-load data required for a flight. You will be able to play in offline mode. It’s basically Flight Simulator on demand style. Or Netflix style. Everywhere will be at the tips of your fingers.
Yes, you’ll be able to find your house.
Coming soon, get ready!
To date, there are no hardware requirements mentioned. But, given it’s coming to Xbox One, minimum requirements shouldn’t be too high. However, to be able to play at the photorealistic graphics settings, 4K, HDR, and a high frame rate: you’ll likely need something extremely up to date, and high end.
With requirements not even hinted at yet, you can be assured that this game will be on our radar. Pun very much intended. We’ll be back with updates for this game. Previous Flight Simulator titles have been huge driving forces for customers buying gaming PCs from us, so we know this is a popular game.
If you pressured me for a guess at what hardware would run this game decently from current the generation?
i5 9600K / R5 3600, 16GB RAM, 500GB of free storage space, and Nvidia RTX 2060. Or higher, of course.