Over the past few weeks a select group of players are testing the alpha phase of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the Asobo Studio airplane simulator (A Plague Tale: Innocence) edited by Xbox Game Studios. The user Utherellus has published in imgur various images demonstrating the scope of photorealism of the title when comparing videogame environments with real scenarios.
The locations present in the screenshots and photographs are the Lake of the Four Cantons (Switzerland), Chambord Castle (France), Mount Ngauruhoe (New Zealand), the capital of Corsica Ajaccio (France), Moscow (Russia), the National Marshes of Mexico, New York (United States) and the French city of Aix-les-Bains. You can see all the images at the end of this news.
It is difficult to discern between What is real photography and what is recreation in the video game. In some helmets it is easy to identify the screenshot of Microsoft Flight Simulator because a watermark appears with the player's Xbox Live user, and other times because an airplane appears in the image.
Real environments recreated with Bing and Azure
Asobo Studio, the French studio that already collaborated with Xbox Game Studios in titles like ReCore and Disneyland adventures, has recreated the planet in the air simulator using the images offered by Bing satellites, the Microsoft search engine; and leaning on the Azure servers of the Redmond company.
Players can fly over any place on the planet, which will be represented with the climatology and lighting of that moment, since the game is synchronized with meteorology services. But at any time the user can change on the fly if it rains, snows or is low, and the time (and therefore the lighting) of the stage you are flying over.
Microsoft Flight Simulator reach Windows 10 computers, included in Xbox Game Pass, sometime in 2020. There is also an Xbox One version in development for which there is no release date. You can read our first impressions with the PC version. In July there will be a closed beta.
