Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: In the new part you can even get out and walk around

Thanks to an interview with our colleagues at PC Gamer, some new details about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 have come to light and they not only sound impressive, but almost megalomaniacal.

The colleagues from PC Gamer

In the new part, you get the opportunity to land and leave your aircraft to roam around the area. “You can now get out of the plane in 2024 and walk around,” Neumann reveals. “You can literally walk your favorite mountain path to your favorite cabin in the mountains. Sit by the lake. Watch the sunset.”

But the new part of the series is also supposed to push some boundaries in technical terms, not least thanks to Microsoft’s Azure AI. Just l isting the features sounds almost crazy. All the airports have been redesigned and new ones added. Every oil platform and every lighthouse in the world is in the game. Every ship in the world is simulated via its transponder signals and you can even land on ships.

Add to that the hundreds of species of animals roaming the world, and even trees are a topic. Neumann says Microsoft Flight Simulator is now able to represent every tree on Earth. “We have a machine learning system look it up,” he explains, “and then we know what the tree is, even to the point where we know what the species probably is… and then we plant trees, literally trillions of trees, and all in real time, so damn accurate.”

The cloud is designed to ensure that all of this can be implemented quickly and doesn’t fill up your hard drives. “In 2020, the initial installation is 130 GB,” he explains. “Then we have 17 global updates. If you extrapolate that, we’re at 500 GB. And then there are 5,000 add-ons that people have made, that’s two terabytes… For Flight Simulator 2024, we’ve changed all that. We’ve gone for a thin client architecture, and we’re not ready yet. We’ll ship in November, but we think we’ll have… I’d say 50 GB or less, but with a lot more data because we’re offloading more to the cloud.”

Phew. It sounds like Asobo wants to create a complete simulation of the entire world with the help of Azure and Microsoft. We’ll see whether and how well this works on November 19th, when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is released.