Microsoft Flight Simulator Pre-Order Trailer Discussion
Microsoft Flight Simulator Discussion
7/14/20
From the moment I discovered Microsoft Flight Simulator in my YouTube recommended page, I knew this was going to be a very special game. The flight simulator genre is something very new to me and something that I’ve barely experienced. Though, from what I’ve researched, this game seems to be top tier; some predicting it to be the best flight simulator of all time. The trailers, confirmed rumors, and technical specs give us more than enough information to dissect this game and see if it will live up to that name.
First things first, it makes sense to discuss the obvious elephant in the room here: the map. The developers of this game put in so much care and dedication to the map and the vast open world the game has to offer. To my knowledge, this is the first ever flight simulator to feature a map as big as planet Earth itself. The game enhances and recreates items from the mostly reliable Bing Maps and lets the player fly over all of it. The game will also feature over 30,000 airports, a handful of them being recreated from scratch. All in all, this probably is the biggest and most ambitious open world game in history. Second, the thing everyone knows will be astounding: the graphics. This game will run in full 4K HD for computers with Windows 10 with the ability to display it and the Series X. The display of the graphics is utterly stunning. The care put into just the trees, for example, makes each and every one of the two billion of them featured in the game to be nearly photo-realistic.
Next comes the discussion of gameplay, and so far, the gameplay looks really fun. The game features first and third-person viewpoints, perhaps second-person, and probably a few more. The gameplay features seem pretty standard compared to most flight simulator games, yet it’s pretty expansive. The only real difference is the graphical capabilities enhancing the realism and immersion to a degree where you truly feel like you are flying a plane. The game also comes standard with varying weather conditions that accurately match different areas of the world. Fourth, we have main parts of the game. What I mean in this case is the airports and planes themselves. The game comes complete with 20 beautifully-recreated airplanes and 30 airports built entirely from scratch. To my knowledge, you can visit most of the other thousands of airports, but they are simply enhanced and made by computers like the rest of the games assets.
With such a large map run with such nice graphics, the game has to come with a cost in terms of technical specifications. The game only needs 8 gigabytes of RAM, which certainly isn’t terrible, but it does take up a whopping 150 gigabytes of storage. To put this in perspective, it’s almost how much storage my phone has, multiplied by five. I’m still not sure how much interaction with the ground you’ll be able to experience. Obviously, if you could land anywhere and drive cars through towns, this game would be in the terabytes. Though, it’s how close you can come to the ground or what building tops you could crash into that really matter. If the game has to render its claimed 2 million cities fully, 150GBs would not cut it. Overall, with every trailer and announcement, some questions still remain unanswered.
Before I go, I felt it was worth noting that the pre-order trailer was only advertising the beta version as opposed to the full game. Perhaps even more features will be added and it will take up even more storage later, but just the beta still looks incredible. The problem is that we are still unsure when this game is coming for the Series X, when the full game is coming to PC, and if it’s even coming to the Xbox One. Personally, I doubt the Xbox One is powerful enough to run a game like this, but we’ll see; maybe in the Xbox presentation later this month. In conclusion, this game looks amazing, and it’s the first game in years that looks this close to flawless. Thank you for reading, and I’ll bring more Xbox news in my planned presentation discussion later this month.
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