Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 hits new heights for realism | hands-on preview

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a pretty monumental achievement in game development, based on a preview I saw of the game in Arizona at the Grand Canyon, courtesy of Microsoft. Now I’m not just saying that because I got to fly in one of their partners’ small jets.

This game looks very realistic, whether you’re looking inside the plane or staring down at the landscapes like the deserts and forests of Arizona. It feels like the real thing. The game is coming out on the PC and the Xbox Series X/S and day one on GamePass on November 19.

If you’re fascinated by big numbers and the blurring line between reality and games, and the march of technology, I suggest you stick around and read this to the end.

The world in a cloud

And, from a technical perspective, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a tremendous technical achievement because it has a smaller download than the previous game and it is hosted in the cloud, rather than on the player’s local machine. The previous game could require half a terabyte of storage space with all the updates, but now, with the data in the cloud, the storage on your local machine is only 23 gigabytes.

This is one example of a game that requires so much data about the world that it can make use of web-connected cloud computing data centers. As a technical feat, that’s pretty crazy. And it’s one of the reasons why Flight Simulator has survived for 42 years as a game franchise and entertained 45 million pilots to date. In an interview, I asked Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, why he had the confidence to put the entire game in the cloud — which has had a mixed record in gaming.

“Sometimes you just have to believe. Even when 2020 came out–I said, ‘Hey, I found two petabytes of data.’ People said, ‘Cool, and…?’ ‘We’re gonna stream all that!’ ‘Come again?’ 2016, 2017, when we started, the internet ping time in, say, western Australia was horrible,” Neumann said. “There was no way you could stream this game. Then more and more data centers were built. As we were working on this product, they built data centers all over the place. That enabled the product. The infrastructure of the world caught up and thank God they did all that.”

The simulated and the real Grand Canyon

Neumann and his team greeted us in a hotel in Tusayan, just miles from the Grand Canyon in Arizona. There, Microsoft treated us to a briefing on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and treated us to an actual flight in a small jet — the single-engine Cirrus SF50 G2+ Vision Jet — over the canyon itself.

So we had the surreal experience of flying simulated planes over the simulated canyon and then flying a real jet over the real Grand Canyon, which is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. I’m not sure how fast I was going, but that jet can fly at 345 miles per hour.

I could feel the plane shake as I fought the joystick to make sure I stayed on course and kept the plane level. The game itself has a G2 version of the real plane, and it can carry seven people, including two pilots up front. I rode with my old buddy Jeff Grubb of Giant Bomb and Charlie Hall, who is a tabletop gaming editor.

None of us had any business flying a real plane, but Cirrus CEO Zean Nielsen wanted to make the point that anyone can fly. In fact, Hall did a nice job actually taking off. I was astounded to learn the Cirrus SF50 G2+ Vision Jet plane could drive itself to the correct runway automatically. Such modern jets really do make flying seems so much easier. Of course, as I was flying at the control amid afternoon turbulence, I was half terrified. But it was also way more than halfway fun.

“They want to show that it’s not that scary,” Neumann said. “They need more pilots. Commercial aviation is lacking about 800,000 pilots. The crisis is all the pilots are aging out.”

The dream of digital twins

You can see what it looked like to fly in the simulation and I’ll upload a video of what it looked like in real life later. But suffice to say that Neumann and the flight sim team made a very good point. This new game is essentially like a “digital twin” of the real thing.

In fact, the Earth in the simulation is really as close to a digital twin of the real planet as has ever been built. I heard a lot about digital twins from Nvidia — it supplies the chips to run simulations that let BMW build a digital twin factory to perfect the design before it builds the factory in real life. And Nvidia ambitiously is building Earth-2, a simulation of the entire world so accurate that it may one day be used to predict climate change for decades to come.

This was the first time — since all the talk of the metaverse — that I heard a game developer seriously talk about using a simulation as a digital twin of the Earth. I asked Neumann about it in an interview.

“The impetus for starting Flight Sim in the first place, back in 2016 when I kicked this off with Phil (Spencer)–I had worked on something called World Explorer on HoloLens. Nobody ever played that because HoloLens is really expensive. But the experience was great,” Neumann said. “We did Rome. There’s a digital twin of Rome. For that we needed photogrammetry of the city. You could land in the Colosseum and those sorts of things. I was also working on Machu Picchu. We didn’t have a scan for that. It’s complicated. Everything is rounded. A complicated space.”

He added, “We got to a point where we got those places right. San Francisco was another one. We did about 12 places around the earth. The real impetus was, can we do this on a worldwide level? I remember getting the Seattle scan. I stuck it into the engine. We got a Cessna 172 from Flight Sim 10 and jammed it in. It felt great. I showed it to Phil (Spencer). We flew over our offices in Redmond. He said, “Why are you showing me this video?” I said, “It’s not a video.” I turned the plane. Yep, it’s real. That showed us it was possible.”

You can see in this version of the game — which is far advanced over the 2020 version — that it is far more realistic. You can see that by looking at the ground, not the air, where there is some much rich, real life built into the landscape.

“The next place we tried was actually the Grand Canyon,” Neumann said. “We had problems with the digital elevation map. There was popping with the shadows everywhere. The resolution wasn’t good enough. But the reason why I thought Flight Sim was the right vessel for that idea, at the core of it all Flight Sim was always a full representation of the earth. Even if it was just a rectangle and one tower representing Chicago, it wanted to be that.”

He added, “For any kind of software, when you ask that question with a digital twin–it needs a purpose. A consumer need has to be fulfilled. We have a consumer need. Flight simmers want this. I’m building this digital twin for the flight simmers. Does that mean it’s limited to flight simming? No. But there’s always a need. Now that they can land a helicopter anywhere and walk around, we needed to make it look at least as good as a first-person shooter or something. How do we do that? Again, there’s a need that drives innovation forward.”

Flying the simulation

As I took off in my simulated experimental plane, I could see the hotel where I stayed and the Playa Bonita Mexican restaurant where I ate dinner the night before in Tusayan, Arizona. I could see why it felt the aircraft were buzzing the hotel as they took off. Then I flew over the seven mile road to see the Grand Canyon Visitor Center below, and then finally the points like the South Kaibab Trail where I hiked down into the canyon for 30 minutes to see the Ooh Ahh Point and the Bright Angel Trail that leads to two tunnels.

Then of course I did something completely illegal and flew my plane into the canyon. I found that it was a bit scary to really low. I could finally see the waters of the Colorado River flowing through the canyon floor, and it was cool to see it both in real life and in the simulation. I later flew an F/A-18e fighter jet over the canyon and wound up hitting the side of the canyon wall. Then my fighter was putt-putting through the river (there are no fiery explosions in the flight sim).

Now, it all still looked like a game, rather than real life. But I was amazed at the one-to-one correctness of different things that I saw on the ground versus the things I saw from the simulated airplane and the real airplane. This was the real deal.

David Dedeine, chief creative officer of Asobo Studio, said in an interview that he had the same surreal feeling when flying over the Grand Canyon. He noticed earlier that his artist had put a lot of greenery into the canyon area.

“I was talking with the art director. I was staying in the area,” Dedeine said. “His name is Patrice. ‘Patrice, there’s something wrong. It’s way too green here. My memory is that it’s much drier.’ Patrice heard that feedback and came back to me. ‘No, David, I think it’s fine. It’s what it needs to be.’ When we flew here with Sebastian, we looked at the environment and said, ‘My God.’

Among the desert red rocks, there was a lot of greenery, and forests around the rim.

“What I like about this story is that it shows you that how we build the game is data-driven,” Dedeine said. “Species are able to grow at a specific altitude and latitude in a specific type of soil. We’re helped by all the data that helps us populate the world. But the thing is, from the sky you look down and you can’t always tell if something is just a bush or an entire tree. I was surprised to–when we flew this morning, we saw that the forest grows very close to the rim. It’s exactly like it is in the game.”

Massive expectations and massive data

This game has a lot to live up to. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 managed to get more than 15 million unique users who flew a billion flight sessions. Lots of those pilots joined communities in the real world, like the Reno Air Races or the Oshkosh air show. There was huge pent-up demand as it was the first major launch in 14 years (the game only reached five million people in 2006).

In between those launches, there was an “explosion in the hobby of flight simulation,” Neumann said. And Neumann said the game from four years ago really exceeded all expectations. In 49 months since the launch, the 2020 game had 49 updates, including adding aircraft from the Dune and Top Gun films. There are now 400 airplanes and 2,200 airports.

There’s a flight sim marketplace now with more than 4,200 items in it. Since the game has many more players than there are pilots, countries of the world praised the game for getting more people interested in aviation. The game gave birth to “digital tourists” who flew around the world to see real places.

This new game is far more advanced, taking advantage of photogrammetry data, capturing things like the landscapes of the Earth as seen from the sky through various kinds of real aerial data sources. The scenery is pretty amazing with 3D water with waves on the ground, interactive physics, and surface objects on the ground like vegetation that affect the physics model of the air above it.

The flight models have been redone and can handle complex shapes like the batwing Stealth Bomber, double-fuselage planes, tri-wing planes like the Red Baron’s plane from WWI, modern fighter aircraft like the F/A-18E Super Hornet, and transport helicopters. The game has new systems for weather, fuel, physics, pre-flight planning, GPS satellites, and more. You can hear the traffic of air traffic control that sounds like real-world aircraft communications.

“Our commitment to the core sim is unwavering,” Neumann said.

Packing in the details

It turns out Earth is a big place and flying is a great way to see it.

This new game has new types of aircraft like gliders and bush planes. You can tell what it feels like to tow a glider in the air and then cut it loose. And when you land a glider, the ground has to look realistic everywhere because you can land a glider in just about any field. That’s why the ground has 4,000 more times detail than the previous game, Yaeger said.

“Gliders in 2024 are some of the most realistic gliders I’ve been able to personally field in a long time. They’ve done a fantastic job,” said Brandon Yaeger, founder and project lead at Got Friends, in an interview with GamesBeat.

And there is a massive amount of detail. There are 2,077 glider airports from around the world, 952 oil rings where you can land a helicopter, 84,184 helipads and much more. Yaeger is a glider and bush plane enthusiast, and he noted how flight is so different when you’re gliding in silence over the world.

If you look for them, you can find herds of sheep on the ground — and you can even herd them like they do in Australia using a helicopter. (And, for you Call of Duty: Warzone players, you cannot chop up the sheep with your helicopter rotors). But one of the amazing achievements about the digital twin of the Earth is that you can land anywhere now and still see a realistic landscape. I flew over my own home and saw it, though it was a bit blurry from the height I was flying at. But because of the ground details, the petabytes of the game mostly sit on the ground, Neumann said.

“This is the largest sim project ever undertaken,” Neumann said.

The pilot lifestyle

You can also become a certified simulation pilot by logging in hours and develop a full career as a pilot. You can create your own character with a backstory and come back to that character over and over. You can specialize in particular piloting skills and log big moments in your career like your first flight. There’s a flight headquarters.

As you can imagine, it took a lot of developers to bring the game to life. Microsoft has a full team as does Asobo, and other studios and real-world aviation partners helped. In fact, many of the planes were crafted by the aircraft vendors themselves in the name of getting better realism. There are 25 different partners now helping with dev. More than 800 people are working on the game around the world, Neumann said.

That doesn’t count the people at the Azure data centers that enable the digital twin to be stored in the cloud computing data centers that stream the data for the game in real-time to the players’ computers. Neumann said the team bet that cloud computing would mature, and thanks to advances like AI, the compute infrastructure has advanced as well and kept up with the demands of running the new game.

“Now we have a highly stable highly performant sim,” Neumann said.

A system for everything

Sebastian Wloch, CEO of Asobo Studio, said the game does smart computing. The game gives you a low amount of detail if you are flying in a region. You can view things from far away. But it switches to the highest level of detail when you are near to the ground or where you can see a lot of things.

While the teams couldn’t do everything to map all of the Earth, they focused on principles of realism, accuracy, the authenticity of flight and real-world data. Four different systems have to work together for an aircraft to fly. There are effects like heat, turbulence, lift, wind shear and more. The cargo you carry will impact a helicopter’s physics and the airflow simulation. You can look inside your aircraft and see things that are inches away or look out the window and see things that are miles away. You can see dust, smoke or the grass blowing in the wind.

Christopher Burnett, cofounder of Working Title Simulations, headed a team of 25 that created the most realistic pilot experience as possible in the simulator. That includes flight plannings and briefings and deep simulations of avionics in the cockpit. When the sun is shining through the window, you can see the buttons cast shadows inside the plane, Burnett said. If you plan to go from one airport to another but can’t get there with the amount of fuel you have, the pre-flight plan will warn you.

I flew in the Cessna and I casually flew low and high. When I started diving, the wings started bucking and the plane was not happy. It became hard to control and I had to quickly level the plane to avoid spinning out of control. If you want, you can fly a Boeing 737, 747 and 787. There’s a new Boeing 747-400 aircraft for the 2024 version.

While flying (yes, flying) a real plane later over the Grand Canyon, I saw the value of having a flight plan because I had to point my yoke so that the jet would stay on course and go exactly where it needed to go — despite some pretty scary turbulence. Fortunately, the jet was a two-seater where a real pilot with his own side panel yoke could take over from me if I lost control of the plane. But a single pilot can fly it.

The static world has an amazing amount of data from satellite imagery and digital elevation maps. Partners provide a wealth of data — though some countries choose not to share it. Still, the team manages to get enough data through its own efforts. The digital twin of the Earth has accurate representations of cities — like the lake near my home that I could see as I flew over it. You can take photos from above as a digital tourist using the photographer mode.

One of the most fascinating things about the game is that it has a dynamic and living world. There are herds of animals on the ground, following their migration patterns. Over the ocean, you can see ships sailing through bays and harbors that you can see from above. There’s live weather data that an impact the cloud systems and atmospheric lighting. When the seasons change, so does the vegetation and the colors of nature. If you land in an airport and walk through the terminal, you would know from looking at the people if you’re in Kenya or Malaysia.

Of course, it can get boring just cruising above the planet. So you can engage in all kinds of missions and challenges as you learn how to fly different kinds of aircraft. You have to get things right like pre-flight checks and make sure you stay on the required flight path as you fly around. There’s one mission (which was hard) where you fly an F/A-18e over the Grand Canyon. I did not do so well on it. How well you complete these missions is something that can go on your record in your career. You can also engage in weekly competitions in a kind of esports of the air.

The game will come in standard, deluxe and premium editions. You get more types of aircraft in each of those versions. In terms of graphics, the game has ray-tracing and realistic glass rendering for improved realism. Soaking all of this in, I wondered how many missions you can do in Microsoft Simulator 2024.

Dedeine knew. He said was three million.

Disclosure: Microsoft paid my way to the Grand Canyon. Our coverage remains objective.