Let’s talk about one of the biggest questions that video games have about them: “Can you learn something from them?” That is a far more nuanced question than you might suspect. On the one hand, you obviously can’t learn things like true swordsmanship, gunplay, parkour, or other things of that nature from video games, even if they had motion controls. However, there are titles that are “video games” that can break that mold, one of them being Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Yes, it’s one of the “simulator titles” that we have seen across multiple forms of life, but this one takes things to the next level with every version they do.
Specifically, they make it the most realistic simulator in the world, to the point that actual pilots go into high-tech simulators running this game so that they can be trained in various things to become a pilot. You might not realize it, but this is arguably the most advanced simulator out there. That’s a big win for Microsoft.
In a chat with Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch, Tech Radar asked what makes Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 so great, and for him, it came down to making it easier to download and more realistic than ever:
“We have measured the first install now and I would say it’s around 30 gigabytes – about three times smaller. With a 2GB per hour [download speed], it takes 50 hours of gameplay to just catch up to the install of 2020.”
And he noted that compared to what happened in 2020, the version that gamers like us can get now is far superior, with incredible variety among planes, conditions and the general realism of the world:
“We have sets of trees, plants, rocks, and types of minerals […] it’s like small areas like a rocky area or so. Then we have AI machine learning. We trained it by looking at satellite photos and recognizing, ‘this is sun’ or, ‘this is rocks’. ‘This is a field, this is a corn field’ and all that. It was trained to recognize what the countryside is, what it’s made of. You train it to recognize maybe 40 types of ground and it’s gonna say this is 50% corn, 5% sand, and then we mix together these different sets based on what the AI has found.”
Further adding to the details of our world are the seasons that you can find yourself flying in during a trip and the animals you’ll see on the ground, depending on where you are. So, yeah, this is a truly realistic flight simulator.
