Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Will Let Players Walk Around The World

Microsoft is starting to share more details about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the successor to the 2020 video game that’s set to be released on PC and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, 2024. In an interview with PC Gamer, Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Simulator at Microsoft explained that players will be able to get out of their planes and helicopters and explore the entire world on foot.

“You can now exit the plane, walk around, in 2024. You can literally walk your favorite mountain path to your favorite hut in the mountains. Sit on the lake. See the sunset. It is truly a digital twin you can absorb,” Neumann explained in the interview.

This looks like this could really change how people will experience the game. It’s not clear yet if there will be actual things to do after exiting an aircraft, but players will likely be incentivized to visit familiar places and see how they differ from reality.

“I think everybody has their own sort of emotional place… when MSFS 2020 came out, everybody flew to their house, and then the house where they were born, and then the houses where their friends are, their family,” Neumann said. “I’m very curious to see where people fly, because we improved the world so much in 2024 that it’s worth revisiting, and there’s some features we haven’t talked about yet that I think are going to make that fascinating.”

In Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 developer Asobo Studios used the power of Microsoft’s Azure cloud combined with Bing Maps to recreate the entire planet as faithfully as possible, with in-game live weather that’s synchronized with real-time weather. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will push the realism even further with more detailed aerial imagery, and the game will also have data about all ships cruising the seas around the world.

“Right now, we have every ship on Earth, right? Every ship on Earth sends us a transponder signal… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first-person shooter environment,” Neumann explained. “I think we’re in a new era of making games that I think are going to break new ground, from a scale and complexity perspective.”

It’s quite fascinating to see the franchise evolve from its pure flight simulation roots to a metaverse-like experience. And this is a version of the metaverse that may actually appeal to people who enjoy using services like Google Street View.

Last but not least, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 won’t use as much storage as the 2020 game as Asobo Studios found a more efficient way to stream data. “We basically went for a thin client architecture, and we’re not done yet. We’re shipping in November, but we think we’re going to be… I’d say 50 GB or less, but with tons more data, because we are offloading more to the cloud,” Neumann explained.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is one of the big Xbox-exclusive games coming this fall, along with Age of Mythology: Retold (September 4), Ara: History Untold (September 24), Towerborne, and Indiana Jones and the Circle of Light. Obsidian’s Avowed, however, has been delayed to February 18, 2025, to “give players’ backlogs some breathing room,” the Xbox team said. All these games will also be available on day one on Game Pass.