The announcement of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 at the Xbox Showcase in June last year came as a bit of a surprise. Asobo Studio’s 2020 technical marvel and pandemic-era smash hit, recently passed a 15,000,000-player milestone, making it the most-played title in the 42-year Flight Simulator canon.
That Asobo would commit to a whole new sim in the wake of such a watershed moment raised a few eyebrows within the community. What were they doing that would warrant an entirely new product rather than a major update to the existing, popular, and still cutting-edge sim?
GamesHub was given the opportunity to ask these questions and more, thanks to an invite from Xbox to attend an in-person preview event for the upcoming game. Still, the answer to that question is difficult to divine. Since the announce, Asobo has played its cards rather close to the chest, with much of the marketing for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 focusing on its new event-driven campaign system.
This overt tempting of the gamers with more objective-led play belies the fact that there are a lot of under-the-hood systems being upgraded or overhauled for FS 2024. Take, for instance, the series’ already industry-leading visuals.
Read: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 announced
“My town didn’t look good…”
Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Newmann exudes a boyish enthusiasm for Asobo and its sims. He is a noisy cheerleader for his team and well-liked for his candour by the flight-simming community.
In person, he also displays a competitive streak that makes him restless – even though he presides over what is without a doubt the biggest and most impactful flight simulator in more than a decade, the emerging shortcomings of the 2020 sim plainly make Newmann itchy.
So much of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was smoke and mirrors. The planes – their models, meshes, and livery textures – were all stored locally. The world around that model was mostly streamed from the cloud. The old adage “laying the tracks in front of the train” applies here. The world would be filled in ahead of the aircraft, its assets downloaded while the plane moved, and its physics sim was influenced by polling real-world weather data in real-time.
Streaming the data this way meant Asobo could make the sim’s so-called Digital Twin of Earth look and feel as true-to-life as possible. However, there was only so much detail that could be captured at the time, and Asobo feels the weaknesses of that visual data have been exposed in the four short years since Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020’s release.
“I was really worried about the planet because the data is only what the data is,” Newmann tells me. “Even this,” he says, gesturing to a poster on the wall that shows a photorealistic image of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s African savannah from above.
“This only exists because we fly planes close to the ground and they take lots and lots of pictures every second. But when you walk on (the sim’s in-game ground)? Without augmentation, it’s like mmm,” he winces. “It doesn’t look like a modern computer game, it looks more like 1999-type stuff.”
He feigns revulsion but with a grin. “You’re like ewww, god.”
Newmann might be his own harshest critic, but he’s also right. As it has aged, one of FS 2020’s greater weaknesses has been that its recreation of Earth looks mighty at a distance but the illusion fails at close range, becoming muddy, blocky, and unidentifiable. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 multiplies the level of ground detail by a factor of 4,000.
“I grew up in Germany, and (in FS 2020), my town didn’t look good,” Newmann tells me. “At all. I grew up next to a lake. Yeah, you could sort of walk on it, but it didn’t look anything like it. So it’s not that great. Now it looks like, wow, holy shit, it actually looks like my lake.”
Newmann had debuted a series of in-engine screengrabs and footage during a presentation earlier in the day that demoed the lift in visual fidelity from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 to 2024. One of them, a shot of Mt. Fuji under a cherry blossom tree, was like night and day. The pebbles beneath the tree were as clear and defined as the striations of Japan’s great monolith in the distance behind them. He’s delighted when I mention it.
“There’s so many pictures that we (the Asobo team) have sent to each other. There was (real and in-sim images) of the Grand Canyon, and the question was always ‘Which one is which?’ I got it wrong,” he said.
“I said ‘Look at that reflection, that reflection there is bad’. They said no, that’s the real one.”
A career in (digital) aviation
With all the trailers focused on the 2024 sim’s new jobs and activities, I confess I’ve been left waiting for the ‘wow’ moment. In 2020, everything from the first trailer forward was a ‘wow’ moment. When we got our hands on it, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 felt like a generational shift. No one had ever attempted a simulation with the level of granularity that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 could achieve.
However, MFS 2020’s greater mission was confirming its many, many systems could work in harmony at all. It was a simmer’s sim, happy to provide some basic instructions via a light tutorial, and then turn the player loose into its digital recreation of the real world.
That’s why the decision to build Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 around jobs and activities came as a surprise. Why pivot from a sim that was happy to let the player figure things out, to one that feels much more closely directed?
Newmann chalks this up to two new audience verticals exposed to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 via the Xbox port and its launch on Game Pass: gamers and what he calls ‘digital tourists’, casual players with a passing interest in aviation. They were neither gamers nor simmers, but people who simply thought the sim looked cool.
“The gamers came in,” Newmann tells me, when I ask about how the Xbox and Cloud launches shaped FS2024. “They compared it to GTA 5, like ‘ooh, this looks cool, let’s go do stuff.’ And they kind of did the tutorials, they did the landing challenges, and then they were kind like … ‘Is there anything else?’”
“They played (the Top Gun challenges), but they didn’t play anything else. They didn’t have anything to go by,” he said. “That’s why we said, ‘ok, we’ve got 5 million gamers, what would they want to do? Oh. Air racing.’”
The launch of the Reno Air Races expansion became a kind of test bed. Would players beyond the hardcore sim crowd think they were cool enough to dig into? The answer was apparently yes. For Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Asobo has built a single-player experience around an array of similar activities.
A box of chocolates
On the topic of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Asobo Studios’ chief creative officer David Dedeine will talk to you for hours, if allowed to do so. All of what he has to say is interesting and is delivered with the passion of someone who has landed their dream job.
Dedeine is the man leading the charge on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s new objective-led activities, and when he speaks about them, he looks at me from across our meeting room table with fire in his eyes. When I ask him about the selection criteria for the game’s activities, he eagerly leaps into a nine-minute answer that covers under-the-hood game design, player agency, real-world flying, and more.
“If you look at it as a box of chocolates, you want the box of chocolates to be as wide as possible,” he says. As he speaks, his index finger taps our meeting room table like a ground wire for his enthusiasm. “White, 100% cacao, you know what I mean? So that each one you pick, you say ‘Oh my god it’s completely different.’”
“If you take a spiderweb of complexity, exploration, fun, engineering things, skills, and you (imagine them as) a spiderweb, we’ve tried to pick the activities that allows us to have the larger surface. To contrast as much as we can.”
Speaking about the new Animal Photography activity – exactly what it says on the tin: you fly around specific countries looking for specific animals – Dedeine explains to me that his team at Asobo has worked hard to make the sim reflect the real world.
If I go to Africa looking for giraffes to photograph, the map screen will show me areas where the giraffe population density is highest versus lowest. But even heading straight to a region where the giraffe population is deemed abundant, I may not find one. This is, Dedeine explains, because there aren’t really that many giraffes to be found across the African continent.
“One of the things I really wanted was to reinforce that feeling of scarcity,” he tells me over my shoulder during our hands-on session. “You must find these creatures, but there are so few of them.” He smiles brightly. “Good luck!”
One of the stand-out moments of my hands-on session with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 came while photographing world monuments from the air. The game had me buzzing the Pyramids of Giza in an Airbus helicopter. The objectives were:
- Take a photo of the Sphinx
- Get the sun in frame
- Make sure the sun is over the Sphinx’s left shoulder
- Take the photo on the summer equinox
I blinked at the fourth line. The summer equinox? Really? This isn’t information I had on hand. I needed to look it up – the Egyptian summer solstice happens on June 21 at 5:21 AM. I would then need to convert that into Australian time, and set an alarm for next year to make sure I was online at the right moment to get the shot and tick off the objective.
I put the question to Dedeine: when planning objectives, why go that specific?
“We wanted people to be amazed by the planet, and in this specific thing. What people don’t realise is that the pyramids were built to align, such that they are perfectly aligned at the summer equinox.”
“By the way, exact same thing with the eclipse. The lunar eclipse is gonna work in 2024. For real, if you are in the right spot at the right moment in time, you are gonna be under the shadow of the moon.”
Again, he’s talking about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
They’ve modelled the sun and the moon’s paths through the sky and the lighting response when those paths converge, which they will. Dedeine says his great hope is that people will play the photo mode and go to sleep that night feeling like they’ve learned something about the world they live in.
He sits back from the table and smiles to himself as he thinks about it. “I think it’s so cool.”
Xbox provided flights and accommodation to GamesHub in order to play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and interview developers. Xbox did not have oversight of this article.
