Microsoft Flight Simulator came out today and I have been sitting here since about 8:30pm watching a progress bar instead of, you know, flying a plane. Which honestly feels like the correct amount of irony for a franchise that's been going since 1982.
I preloaded it two days ago because I'd read the base install was somewhere around 90GB, and I still wasn't ready for it. The thing streams live scenery data off Bing Maps on top of whatever's already on your drive, and Microsoft's own numbers say that dataset is something like 2 petabytes of satellite and aerial imagery. Two petabytes. I don't think I can meaningfully picture that, but I can tell you my modest little cable connection choked on its tiny slice of it for most of tonight.
There are three versions of this thing: Standard at $59.99, Deluxe at $89.99, and a Premium Deluxe at $119.99 that throws in extra airports and planes. I went the cheap route through PC Game Pass instead, which is still running that five-dollars-a-month preview pricing as of tonight (I keep expecting that to change any month now, so grab it while it's cheap if you haven't). Getting an entire modern flight sim, day one, for less than the cost of a large pizza is a genuinely good deal, download times aside.
I grew up on the old Microsoft Flight Sim on a beige desktop that made a noise like a dying fax machine every time it loaded a new airport, so there's something almost funny about the jump from that to this. Once it actually finished pulling scenery data and let me take off, I flew low over my own city just to see if my house was rendered. It wasn't, not really, just a generic photogrammetry blob where my street should be, but the mountains a few miles out looked unnervingly close to real. That's the trick this whole release is selling, and it mostly works.
I will say the system requirements are steeper than I expected for something that isn't a shooter. Asobo, the studio that actually built this under Microsoft's banner, clearly leaned hard on the assumption that people buying a flight sim in 2020 have decent rigs and decent internet, and if you don't have both you're going to spend your launch night exactly where I spent mine, staring at a bar that ticks up one percent every ninety seconds.
Small aside because I can't not mention it: this dropped in the same week Apple and Epic set the app store world on fire, pulling Fortnite off the App Store and Google Play after Epic snuck in its own payment system, and Epic firing back with that whole 1984-parody stunt and a lawsuit the same afternoon. Everybody and their cousin has already written that story to death this week, so I'm not going to rehash the whole thing here, but it's a weird contrast having one gigantic corporate fight over who controls a ten-dollar V-Bucks purchase happening at the exact same time another giant corporation is quietly giving away two petabytes of the actual planet for five bucks a month. Same industry, wildly different vibes.
Anyway. Flight Simulator. If you've got the storage and the patience for the download, it's worth it just for the sunset lighting alone, the way clouds actually cast shadows on the ground beneath your wings instead of being flat cardboard cutouts like every sim before it. I haven't tried landing yet because I am, predictably, terrible at this, and my first attempt into a small regional airport ended with me clipping a hangar roof. Going to bed. Will report back once I've stopped crashing into things that Bing Maps insists are real buildings.