REVIEW : Microsoft Flight Simulator (PC)
What an exciting way for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series to reenter after years under Dovetail’s DLC-focussed stewardship, and what a towering success from Asobo Studio.
This is a seismic time for PC gaming then. But what’s sufficiently clear is that this is very much the origin of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s journey, one moment on a roadmap that incorporates regular content updates on a monthly cadence and should by necessity also include just as many to fix some important teething technical problems.
A total of 20 planes are added with the regular edition at launch, comprising three airliners, two jets and fifteen props. Using any one of those planes, you can place yourself on the runway of an airstrip in the world, take to the skies, and see a startlingly realistic recreation of the region below. It’s a shocking, terrible time for anyone who invested in all those scenery addon packages for FSX.
It’s a premise with a charming way beyond the flight sim’s usual remit. Who wouldn’t require to fly around in a playable, 4K, lightmapped version of Bing Maps with volumetric clouds and unbelievable weather effects? Who could resist the carving to try and find their own house? That speaks to a much broader crowd than the past thirty-odd years of the series ever could.
With only a whisper of structure to your experience on the game’s part, you’re tacitly invited to devise your adventures. Career progression only exists insofar as completing the flight school and ticking off the landing challenges and bush flights, which for their part offer excellent slices of curated content with leaderboard components that give them chocolate digestive-like addictive features. But you’re not going to spend 100 hours on them.
Instead, you’re going to plot a secret tourism tour on the world map, ticking off Chernobyl, The Polygon at Semipalatinsk, the Dylatov Pass. You’ll tick off every F1 circuit on the race calendar. And you’re going to have a fantastic time. The prospect of an entire planet to explore can be crippling too though, of course, so it would be great to see more curated experiences from Asobo in future.
So it’s a simulator for people interested in flight, and a magical virtual tourism portal for people interested at peering into the Mir Mine in a prop they’re controlling with a pad. The dividing line, then, is the method of control.
Traditionally, the simulation community reacts like the locals in that pub from American Werewolf in London to an influx of casuals, but there’s no trace of sacrificing depth to cater to a broader audience here. The simulation model is more detailed than it’s ever been, a statement you can put to the test yourself by switching between ‘modern’ and ‘legacy’ models in the game settings. Its reality is scalable, too, to provide for zero-stress virtual tourism with an Xbox game remote or all-out simulation with a HOTAS or yoke setup.
The complexity of its simulation exhibits a bit of a barrier for entry, though, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s technical issues lay barbed wire around the door. First to battle with is the installation, which downloads a 500MB client in which the full 90GB install happens.
In reality, that preset’s a bit of future-proofing. But while the visual quality is certainly scalable, performance doesn’t scale proportionally. That means landing at JFK is still a stuttery affair using any preset, including low, which generally produces 30-35fps in cities on my system and a much more consistent 60 out in the wilderness. Crashes are fairly commonplace on my system too—unplugging or connecting a device results in an instant CTD, and scenes causing low frame rates have also seemed to trigger them, albeit less frequently. An Nvidia game-ready driver has increased FPS performance, albeit slightly. Frame rate dips are generally an annoyance, but here they’re a real hindrance to your ability to control the plane. Landings require responsiveness and feather-light inputs, and if you’re seeing them in flip book-o-vision you’re not able to perform them properly.However frustrating its performance issues are, there’s a voice inside your head saying ‘Can you just give it a minute to render the entire world? Would that be ok?’ Still, the fact is low frame rates impact your ability to fly the planes, and on the vast majority of systems, simply whacking the settings down to the low preset won’t produce stable 60fps. In other news: the PC gaming community has found its new Crysis.
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