You can land in the desert, on a mountain, anywhere – these planes are great to explore countries, to discover the planet.” You can just sit there and enjoy the sunset. You can land north of the Golden Gate bridge, and you have this great view over downtown San Francisco.
“You can touch down anywhere on the planet. “The Savage Cub has a very short landing distance,” says Wloch during our demo. In fact, select a small enough plane and you can land wherever you want, too. You choose an aircraft and then go wherever you want. Various autopilot functions can take over almost all the complexities of flying, allowing you to control your plane with a joypad alone. These are the things I miss – these quiet moments, the Earth and I, in transit together.Īnd it seems the game is being partially designed for dreamy travellers like me, who perhaps don’t want to fully engage with the instrumentation panels of an Airbus A320, but do want to swoop through the clouds over the Italian alps or touch down somewhere in rural Ohio. These are the things we see when we’re flying over a landscape, or even travelling by train or car – the sky changing colour, the clouds forming, their shadows like dark handprints across the fields the lights from distant cities twinkling like constellations and then fading away. Flight Simulator, it turns out, is also a rainbow simulator.Ī rainbow over Amsterdam. Get enough rain on a sunny day and the light is scattered through the droplets, causing the beams to reflect and refract. These forces combine to produce authentic weather effects – a fog rolling in from the sea, a storm gathering on the horizon.
#MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2017 STEAM FULL#
There are full day/night cycles, too, and seasonal shifts utilising weather data supplied by Swiss specialist Meteoblue, so the conditions you encounter in the game are true to what the real world is experiencing in that moment. In some places, you’ll see coral reefs beneath the surface. Clouds are three-dimensional and volumetric, built from multiple layers that reflect light and cast shadows – they look plump and fluffy meanwhile, the sea varies in colour depending on the mud and algae content, and the water is translucent and as you fly over. I said to myself, ‘Can we do this for the whole planet? I want to sit on that hill in Out of Africa and look out over the plains.’ I think we can do that now.”Īfter watching the demo, I wonder if it won’t be the big, grandstanding landmarks that will really get you but rather the quiet moments of natural beauty. I’d never been to South America and it felt so real. “We were working on a HoloLens project called HoloTour – the whole point was that you could use AR to visit different places on Earth and we made Machu Picchu. I think that helps you relate to people.”Īccording to Neumann, this fascination with virtual travel is how Asobo came to be involved with Flight Simulator. I love that! I want to go there and see it. The trailer that Sebastian Wloch showed during our presentation, it’s based near where he grew up in the Pyrenees. I am able to visit the planet again now and that means a lot. This week I’ll pick some other place on Earth to explore. “To counteract it, last week I was playing in Suriname, the week before I was in Nepal. “Lockdown has had a big impact on us,” says project head Jorg Neumann.
But now it seems developer Asobo Studio has sought to capture the spiritual, emotional element of flight as well. In the past, Flight Simulator offered a super-technical, incredibly authentic flying experience to sim fanatics, and this edition does that, too – the cockpits, instrumentation and flight mechanics of dozens of planes are faithfully reproduced. Being able to zoom above rolling landscapes once again was almost a relief. While watching the two-hour demo of the game given by its lead designers, I realised with a visceral lurch how much I missed visiting new places. This was impressive last year, but now, given the current pandemic, it feels genuinely wholesome.
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