Got something pretty cool for you today. For a long time, I have waited for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 to come out and it finally happened on 18th August. The game is a hardcore flight sim with many different aircraft and you can fly it like a real plane except you sitting in your room. Push every button out of thousands of them inside the Boeing 737 cockpit and so on. It all awesome but the real reason why I so eagerly waited for this game was a world exploration.
The world is a full recreation of the real one and you can go absolutely anywhere on the globe. The best thing is that it looks exactly like in real life.
Here is Rio for example.
The magic here is that the whole world is created using very high-resolution satellite imagery ( down to 5cm accuracy )combined with advanced AI that builds up the 3D rendered cities and yes the cities look like they are in reality like! Sounds insane right? But it is all a reality where gaming is today.
Want to visit the statue of liberty? no problem.
Or see the dense New York city downtown.
Obviously not all cities are 3D rendered, so they are built up by an AI. They still look like they do in real life, buildings are the same shape and everywhere there is a building in real life there is a house in the game as well. It just isn't the same color or has the same kind of walls because AI guessed what there is.
Weather System
Is another sick feature in this game. It replicates real-world weather so good. All the clouds are volumetric and evolve as real ones do. Of course, there is rain and snow and storms. You can set it on live weather and you can get the real-time weather anywhere in the world or modify the weather in-depth as you like.
For example, here I drove into Hurricane Laura on the Gulf of Mexico that hit the US couple of days back. So this game can also be a storm chasing simulator as well 😂.
Here is a night time shot of the Miami. Nighttime lighting is also made so well that you really won't see the difference between the game and real life.
I'm a huge fan of nature and landscapes so I love flying around in places around the world, Its pure joy. There is satellite data and also accurate height data so all the mountains are exactly the shape and height they appear in real life.
Here is Svinafells glacier and fall glacier that I also hiked in real life and I can confirm, it looks the same as I saw with my own eyes.
Always wanted to know what it's like to go all the way up to the glacier. Here is a shot out of the cockpit.
Wondered what is the morning view out of the random house in the Alps at the hillside of Bolzano area, Italy.
Or seeing absolutely nothing except sand in Libya desert.
So this game is next-gen In every aspect I can think of and perfect for me to explore the world everywhere I like to. Go to places I probably never will in my lifetime, or simply seek out places I certainly want to visit in real life as well.
You might ask
But why should I buy it for world exploration when I have google maps, street view and youtube videos? Simple, you have no real-time control over your movements, the ability to go where you want. Moreover, in the world map, we have so many places still where there is no photographic info on the maps. I genuinely feel when I have traveled through the Balkans for example, then I know how this area looks like and leaving me with a feeling like I was there in real life. The world is just so immensely detailed in this game.
Also if you like aircraft and learning them then it's also a simulator for you. This game also features all the 47K airports in existence all around the world, big and just the small grass ones.
Somewhere in the Philippines.
So you thought you want to play this? This is good but you really going to need a powerhouse of a PC that can run this on ultra graphic setting as you see on my pictures. My PC has an Intel I9 9900K processor 32GB of DDR4 ram and 1.5GB of SSD storage, Asus Strix GTX1070 graphics card.
I do have a high-end PC except for the graphics card and I am looking forward to upgrading it in the near future. In fact, Nvidia releases its next-gen cards in a couple of hours during writing this.
Playing with my current one in 4K resolution is a shitshow. So I'm in full HD right now.
Some Flaws of the game
Not everything is perfect, It is impossible to craft every inch of the world with 100% accuracy.
Some churches and ruins are rendered as ordinary houses.
Coral reefs are missing( will be fixed shortly )
Live weather not working correctly in the Americas ( will be fixed )
Too many trees in some places that do not have them much, like Iceland.
Autopilot does not work in some cases ( will get fixed shortly )
Some craters, sinkholes, and mountainous coastlines appearing flat. ( hopefully getting fixed soon )
Some more stuff as well but let's not make it that long.
Developers said this game is a long project and I can only imagine what they do in 10 years.
Everyone who made it till the end...
Who can Quess ?
How large the original file size of this game is? Also, tell me what you think of this game.
In the future, you can expect some posts about my virtual explorations in this game.