Multiple YouTuber’s have posted videos this morning featuring new video and comments from a recent event with Microsoft about their new Flight Sim 2020 product that is in early development. There’s new aircraft on display and a lot of talk about what the new sim is like. Let’s have a look!
No lightweight
The worry that many of us have had is that Flight Simulator 2020 is going to be a lightweight sim. One mention of running it on XBox and a lot of us became very skeptical. But it seems that our feelings on this may be unwarranted based on the comments of several YouTuber’s.
First up is frooglesim whose videos have been instrumental in me understanding the civil aviation experience with FSX, P3D, X-Plane 11, and others. Froogle is very much a serious simmer and he was extremely skeptical about what was coming… and he came away impressed. Watch that below:
Next, flightdeck2sim has some of the same footage but with some of his comments.
Flight Chops
Some general comments
There’s lots of answers here and some questions still to answer. Here are some basic notes that I’ve taken:
- Based on FSX but almost entirely overhauled
- Azure AI is used alongside Bing Maps, as we suspected, to generate each unique building in the world
- The world is fully simulated
- Multiplayer is in
- Support for all kinds of external hardware components
- VR is apparently not in at launch
- Shared cockpit is a maybe
- GA aircraft and jets are in, helicopters not yet
- We don’t know what the pricing model will be
- The auto imagery is at level 19 for the ortho imagery and are streamed, cached, and an offline mode
- Cessna C.172, Robin DR400, and SOCATA TBM 930 are all available right now
So, in summary there’s a mix of some good and some not quite as good. Heli-sim pilots probably wanted to hear that helicopters were in but not yet. That said, a DLC pack with a bunch of helicopters in the future would be a nice thing perhaps. VR players I know tend to demand VR to support any product in 2020 but that is not planned for launch – at least at this point.
Still, there’s a lot that’s great here and it sounds like FS2020 is going to be absolutely serious and have a huge impact on the industry shaking up the civil sim market in a big way. It’s pushing technology, graphics, and modeling forward and that can only be a good thing. This is going to have an impact on the industry with competing titles such as X-Plane 11, P3D, and the original FSX all that will be impacted. This is going to be very interested!
Stormbirds 
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