New in Wishlist: Microsoft Flight Simulator

If you were born in Bangladesh, you had two destinies to choose from: Become a doctor or an engineer and make your parents proud. If you didn’t do either of those, you’d automatically become a disappointment. Unless you really wanted to shoot for the sky and became a pilot.

Thankfully, by the time I was born into the family, it was late enough that my parents didn’t force me to be in one of those professions. They were still unsatisfied with my obsession with computers, though, but I pushed through and now that I have a career, they seem to be happy. 😂

However, I did want to become a pilot. The obsession started with video games, of course. Unlike my love for driving cars which started after I actually drove a car for the first time.

Video games to real life!

I know flying a plane in a video game is nothing like the real deal. Flying a real plane is likely 100 times more complex and entails a lot of calculations and focus. I wouldn’t know, because I never flew an actual plane. But given the opportunity, I would really want to!

That’s where simulation games come into play. For the uninitiated, “Simulation” is an entire genre of video games where you can do things as if you were doing them in real life. I’m a big fan of Euro Truck Simulator where you simulate driving large trucks in maps based on real-world locations. While I don’t really fancy driving an actual semi, I do like the driving aspect of it. City Car Driving is another car driving simulator that’s fun to play.

There are simulation games for a lot of things. There are train simulators, bus simulators, truck simulators, car driving simulators, flight simulators, and even farm simulators where you spend time farming with heavy machinery and equipment.

The fun doesn’t end there. As if all those weren’t enough, there’s a surgeon simulator where you could play a surgeon operating on someone.

As if even this wasn’t enough, there’s a goat simulator too if for some reason you fancy being a goat.

But enough goat talk, let’s get back to the thing I want to talk about: Flight simulators.

In the search for a cockpit…

I remember seeing CDs of Microsoft Flight Simulator when I was a kid. I’ve never been able to play that really well because I never had a compatible setup. After I purchased my first gaming PC a few years ago, I did try playing the flight simulator. I couldn’t really get into it because the graphics were cartoonish, and it looked like I had to purchase a lot of DLCs to really enjoy the game.

Also, I don’t have any gears to play the flight simulator like it was meant to be played: With yoke, throttle, and rudder pedals. As a lazy person, I thought setting up all this was too much work. (I do have a Logitech driving wheel that I use when playing the truck and car driving simulators!)

All that mindset changed when Microsoft dropped this beautiful and stunning trailer of the upcoming flight simulator, named “Microsoft Flight Simulator.”

Once you’ve immersed yourself in the breathtaking scenery from the trailer, you can dive into this article that goes into much more details about the technical aspects of the game.

Apparently, the game will use real-world locations by pulling assets (maps) from Microsoft’s Bing Maps. That’s crazy!

The developers say they still don’t know how they’ll pull it off in terms of delivering these massive amounts of assets to the players’ device. According to the Polygon article:

[…] The Last of Us Part 2 would ship on two Blu-ray discs. A single copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator would need 20,000 of them.

Because the maps data will come from Bing Maps, Microsoft’s current plan is to stream the assets to the game as it’s being played. Of course, I don’t know how that’d work, but I do hope it won’t call for a high-speed internet all the time.

I get the vibe from the article that the developers haven’t figured that part yet. Which means it could be still a year or even longer before the title sees a public release. At the moment, it’s said to be released in 2020, but there has been no release date yet.

Waiting for the departure

I’ve never been a die-hard fan of flying planes. I like cars better. But flying a plane is definitely something I’ve always been interested in. I’ve even looked at flight school fees and such because I’ve been curious. But it’s not something you can just go ahead and do whenever you want to.

While the real deal may not be in my destiny, I sure am ready to fly all kinds of aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator’s beautiful virtual world!