What better a time to release the most visually stunning recreation of Earth in a Flight Simulator than in the middle of a pandemic where you can't meaningfully leave your home?

Sadly? this is probably the most people are ever going to be excited to use Bing Maps

Time for a veeeery long download!

So… what version of Flight Simulator 2020 did everybody get?

Unfortunately, Bing Maps has no photogrammetry for Dublin, so both airport and city look pretty miserable in Flight Simulator. I wonder if Flight Sim will become a big driver of updates and improvements to Bing Maps content?

(Granted, it's totally convincing from the air — the procedural city generation looks fantastic, and the realtime weather is )

Flight Simulator at 4K on my i4790 and a GTX 1080 is definitely a ~15–30fps experience without turning individual graphics settings down from High. If I wasn't thinking of a new PC build before, I definitely am now

Cities with photogrammetry look absolutely stunning, which makes it even more frustrating that my rig just can't get playable framerates at this quality level

As an example of how far behind Bing Maps data is, construction hasn't even begun on Apple Park in the Flight Simulator canon. ~5 years out of date?

Didn't make it there in person this year, but at least I can sit and watch the realtime weather and traffic from here

One of my favorite things to do in a game is use the free camera to take pretty screenshots; Flight Simulator gives an entire world in which to do that, with realtime weather, air traffic and road traffic sparkling underneath. I'm not even mad that I can barely run it

Photogrammetry data is awesome, but it's just as messy as you would expect from using Google/Apple Maps, with melting bridges, ghost cars, water slopes, and unmapped underhangs. It doesn't help that Bing Maps is a distant third to the other two

Absolutely no shortage of breathtaking moments, however!

…definitely time for a new gaming PC.

If Flight Simulator had no planes and were purely about taking screenshots around Earth, I think I still would have bought it

The cities with flyover data really elevate the simulation; I've often wanted to see this rendered in a real game engine. Disappointing that Bing doesn't have mapping for London or Dublin, or places closer to home

I do love all the tiny little places you find — everything looks so convincing. The VR experience with this game will be incredible

Love the material work here (minus the roof that somebody forgot to convert to PBR) and how it reflects the sky

An example of the transition between photogrammetry and procedurally generated buildings; one side of this road is real, the other is completely artificial. I think the AI-powered procedural generation in this game is awesome

As a showcase of Bing Maps, Flight Simulator is very revealing. Bing has no photogrammetry data at all for major cities like London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, or a fraction of what other services have, and the imagery it does have is years out of date. Microsoft has ton of work to do

IOW, Asobo & friends have done an amazing job with what they got from Bing as a data source so far, but I have no idea what will motivate Bing to start capturing more cities with 3D flyover data at this point which could really be problematic for Flight Simulator going forward

Building a mapping service is an enormous amount of work, and I just can't imagine Microsoft investing further in this part of Bing when the only real client of its 3D data is a videogame. Plus, by now, Apple and Google have likely acquired all the companies in this area

It does say a lot that the most beautiful and varied map in any game ever is a 1:1 reproduction of our own Earth. There is only one!

Afternoon fly over Marbella, detail and foliage modelled into the distance. This game is really special

I started somewhere in the south of France and just pointed in a direction and let it fly for an hour

Sorta idly flying to Zurich; syncing the weather and time of day (and air traffic) to the real world is such a cool feature

*looks at fuel gauge*

oh.

So I radio the nearest airport and arrange a landing so I can refuel; so cool

I made it to the ground!

The journey continues!

This renderer is so good

I think I'm just over the half way mark; it's been very chill controlling this on one screen while reading & listening to things on my Mac. If this had a screensaver-style mode where you could just follow a real world flight in realtime, I would definitely use it

Final stretch; I can absolutely understand a 10/10 review — despite its flaws and a list of things I'd want to add, this is a genre-defining game that everything will be compared to for a very long time to come, and it really pushes the limits of modern hardware @MSFSofficial

Turns out 0% isn't when you run out of fuel I may have to ‘land’ on a mountain

…like a glove *insert 30 seconds of me desperately trying to figure out which button the parking brake is mapped to*. Also, I picked the middle of nowhere to land, and it was still a super-compelling experience

Made it, in the end!

…almost.

Nice to see Flight Simulator accurately models a post-apocalyptic San Francisco…

A lot of planes flying over a very miserable Dublin right now. I like the Elite-style seamless multiplayer

Peak…-a-boo

As a counterpoint to my Bing map data complaints, Microsoft has a new video; they say they've spent a lot of time refreshing their photogrammetry lately:

As somebody who's spent hundreds of hours in Elite Dangerous, I really like that Flight Simulator has a UI for hailing the nearest airport and a menu system for landing, taxi and refuel. There's so much untapped potential here for a mission system or singleplayer campaign

It would be such a shame if some kind of campaign or mission system isn’t made available as a DLC. It's ideal for the Xbox players, and all the new players to Flight Simulator enticed by the pretty graphics but terrified by the 'sim’

Dublin to Shannon before bed, with real-world weather conditions