Goodbye local storage, hello streaming.
Players who indulge in yearly sports games are used to publishers slapping a year at the end of their favourite game, complete with a new – and premium – price tag (and sometimes with or without new feature sets).
While the analogy of NHL 24 versus NHL 25 doesn’t exactly map with Microsoft Flight Simulator (2021) and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, I used it anyway to ask Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann why the new title couldn’t be built off the back of the old.
“A lot of it had to do with technology, frankly,” Neumann told Stevivor. “[When] we launched, back in the day… people said, ‘oh my God, this thing is like [a] 120 gigabyte download’.
“Since then we’ve done, I think, 18 world updates and a bunch of city updates — when you look at where we are with data, we’re now at nearly 500 gigabytes and then we have plans to keep going. We’ll be like a 1 terabyte plus game — and at some point the whole entire infrastructure really stopped working.”
Neumann added that it wasn’t just first-party work on the title that was pushing the old Flight Simulator to its breaking point.
“The other thing that happened was there’s this creative community, which is awesome, but they create tonnes of things — we are now at 5,000 add-ons,” Neumann continued. “There’s also stuff like memory and stability and you know, we need to kind of keep things going.
“So, we optimised as much as humanly possible and some point with that, the rate of creativity and the rate of data and the size of data is such that we have to change architecture.”
Neumann said he and the Flight Simulator team were already used to optimisation because of the Xbox release of 2021’s iteration, which followed a PC release. Now, Flight Simulator 2024 will be released on both PC and Xbox simultaneously.
“The first Xbox release, I would say… made us optimise the living hell other things,” Neumann said. “You look at your memory consumption completely differently.
“We optimised a lot to make it even fit — specifically on [Xbox Series] S, right — but also on [Xbox Series X]. And I think that has been hardening us to think about these things in a lot more stringent way.”
Seeing 2024 as a larger opportunity, Neumann explained how the Flight Simulator team began to realise it could change the way in which it delivered its experience altogether.
“Sebastian from Asobo actually was the sort of the mastermind behind what we call now the ‘thin client’,” Neumann said. “We basically said, ‘look we’re already streaming the world in the textures — let’s just stream everything… as much as we possibly can because then we are future- proof’.”
“So we did that – we paired everything back as much as we could. We’re saying [Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is] 30 gigabytes [but] it’s actually quite a bit less than 30 gigabytes.”
Behind the hood, in the cloud – or is that the clouds – there’s a lot of data driving the experience.
“We already have 2.5 petabytes of world data,” Neumann confirmed, “and there’s many, many terabytes of other data – let’s just stream it all.”
While Flight Sim 2024’s storage footprint has been reduced, that need to stream means your internet connection will need to take on some of the load. While the original’s minimum specs aimed for a 5MB download connection, 2024 is eyeing up a 10MB one. Ideally, though, Neumann said a 50MB download connection was “perfect”.
“The really cool thing about the system is — I don’t know if [we] succeed in making it clear – it is truly on demand,” he explained.
“Imagine you like Netflix — and you like one show on Netflix — and Netflix says ‘before you can watch that, download all the movies from Netflix on some hard drive and then you can watch’,” Neumann said. “Why would you possibly do that? From an internet usage perspective, or power perspective even, it’s the most optimised way to go, because it’s literally just on demand.”
You can watch our full, twenty-two-minute interview with Neumann above.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 heads to Windows PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Cloud Gaming on 20 November.
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Microsoft Flight Simulator 202420 November 2024PC Xbox Series S & X
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