Microsoft Flight Simulator will release on Xbox Series X|S on 27th July, Microsoft has confirmed. Not only that, but there’s some Top Gun-themed content coming in a free expansion this autumn.
Check out the frankly gorgeous new trailers here:
Microsoft Flight Simulator was promised for Xbox Series X|S quite some time ago, coming almost a year after the release of the game on PC. Since then, Asobo has dropped regular updates for their game, alternating between simulation modifications and sweeping overhauls of the game’s world map to add more detail – World Update 4 gave a fresh pass over the parts of Europe, including Belgium, France, The Netherlands and Luxembourg, adding a bunch of significant landmarks, newly realistic airports and more.
One nice thing for console owners is that Asobo was able to perform “some optimisation” to the game in the last update, so that a fresh download of the base game on PC is just 83GB instead of over 170GB. Weather data bandwidth has also been reduced. These are both important changes when considering that the game does need to squeeze down for the Xbox Series S.
Presumably aiming to have a universal marketplace for fan content, they also released an update to the game’s content creation documentation, gathering the latest info and best practices to port content on Xbox.
For now, it seems that only Xbox Series X|S is getting the game, with the Xbox One sure to be a much bigger challenge for developer Asobo Studio to optimise the game for. That will be a big disappointment for those expecting the game on the last-gen console, especially the Xbox One X, which should be able to cope much better than the original console. However, at the same time, it’s quite understandable that a seven-year-old console that was never the most powerful in its class couldn’t handle a game that doesn’t run particularly well on even high-end PCs.
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