Standard Heathrow looks like this...

That video I put there is a guy breaking down of all the little details and things from the trailer, if you go to 19:55 you can see how the space under things like bridges isn't open, basically the sort of artifact you see in something like Google Earth when looking at the 3D view of cities. I don't know the techical specifics but I believe it's because of how the ground is scanned from the air, that generates 3D data which is being used here to make a representation of buildings and objects without actually manually 3D modelling everything. It's nice that they aren't hiding the rough edges, and even some of the blurry textures in the middle of nowhere look plenty good enough for some immersive flights.

The premium stuff will be manually modelled and edited stuff, probably more animations for cars and other vehicles too I assume. It will be for those who want to make really realistic flight videos, and have those airports look really lifelike I guess. If you aren't into that and just want to fly about it probably won't make much difference.

It's going to be an amazing game for finding places and taking screenshots I reckon.

...and that's just Heathrow.

Heathrow expansions, always controversial.

Basically it looks to be the best flight sim ever, in terms of accesibility and realism. The combination of the weather system and flight physics looks really engaging.

An additional system requirement seems to be internet bandwidth, 5/20/50 Mbps for the min/Recommended/Ideal specs. I guess because it's getting all the world data from the internet, Bing maps apparently. Power of the cloud indeed. This might mean longer loading times for jumping into an area if your internet is a bit pants, or more stuff visibly popping in as you fly along.

There's an option for real world weather, and there's even real world air traffic data, so in theory you could virtually fly alongside a relative who's making a plane journey.

Some real care has been taken to record and implement sounds properly, apparently something that has not been a strong focus for most existing flight sims. I'm all about good sound, so this is a big deal for me.

So this makes more sense to me now as to why you're paying more for some airports, as it sounds like most are generated pulling data from Bing, and the ones specificaslly mentioned have ben specifically created by hand. 

I guess we'll see how much I play this before dropping any money on it, but as I'll be playing on Gamepass I'm much more likely to pay for the expansions.

The physics as shown in the video above sounds dang impressive

Relative to other sims it's honestly not that bad, take a look at the 271 pieces of DLC for Flight Simulator X for example, just detailed Northern England scenery costs 25 quid.

X-Plane 11 has £1696.92 worth of add-ons available. The impressions I'm seeing are that much of the base content for MSFS 2020 surpasses stuff you would typically pay money for as DLC or 3rd party add-ons in other sims. I think the way they're using aerial photography/photogrammetry and other pre-existing data for weather, and the clever procedural AI techiques to stitch it all together and generate stuff has automated much of the work necessary to recreate the entire planet, meaning they can offer a lot more for the money than was done previously.

The deluxe editions kind of seem mainly like fistbumps to the developers, with some extra goodies for enthusiast simmers.

No you're right that they'll probably start the gouge at some point, the base game though seems to offer quite a lot and hopefully any extras are priced reasonably.

Yeah exploration will be ace. Looking forward to landing at my local runway too. Not sure how good the terrain quality will be down here though.

I'd quite like to try and find some places that I've been to before, but haven't seen in a long time. There's somewhere in Derbyshire/Peak District that I'd like to see from the air.

Somewhere in the midlands
Japan - Mount Fuji and Hokkaido
Maybe the Okavango Delta, or other weird and wonderful places with fascinating river patterns.

Manchester-Blackpool (local innit)
Some Arctic Circle flights (because that's gotta be some cool views
New York (for same reasons as you)

if i play this it will be to take the biggest and/or fastest plane, take off, try to do a loop and then try to land it....
no doubt I'll crash and never play it again.

RamSteelwood wrote:

if i play this it will be to take the biggest and/or fastest plane, take off, try to do a loop and then try to land it....
no doubt I'll crash and never play it again.

I see you have played flight sim before.

GurtTractor wrote:

I'm curious to see how effective the coverage of high detail is. I expect there will be areas that are a bit janky and low res, that's fine though really and all part of the fun.

I'm expecting Glasgow to be like one of those Gran Turismo 2 cars in GT6