Steven Gunderson of Asobo Studio, the lead development team on Microsoft Flight Simulator(2020), sat down with Game Informer on Friday to answer some questions about the game. For those of us who have been following the game, most of what came out of the interview has been mentioned in previous interviews. The big pitch with this new Microsoft Flight Simulator is that it will feature large scale environments generated out of Bing map data, supposedly making use of Microsoft’s XCloud system. And Steven used this interview to make this pitch for the casual audience who haven’t been following the game’s development. But he also made a point of affirming the team’s general commitment to making this game a true simulator, and not an “arcade flight game.”
But the big new detail coming out of this interview is the confirmation that the game will feature real-time weather conditions and disasters.
Work is continuing at a rapid pace, it’s hard to keep track of everything we added. But the I thing I’m most excited about right now is we just put in the real-time weather/disaster system. And what that means is, if you opt-in, we will stream in real-time weather conditions so that the world in-game will match exactly the world outside.
Where this got interesting was with the fires that hit California last month. First of all, yes, our game does model these kind of fires and it’ll also model estimated damage to buildings in the area based off the available weather data at the time. You can actually swoop down under the smoke and see the individual houses burning. We tested this with a member of our team who grew up in the Petaluma area and he was actually able to use the game to see how XCloud accurately modeled the rubble of his family home. It was amazing.
Steven Gunderson, Asobo Studio
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