Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is set to break some new ground with its multiplayer features. In the latest episode of the Feature Discovery Series, Asobo Studio CEO Sebastian Wloch shared what we can expect.
A seamlessly shared world in MS Flight Simulator 2020
“We created one shared world,” Wloch explains. “The goal was to bring all the pilots together, whether they are flying in the real world traffic or whether they are flying virtually in the simulator. The experience is seamless, there is nothing to manage, nothing to configure.”
In practice, you won’t have to create or join a session in order to play with others, but you can set filters. If you want to share the airspace with real-world pilots — which are augmented by real-world air traffic data — you can simply set the filter to ‘live players only’. This means you’ll have to abide by the rules and fly in real-time live weather.
If you just want to do whatever, you’ll filter by ‘all players’. This is the open-world where you’ll find everyone else with that filter selection. You can hop in and start flying around the simulator with everybody else.
Just want a smaller group? Hop in a group of friends, one of which will be the leader. The leader can set the weather, time, all that good stuff, and you can cruise through the skies together.
The technology to make all this happen
If you’re worried about being overloaded with information because of the many thousands of planes in traffic at any given time, you can relax. The simulator will limit how many planes you can see.
“The servers automatically optimize the stream to you, so for the live traffic, you will receive from the servers all the planes which are within 200 km. And for the multiplayer traffic, you will also receive planes within 200 km, but limited to the 50 closest planes.”
For all the information and the beautiful gameplay that accompanies it, check out the video for yourself.
