Do the roar.
After being revealed in last month’s Indie World showcase, FuturLab and Square Enix have today announced that PowerWash Simulator‘s paid Shrek DLC will be making a mess on Switch on 10th October.
Adding to a long list of impressive PowerWash collaborations with the likes of SpongeBob, Final Fantasy and Back to the Future, the Shrek Special Pack offers up a collection of mucky locales from Far, Far Away, and it’s up to you to clean ’em.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was by far the most successful entry in Microsoft’s longest supported franchise. It redefined what was possible from a flight simulator by utilizing a mix of cloud-based worldwide map data, cutting-edge photogrammetry, machine learning techniques, and a real-time worldwide weather simulation. These offerings, along with a complex physics system that allowed for highly sophisticated flight models, all made the famous franchise a household name again.
Now with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on fast approach for a November 19, 2024, release date, we got our first deep dive into the game, and discovered how much more impressive the entire flight simulator experience is about to become for fans. From the digital tourist to a novice flyer to the most advanced pilots, it’s shaping up to have something for everyone to enjoy.
“Since we launched Microsoft Flight Simulator in 2020, we have seen 15 million people come to the simulation and be interested in what we do,” explains Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann. “When you compare that number to the previous biggest launch we had, which was Microsoft Flight Simulator X, it took 16 years to get to 5 million users. So there has been an explosion in the flight simulation hobby and it’s because of the community and excitement that everybody’s bringing [to Microsoft Flight Simulator].”
One of the features I’m most excited to see come to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (MSFS 2024) is its Career System, designed to bring a comprehensive and immersive experience for all manner of piloting skills. The system cleverly mimics the experience of how real-world pilots start their aviation careers. “You can pick any single airport on the planet and start your career there, which means that you are going to take your lessons at this location. Your first job can be anywhere, and I mean anywhere, in the world,” explains CCO of Asobo Studio David Dedeine. “You will start as a rookie pilot and meet a mentor who will explain to you how the career works and guide you through the very first steps in the career.”
The Career System introduces new elements to the simulation like pre-flight procedures, logging flight paths, and choosing from a vast amount of mission objectives. Advancement is tracked through a certification tree where you can learn the skills to fly various types of aircraft – each of which comes with a training session to help you master those skills. Later, specializations will unlock a variety of missions, such as Search and Rescue, Commercial Flights, Firefighting, and many more.
“You are not going to have to spend five years of your life to do the actual exam. It’s a simplified version, but still, it will explain to you the basics of each of those different activities, from commercial pilot to tailwind, airliner, transport, etc.” Dedeine adds. “Performance for these missions is evaluated by several factors like following ATC instructions, taxi paths, and flight parameters. Completing these missions successfully nets you credits and reputation, which you can then use to save up and buy your own plane and eventually manage your own fleet.”
Once you have earned enough money to run your business with your personally-owned aircraft, a new phase in MSFS 2024 opens in which you’ll be directly responsible for your aircraft; every landing, every bump on the runway, is going to impact the warranty of your planes, affecting the cost to keep them maintained. Effectively, MSFS 2024 includes a management sim inside the wider flight sim.
“This is basically the management of your fleet,” Dedeine elaborates, “because you will buy more planes at some point to allow you to engage in a different type of activity. Maybe you want to buy your own airliners and expand your fleet across the world. This new Career System is a big chunk of the innovation we introduce in MSFS 2024, and I think it’s never been done at this level of variety and quality before.”
If there was a ding against the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, itwas that each of its individual experiences, like Bush Trips and Landing Challenges (which are still fun), rarely felt connected to each other. It was akin to putting on a greatest hits album, giving you the best bits without experiencing what the journey was like to get there. This is what I’ve wanted from a flight simulator for such a long time, and having a chance to create my own virtual pilot journey from start to finish sounds like it’s going to keep me flying for a long, long time.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also bringing massive enhancements to the simulated Earth by increasing the detail of its virtual environment by a factor of 4,000. For instance, the ground will no longer be a mere heightfield; it now features tiny stones, rocks, gravel and grass all modeled in 3D. This ground detail impacts your aircraft’s wheels as they interact with the various surfaces affecting take-offs and landings. Improved sky and atmospheric lighting, especially during sunrise and sunset, with varying displays of colors based on the makeup of the clouds ensuring accurate temperatures for all light sources. New cloud types like cirrus clouds will better simulate the highest levels of our atmosphere, while the dynamic weather has been improved as well, increasing the density to make storms and other weather phenomena much more realistic and impressive to fly through.
“We can basically get every rock on Earth now; it’s unbelievable,” Neumann adds. “We updated the aerial imagery for the entire world, and we set up a team of specialists that gather digital elevation maps from across the planet. The result of these last four years of work is that we now have an unprecedented level of ground detail. Nobody else has anything like this.”
And it’s not just inanimate objects that are getting massive improvements. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is attempting to populate its digital Earth (the “digital twin”) as close to our real world as feasible by introducing a large cast of diverse human characters and locally-significant vehicles, all adding to the overall realism of the simulation. For instance, there’s real-time ship tracking so you can see cargo ships move throughout the world as you would in real life. You can see passengers inside airliners or moving from one location to the next in airports. And because landing just about anywhere in the world is one of the key features, due to the much more detailed environments, the development team worked closely with partners like Frontier (creators of Zoo Tycoon and Planet Zoo) to introduce many species that bring the world to life.
“We have species separated into two groups. For wild animals, we are using a fantastic database (GBIF – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) to place animals across the world both in their appropriate habitats and in roughly appropriate quantities to get close to realistic densities. For domesticated animals, we are using our field detection (which is also used for activities like Aerial Application) to place species like cows, sheep, goats and horses across the planet. We can essentially now go sheep herding or cow herding with helicopters, which is super fun,” Neumann explains.
Another big area of improvement that’s planned is addressing the installation size. It’s no big surprise how much space Microsoft Flight Simulator takes up on your console or PC (it’s a lot). So, it’s refreshing to hear how this is one of the biggest things that is being addressed in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. By tapping into the latest cloud streaming technology, installation size has been trimmed down to about 30 GB to get you in your seat and flying as quickly as possible, streaming in the higher detailed areas that are only necessary for your flight path; why install all the data for the United States when you’re intending to just fly over Europe for the evening?
“The very important thing is overall bandwidth consumption is way down, because you only download what you really see when you see it, and we don’t pre-download at like hundreds of gigabytes,” explains CEO and Co-Founder of Asobo Studio Sebastian Wloch. “Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) already had over two petabytes of data on the cloud. That was the whole world data. We kept adding to that, but we still had planes, airports, meshes, points of interests like castles, and textures that were all installed. That’s the part that kept growing with the marketplace content, which had grown to 2 TB. Now we integrated everything into the cloud, and it is all streamed and kept into a rolling cache on the hardware. You don’t have to install any new World Updates; they’re just streamed seamlessly.”
It’s all highly optimized and tailored to each player’s experience. For example, if you fly over a large international airport, you won’t need to have the highest quality version of the mesh downloaded on your system. The simulator is only going to pull the lowest or medium quality version, leaving the higher quality assets streamed on demand through the cloud for when you’re closer.
Another impressive addition to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be its “soft body simulation” for hot air balloons. These balloons will be simulated across 6,400 surfaces giving a realistic reaction to heat density — when you turn on the heater, the air will heat up, and it’s going to inflate the massive balloon.
“You will see the balloon inflated and get lighter. Combustion happens, and the balloon goes up. Banners are physically simulated, so they will flap in the wind, just exactly like tissue with the rope attached,” explains Wloch. “Also, we now have parachutes. For example, the Cirrus Vision Jet, which you can fly, has a parachute system that can be deployed when needed.”
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is launching with one of the most largely diverse groups of highly detailed aircraft systems than any flight simulator has ever come with before. It isn’t just how good these aircraft look – and they certainly look fantastic – but also the care and attention that has been given to these systems.
“The reason that we wanted to focus on this experience so much and to build things like flight planning and pre-flight activities into the simulator is because we wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to take advantage of those kind of capabilities and those kinds of experiences,” explains Co-Founder of Working Title Simulations Christopher Burnett. “One of the things that has impacted simmers in the past is that flight simulators have often used outside tools to do their flight planning or preflight activities, and those came with some barriers to entry, things like cost or maybe complexity, that kept a lot of them from doing that.”
Now you’ll be able to go through the entire preflight experience, from planning to briefing for things like weather, and then executing that flight on some of the most detailed cockpits and avionics systems that we’ve ever seen in a flight simulator. The new flight planning tool supports anything from small flight plans all the way up to larger, more complicated paths using the same kind of tools that airline dispatchers use for their long commercial flights.
“We’ve also got several commercial aircraft systems that we’re bringing into MSFS 2024,” Burnett explains. “The 737 Max 8 avionics package is one of those. Of course, we’ve got the 787 and 747 8i as well. Then something exciting that we’re working on is the Boeing 747 400 LCF, also known as the Dreamlifter. This is a purpose-built aircraft that Boeing made to help them with the manufacture of the 787. They expanded it and now simmers can use this to fly aircraft parts around. We’ve partnered with Boeing to faithfully recreate this aircraft and the 747 400 avionics package that goes with it. We’ve got a ton of great avionics in the simulator.”
All these enhancements, from addressing install size, entirely new forms of photogrammetry and an unprecedented digital twin of Earth, the enhanced learning system, the vast and innovative Career System, were not the only things that the development team was excited about. They are, as Neumann explains, all the result of carefully listening to the wishes and dreams of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s passionate community. The community feedback was welcomed and embraced by the dev teams and became the guiding principles in the creation of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 “We are making this new simulator for the community, and we are working directly with the community and it is through this fantastic collaboration that MSFS 2024 is able to take flight simulation to the next level,” Neumann shares.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is shaping up to be the most ambitious commercially available flight simulator that has ever been undertaken – and it’s not even close. It’s fun to think about how many decades some of us have been “flying” in front of our PCs now, and it’s impressive to see how Microsoft’s longest-running franchise wasn’t content to just settle for sticking the landing a few years ago – it wants to keep soaring and bring all of us along for the ride. Time to buckle up.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 — available for pre-order today on the Microsoft Store — will launch in a variety of editions on November 19, 2024, and the Standard Edition will be available day one with Game Pass. All pre-orders will receive the De Havilland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft to use instantly in Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020). The Standard Edition comes with 70 aircraft and 150 upgraded airports; Deluxe Edition will include 10 additional aircraft and five extra airports; the Premium Deluxe will have another 15 aircraft (total of 95); and then there’s the Aviator Edition for those who want everything which comes with all of the above plus the 30 planes that have been released in the Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) Marketplace for a grand total of 125 planes with that edition.
Xbox Game Studios
Fly with Purpose
· Launch your aviation Career wherever you choose in the world. Gain experience, build your reputation, and complete certifications to gain access to authentic aviation activities ranging from Medevac, Remote Cargo Ops, Aerial Firefighting, Search & Rescue and more, all the way to becoming an Airline Passenger Transport Pilot. Set out on a truly global aviation adventure with virtually unlimited missions across the planet.
· Compete against other pilots in the all-new Challenge League mode or hone your skills in dozens of Activities ranging from exciting Rally Races and Precision Landings to Low-Altitude challenges and more. Fly head-to-head in the iconic Red Bull Air Races and the legendary Reno Air Races, including the new Roswell courses.
· Be a World Photographer and travel across our beautiful planet to capture awe-inspiring natural vistas, visit famous landmarks, and record these adventures with pictures in your travel book. Unique photo challenges test your creative eye along with your piloting skills while you strive to capture the perfect moment.
Advanced Simulation
· Enhanced physics system allows 10,000+ rigid-body surfaces that enable the simulation of any shape of aircraft. Soft body physics supports cloth, ropes, balloons, and more. Improved ground and water handling further enhance realism.
· New, highly accurate aircraft systems including electrical, pneumatic, fuel and hydraulic systems, payload and passenger systems, and avionics like the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honeywell Primus Epic 2. Preflight inspections and walkaround checks add to immersion.
· Plan your flights with a groundbreaking flight planner which supports both IFR and VFR map layers, IFR charts, route planning, fuel and payload planning, vertical profile planning, and ETOPS planning. It also provides airport information including weather and NOTAMS and is available native in the sim, on mobile devices or web browsers for flight planning outside the simulator.
Explore Our Visually Stunning Digital Twin
· Explore our most detailed re-creation of planet Earth to date. Enhanced digital elevation maps, over 500 TIN (triangular irregular network) cities and more than 100,000 square kilometers of countryside photogrammetry allow for visually stunning digital twin experiences. More than 150 airports, 2,000 glider airports, 10,000 heliports, 2,000 points of interest, and 900 oil rigs have been carefully hand-crafted while a procedural system generates all 40,000 airports, 80,000 helipads, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly 3 trillion trees our planet.
· Land anywhere and, for the first time in Microsoft Flight Simulator, exit your aircraft to explore 27 highly detailed biomes with hundreds of species of vegetation, dynamically created details including grass, rocks, and flowers – all influenced by seasonal changes. The all-new photometric lighting system renders the world more accurately than ever before, and enhanced weather features such as new cloud types, auroras, and other weather phenomena produce fresh and compelling atmospheric experiences.
· The world comes alive with a vast array of land-based wildlife in their natural habitats and free-ranging livestock across the entire globe. The oceans and waterways are teeming with live, worldwide maritime traffic ranging from large tankers and cargo ships to trawlers, tugs, and more. A richly diverse, regionally accurate representation of humanity brings life to the airports, aircraft, and passenger cabins of the world. Enhanced real-world air traffic populates the skies and airport tarmacs with hundreds of accurately depicted aircraft models and dozens of officially licensed liveries.
Xbox Game Studios
Fly with Purpose
· Launch your aviation Career wherever you choose in the world. Gain experience, build your reputation, and complete certifications to gain access to authentic aviation activities ranging from Medevac, Remote Cargo Ops, Aerial Firefighting, Search & Rescue and more, all the way to becoming an Airline Passenger Transport Pilot. Set out on a truly global aviation adventure with virtually unlimited missions across the planet.
· Compete against other pilots in the all-new Challenge League mode or hone your skills in dozens of Activities ranging from exciting Rally Races and Precision Landings to Low-Altitude challenges and more. Fly head-to-head in the iconic Red Bull Air Races and the legendary Reno Air Races, including the new Roswell courses.
· Be a World Photographer and travel across our beautiful planet to capture awe-inspiring natural vistas, visit famous landmarks, and record these adventures with pictures in your travel book. Unique photo challenges test your creative eye along with your piloting skills while you strive to capture the perfect moment.
Advanced Simulation
· Enhanced physics system allows 10,000+ rigid-body surfaces that enable the simulation of any shape of aircraft. Soft body physics supports cloth, ropes, balloons, and more. Improved ground and water handling further enhance realism.
· New, highly accurate aircraft systems including electrical, pneumatic, fuel and hydraulic systems, payload and passenger systems, and avionics like the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honeywell Primus Epic 2. Preflight inspections and walkaround checks add to immersion.
· Plan your flights with a groundbreaking flight planner which supports both IFR and VFR map layers, IFR charts, route planning, fuel and payload planning, vertical profile planning, and ETOPS planning. It also provides airport information including weather and NOTAMS and is available native in the sim, on mobile devices or web browsers for flight planning outside the simulator.
Explore Our Visually Stunning Digital Twin
· Explore our most detailed re-creation of planet Earth to date. Enhanced digital elevation maps, over 500 TIN (triangular irregular network) cities and more than 100,000 square kilometers of countryside photogrammetry allow for visually stunning digital twin experiences. More than 150 airports, 2,000 glider airports, 10,000 heliports, 2,000 points of interest, and 900 oil rigs have been carefully hand-crafted while a procedural system generates all 40,000 airports, 80,000 helipads, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly 3 trillion trees our planet.
· Land anywhere and, for the first time in Microsoft Flight Simulator, exit your aircraft to explore 27 highly detailed biomes with hundreds of species of vegetation, dynamically created details including grass, rocks, and flowers – all influenced by seasonal changes. The all-new photometric lighting system renders the world more accurately than ever before, and enhanced weather features such as new cloud types, auroras, and other weather phenomena produce fresh and compelling atmospheric experiences.
· The world comes alive with a vast array of land-based wildlife in their natural habitats and free-ranging livestock across the entire globe. The oceans and waterways are teeming with live, worldwide maritime traffic ranging from large tankers and cargo ships to trawlers, tugs, and more. A richly diverse, regionally accurate representation of humanity brings life to the airports, aircraft, and passenger cabins of the world. Enhanced real-world air traffic populates the skies and airport tarmacs with hundreds of accurately depicted aircraft models and dozens of officially licensed liveries.
Xbox Game Studios
Fly with Purpose
· Launch your aviation Career wherever you choose in the world. Gain experience, build your reputation, and complete certifications to gain access to authentic aviation activities ranging from Medevac, Remote Cargo Ops, Aerial Firefighting, Search & Rescue and more, all the way to becoming an Airline Passenger Transport Pilot. Set out on a truly global aviation adventure with virtually unlimited missions across the planet.
· Compete against other pilots in the all-new Challenge League mode or hone your skills in dozens of Activities ranging from exciting Rally Races and Precision Landings to Low-Altitude challenges and more. Fly head-to-head in the iconic Red Bull Air Races and the legendary Reno Air Races, including the new Roswell courses.
· Be a World Photographer and travel across our beautiful planet to capture awe-inspiring natural vistas, visit famous landmarks, and record these adventures with pictures in your travel book. Unique photo challenges test your creative eye along with your piloting skills while you strive to capture the perfect moment.
Advanced Simulation
· Enhanced physics system allows 10,000+ rigid-body surfaces that enable the simulation of any shape of aircraft. Soft body physics supports cloth, ropes, balloons, and more. Improved ground and water handling further enhance realism.
· New, highly accurate aircraft systems including electrical, pneumatic, fuel and hydraulic systems, payload and passenger systems, and avionics like the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honeywell Primus Epic 2. Preflight inspections and walkaround checks add to immersion.
· Plan your flights with a groundbreaking flight planner which supports both IFR and VFR map layers, IFR charts, route planning, fuel and payload planning, vertical profile planning, and ETOPS planning. It also provides airport information including weather and NOTAMS and is available native in the sim, on mobile devices or web browsers for flight planning outside the simulator.
Explore Our Visually Stunning Digital Twin
· Explore our most detailed re-creation of planet Earth to date. Enhanced digital elevation maps, over 500 TIN (triangular irregular network) cities and more than 100,000 square kilometers of countryside photogrammetry allow for visually stunning digital twin experiences. More than 150 airports, 2,000 glider airports, 10,000 heliports, 2,000 points of interest, and 900 oil rigs have been carefully hand-crafted while a procedural system generates all 40,000 airports, 80,000 helipads, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly 3 trillion trees our planet.
· Land anywhere and, for the first time in Microsoft Flight Simulator, exit your aircraft to explore 27 highly detailed biomes with hundreds of species of vegetation, dynamically created details including grass, rocks, and flowers – all influenced by seasonal changes. The all-new photometric lighting system renders the world more accurately than ever before, and enhanced weather features such as new cloud types, auroras, and other weather phenomena produce fresh and compelling atmospheric experiences.
· The world comes alive with a vast array of land-based wildlife in their natural habitats and free-ranging livestock across the entire globe. The oceans and waterways are teeming with live, worldwide maritime traffic ranging from large tankers and cargo ships to trawlers, tugs, and more. A richly diverse, regionally accurate representation of humanity brings life to the airports, aircraft, and passenger cabins of the world. Enhanced real-world air traffic populates the skies and airport tarmacs with hundreds of accurately depicted aircraft models and dozens of officially licensed liveries.
Xbox Game Studios
Fly with Purpose
· Launch your aviation Career wherever you choose in the world. Gain experience, build your reputation, and complete certifications to gain access to authentic aviation activities ranging from Medevac, Remote Cargo Ops, Aerial Firefighting, Search & Rescue and more, all the way to becoming an Airline Passenger Transport Pilot. Set out on a truly global aviation adventure with virtually unlimited missions across the planet.
· Compete against other pilots in the all-new Challenge League mode or hone your skills in dozens of Activities ranging from exciting Rally Races and Precision Landings to Low-Altitude challenges and more. Fly head-to-head in the iconic Red Bull Air Races and the legendary Reno Air Races, including the new Roswell courses.
· Be a World Photographer and travel across our beautiful planet to capture awe-inspiring natural vistas, visit famous landmarks, and record these adventures with pictures in your travel book. Unique photo challenges test your creative eye along with your piloting skills while you strive to capture the perfect moment.
Advanced Simulation
· Enhanced physics system allows 10,000+ rigid-body surfaces that enable the simulation of any shape of aircraft. Soft body physics supports cloth, ropes, balloons, and more. Improved ground and water handling further enhance realism.
· New, highly accurate aircraft systems including electrical, pneumatic, fuel and hydraulic systems, payload and passenger systems, and avionics like the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honeywell Primus Epic 2. Preflight inspections and walkaround checks add to immersion.
· Plan your flights with a groundbreaking flight planner which supports both IFR and VFR map layers, IFR charts, route planning, fuel and payload planning, vertical profile planning, and ETOPS planning. It also provides airport information including weather and NOTAMS and is available native in the sim, on mobile devices or web browsers for flight planning outside the simulator.
Explore Our Visually Stunning Digital Twin
· Explore our most detailed re-creation of planet Earth to date. Enhanced digital elevation maps, over 500 TIN (triangular irregular network) cities and more than 100,000 square kilometers of countryside photogrammetry allow for visually stunning digital twin experiences. More than 150 airports, 2,000 glider airports, 10,000 heliports, 2,000 points of interest, and 900 oil rigs have been carefully hand-crafted while a procedural system generates all 40,000 airports, 80,000 helipads, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly 3 trillion trees our planet.
· Land anywhere and, for the first time in Microsoft Flight Simulator, exit your aircraft to explore 27 highly detailed biomes with hundreds of species of vegetation, dynamically created details including grass, rocks, and flowers – all influenced by seasonal changes. The all-new photometric lighting system renders the world more accurately than ever before, and enhanced weather features such as new cloud types, auroras, and other weather phenomena produce fresh and compelling atmospheric experiences.
· The world comes alive with a vast array of land-based wildlife in their natural habitats and free-ranging livestock across the entire globe. The oceans and waterways are teeming with live, worldwide maritime traffic ranging from large tankers and cargo ships to trawlers, tugs, and more. A richly diverse, regionally accurate representation of humanity brings life to the airports, aircraft, and passenger cabins of the world. Enhanced real-world air traffic populates the skies and airport tarmacs with hundreds of accurately depicted aircraft models and dozens of officially licensed liveries.
The post Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: The Many Enhancements That Make This the Most Ambitious Flight Sim Ever appeared first on Xbox Wire.
In 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator gave us the world. In 2024, Microsoft Flight Simulator is letting us live in it. I was at the preview event for MSFS 2020 back in September 2019 and I couldn’t believe what I had seen, and after playing it for several hundred hours over the last four years, I was having a hard time imagining what a new version could add that would bring the same sense of awe I had the first time I experienced the world at my fingertips. After my first time playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, though, I’m honestly more excited for MSFS 2024 than I was after my initial hands-on with the 2020 game five years ago.
Everything MSFS currently does well has been improved for 2024. Load times, weather effects, the physics of your aircraft – there’s just so much more now. Even the ground, which you are very much not supposed to see a lot of, has had its realism cranked up massively. MSFS 2024 took the literal globe-spanning scope of its predecessor and zeroed in on making it feel closer to the actual planet upon which we all live and breathe.
Career mode is easily the biggest addition to MSFS 2024, and it arose directly from community feedback. Simmers asked for structured challenges in MSFS, and career mode was a natural fit.
“Very soon after the launch, we did several surveys,” Asobo Studio Chief Creative Office David Dedeine said, “and what was amazing about them is everyone across the board, from super hard-core simmers to what we call digital tourists” were asking for “more purpose and goals.”
The defining mode of the new MSFS 2024 experience was originally proposed for MSFS 2020, but for a slew of reasons, it never made it into the final sim. But the seed of career mode goes back even further. Deidene said he recently found a development document from 2017 that was one of the earliest mentions of the concept.
“But we had to focus on 2020 first,” he said, noting that the early survey gave the team the proof they needed to move forward with career mode. “Everybody wants to do this. We wanted to do it. Let’s go for it.”
Career mode is much more open than I had anticipated. There’s no pinned coordinate on the map to start your journey. You build your avatar and start at any airport in the entire world. You meet your mentor and take off on a familiarization flight. Deidene promised the openness of the mode means you can “basically play an infinite number of times.”
The interface itself is familiar to anyone who’s been gaming for any period of time: it looks like the traditional skill-tree you might find in a Spider-Man game, for example, but it tracks your aviation certifications. You’re not spending skill points to unlock a super power, but you are spending in-game credits you earn while doing jobs as an aviator. Getting your certification requires proving yourself before you’re eligible to take an exam. That examination costs “money,” earned doing jobs for your chosen career path and getting evaluated.
For example, you might be a private pilot tasked with taking a mother and her son from Aspen to LAX. A smooth flight and subsequent landing will impress your customers, and how much you earn is based on your abilities and evaluations from the simulated customers. Not only is that in-game currency system tied to your exam fees, but you can also use it to buy your own airplanes and hangars, hire your own staff, and move from apprentice to master. I’m already planning out my world-spanning commercial airline, and so far I haven’t taken a single flight in career mode. And that’s just one option! There are options for air rescue careers, racing, agriculture, and more.
If you’d rather gamify the sim experience without pouring yourself into career mode, there’s a new challenge league. Challenges are something that’s not entirely new to MSFS: since the launch of 2020, there have been landing challenges as well as challenges tied into Top Gun: Maverick and Dune: Part Two. What’s new in 2024 is the specific challenge league. Every week, three new challenges are introduced, and you compete against the rest of the community for clout on the leaderboards. Scores designate what level you compete at, from bronze to gold, and each is designed to last between two and three minutes.
I tried the F/A-18 Hornet race through the Grand Canyon during my hands-on with MSFS 2024, and what I really loved about it was how, in spite of the challenge itself being somewhat fanciful (I don’t think the DoD or the National Park Service would appreciate the noise and danger posed), the flight model remains the same. The simulation of the aircraft hasn’t been tuned for a more “arcade-like” experience. You have to complete the challenges given all the aerodynamics, handling, and physics found in the greater sim. I was unable to unseat the winner from his world-record pace, but to be fair, he had an aircraft-appropriate flight stick and I was racing with a yoke. Regardless, it was a lot of fun and dammit if I can’t wait to race in the final game with my Thrustmaster flight stick and throttle.
As was the case with MSFS 2020, there multiple versions with different levels of content that will be available when MSFS 2024 releases: standard, deluxe, premium deluxe and aviator. The standard version alone will have 30 new aircraft, from helicopters to a personal VTOL, hot air balloons, helicopters, and more. The high-end aviator edition ships with 125 new aircraft and 160 new aiports. And all versions have upgraded versions of MSFS 2020 airplanes and airports.
One of my all-time favorites, the A-10 Warthog, is coming to the standard edition. I took some time to fly one from its home base at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona and was really impressed with how it feels and flies, as well as the level of detail in Davis-Monthan’s famous aircraft boneyard, a monstrous graveyard of decommissioned airplanes inside the base.
The deluxe and premium deluxe editions include more planes and more airports, and are totally optional, but I pumped my fist and said “yes!” audibly during the presentation when they revealed the C-17 Globemaster is coming to MSFS 2024. I’ve never flown one before, but I’ve been inside of them during my time in the Air Force and they’ve always held a special place in my heart, so I’m really looking forward to finally sitting in the cockpit and recreating my 2001 flight from Bahrain to the Azores and then from the Azores back to US shores. The one plane I had hoped to see, the Lockheed C-130, was not shown, but I’m extremely hopeful that Lockheed-Martin will eventually realize how beneficial it is to me, personally, to have their plane available as an official sim asset.
When I say everything has been improved upon, it doesn’t really do justice to the scale at which MSFS 2024 builds on its predecessor. For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, the ground has been massively overhauled for MSFS 2024. The detail on the ground in any given area has increased 4,000 times over 2020. What that means for you and I is basically a lot of places we can land in now in MSFS 2020 aren’t going to, uh… fly… in MSFS 2024.
As an example of just how much of a difference the new ground modeling makes, Asobo Studio CEO and co-founder Sebastian Wloch showed us a small hill at the end of a runway as it currently appears in MSFS 2020. It has the contours of a skate ramp, something you could almost certainly roll up fairly easily if one were so inclined. He then showed us the same location in MSFS 2024. That gentle bowl shape was now littered with uneven knobs and protrusions, looking more like a partially-covered rock formation than a smooth and even surface. In other words, if you tried to roll over it, you’d almost certainly do a whole lot of damage to your aircraft.
Because of the new level of detail afforded by the MSFS 2024 engine, landings now need to be more purposeful. Soon the days of landing the Boeing 747 in a random field will be but a memory, because in addition to the surface modeling bringing rougher and more realistic terrain to MSFS 2024, the ground itself will react more realistically.
Snow, mud, even grass will show wheel marks if you roll through it, and if you try and land a massive aircraft on a muddy river bank, it’s going to react in the way you’d probably expect it to: not well. This rougher terrain will even affect your aircraft. We saw a brief glimpse of a bush plane with its over-sized tires caked with mud. I wanted to know if that was just an illustration or an expected behavior, so I asked Wlong if mud really sticks to your tires. “Oh yes,” he confirmed.
“The planes will wear and tear. They’ll get dirty,” Wlong continued. “The way you fly or hard landings, the way you brake, these things will impact the systems and instantly affect performance.” As an example, Wlong explained the braking system in MSFS 2024: “We simulate carbon or metal brakes. They both react completely differently to braking.
Carbon is more efficient hot, metal brakes are less efficient hot.” Depending on which your plane has, you need to brake differently. “Basically, the temperature is going to build up during your braking,” Wlong continued, and the more they’re used, “the more they wear, the less efficient they get.”
This means there are both short and long-term impacts to your aircraft, and not just on the brakes. “We have that for tires, for engines, for many things,” in MSFS 2024. “Over time, the quality of your flying, hard landings, stuff like that is going to affect the aircraft.” But fear not, you won’t have to watch your favorite plane deteriorate over the next several years. You can repair the problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to ask if this feature can be toggled on or off, but given how attentive the team at Asobo has been to satisfying the needs of the hardcore simmers and the “digital tourists,” I’d be surprised if shutting it off wasn’t an option. We’ll see when the final sim comes out in November.
Another massive overhaul in 2024 is the physics system. To demonstrate, the team showed us the effects of rotor wash and wake turbulence. In real life, when an airplane takes off, it moves a lot of air. That air doesn’t magically return to normal once the plane lifts off, it leaves a trail of rough air behind it known as wake turbulence. If you’ve ever wondered why planes don’t just take off one right after another in rapid succession, wake turbulence is the answer. That unstable air can, and sadly has, led to disaster. In Flight Sim 2024, every aircraft has a path of wake turbulence behind it, and not only that, the wake turbulence is affected by the ambient weather. At an airport with two runways parallel to one another, for example, a cross-wind can push the turbulence from one runway to the other, and in MSFS 2024 that behavior is also present.
Helicopters suffer from an enormous downrush of air known as rotor wash – fast moving turbulent air generated from the lift of the helicopter’s spinning blades. We were shown a demonstration of this effect in the sim using simulated smoke and a hovering helicopter. It swirled and bellowed realistically, sometimes enveloping the helicopter almost entirely before unpredictably whooshing away and coming back. This, and the wake turbulence of a helicopter underway, are part of the updated simulation engine in MSFS 2024.
“Someone suggested that we plug the wake turbulence onto big boats,” Wloch said, meaning chasing down a container ship or cruise liner in a helicopter would introduce a new and realistically challenging condition. That feature won’t be in MSFS 2024 when it releases “but it’s coming,” he said.
Which is awesome because the team has integrated real-world ship tracking into MSFS 2024 using readily-available transponder data. I took a flight around my home airport in Maine and had forgotten that a rather large cruise ship was anchored in the harbor nearest to my house. I remembered once I saw it sitting in the exact location in the sim as it was in real life at that very moment. The ship transponder data is updated in the sim every 30 seconds, which meant I was able to fly over the Maine State Ferry Service ferry from the island on which I used to live. Right on time.
Water physics have also been improved, which will affect take-off and landing distances for seaplanes and other craft capable of landing on the water. The MSFS 2024 team doesn’t yet have a solution to realistically pitch big ships, so you won’t be able to practice your carrier landings in the F/A-18 Hornet in pitching seas quite yet, but given how much and how often MSFS is updated, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
Every helipad on the planet is now in MSFS 2024. That’s over 80,000, a number that includes all 941 off-shore oil rigs. The team also called, or wrote, to every glider airport in the entire world and created the first database to track them. Tall structures that pose an aviation hazard have what’s known as an “OB”, “obstruction light” on the top. You know those red lights you see on radio towers? Those are OB lights. MSFS 2024 has modeled over a million of them now, all across the planet.
“Flight Sim always wanted to have all of Earth as real as it gets,” head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jörg Neumann told me during the event.
The quest for realism in MSFS 2024 and its predecessor has not only been one of the defining features of the franchise since 2020, but its vast data is making an impact internally, within Microsoft itself.
“It’s just knowledge that gets shared” around the company. I asked him if this means something like the Forza team.
“Absolutely,” he replied.
“I think we reinvigorated Bing,” he said of how the MSFS commitment to realism has most paid off for the company as a whole.
“I had an interesting phone call with Bill Gates where he said, ‘you took two franchises that were sort of on the downtrend,'” –Microsoft Flight Simulator and Bing search– “‘and you put them both back up on the uptrend.'”
“When we make trees, Bing gets our trees,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m flying to Brazil. Do you want those cities?’ OK, here’s the Brazilian cities. What else do you want?” Neumann said every piece of data they get, they share back with the Bing team, or at least what the Bing team will accept. “Obstacles like power lines…do they need that in Bing? No, but it’s not bad for Bing. It’s actually kind of good because it’s a richer experience.”
It’s not just the aircraft and the physical world they inhabit that’s had its realism ratcheted up from MSFS 2020. People and animals, too, have been revisited and improved with an eye towards recreating the world as accurately as possible.
People are dressed in clothes and styles matching their countries of origin. They speak in the language of their home countries. Flying from the US to Finland on a commercial plane? Walk through the cabin: you’ll hear both English and Finnish being spoken by the passengers.
Neumann, who has a supervising producer credit on 2013’s Zoo Tycoon and a degree in biology, has a soft-spot for animals and wants to make sure they’re also being more realistically simulated in MSFS 2024. “I really didn’t like the implementation of the animal flights in 2020,” he admitted. “It really bothered me, it was like, ‘Hey, find the elephants!’ and there’s a stick in the UI and there’s three sad-looking elephants.
“There’s an open source database that has all wild species, extinct and living, and it has distribution maps with density over time,” Neumann continued. Asobo is drawing from that database to make sure animals are exactly where they’re supposed to be, and that they have the correct population densities. In different locations throughout the year, “you will find different stuff, but also they’re migrating,” so where you spot a herd of wildebeests or caribou one day might not be the same place you find them the next.
Animal behavior is also closer to reality, not just where to find them. Hovering over rural Australia in a helicopter and you spot a herd of sheep? Go ahead and herd them with your helicopter. That’s just old-fashioned Aussie fun, mate. Neumann stopped short of saying exactly how many animal species are coming to MSFS 2024 when it releases in November, but he did say it will be “a lot.”
“I want to do butterflies. I wanted people to get out of the plane and do butterfly collections and stuff,” he said. While that isn’t yet an official part of the MSFS 2024 experience, “something like that people can do with SDK,” or the software development kit.
Of course, animals and virtual people are amazing additions to bolster the realism, but MSFS 2024 in all its modes is ultimately about the experience of aviation. When MSFS 2020 came out, there was a worldwide shortage of 800,000 pilots.
“I can really tell you that the aviation industry is in an open crisis,” Neumann said. “It’s not that well discussed.
“They need pilots to be trained up from a younger age,” he added, and building the real-deal simulators can cost as much as $40 million. But thanks to the popularity of MSFS 2020–Asobo said they have over 15 million simmers–people are able to approach aviation from their living rooms on their Xbox and then move up from there. This ease at which people can get acquainted with flying, and the detail at which they can experience it, means aircraft companies are more than happy to work with Asobo and the Flight Simulator team.
“All of them with one exception has called us and said, ‘Please help us with recruitment,’ like we need to get people in.” Neumann said. This two-way relationship helps not only with an industry struggling to meet the demand for pilots, but it also helps MSFS become a better and more realistic experience. “When I say, ‘Hey, I need help from you guys,’ they’re like ‘You got it.'”
This constant improvement to the simulation from the aircraft manufacturers coupled with the community feedback means tutorials are out.
“This whole thing of tutorials going bye-bye? I kind of love it,” he admitted, saying he wasn’t a fan of the tutorials in MSFS 2020. “I fly a fair bit, but not like jets and stuff in the real world. So I had to take those tutorials and I didn’t really retain any of it.” The philosophy now is rather than rote tutorials, MSFS 2024 “is a way to really plug you into a path that is a real world path of aviation.” Career mode in particular will teach people a lot through the experience of doing, rather than through the traditional check-list-like system already in place with MSFS 2020’s tutorials. “I took them, I did them, I don’t remember it,” Neumann said about the original tutorials.
“I think we’re doing a better job helping people become aviators in the real world. I think that’s cool because it’s the only game I ever made any kind of real world connection [with].”
I was able to take on some of this training on piloting a helicopter. I’ve never really gotten the hang of it in MSFS2020, but Microsoft had a complete control set-up in place at the preview, accurate to what you’d find in an actual helicopter training class. Now, as was the case with 2020, you don’t NEED to have all the gear to learn to fly. I personally recommend getting whatever you can and building up, but if you have nothing more than an Xbox controller or just a mouse and keyboard, you can jump right into the lessons. It’s a very traditional route to learn to fly, but the new career mode gives stakes to this experience. “Why am I learning to hover? Oh right, because I need to swing a scaffolding into place with my sky crane later on in my career.”
Even with all the upgrades to the graphics and physics, MSFS 2024 promises to be a lighter experience on your hard drive than MSFS 2020 currently is. If you’ve ever changed the drive location of MSFS, or had to re-download it, you know the pain of pulling down hundreds of gigs of data. Even the major updates are 20-30 gigs, and sometimes it feels like half the hours I’ve spent in MSFS have been either updates or load times.
Thankfully, MSFS 2024 addresses these problems with cloud streaming. If you’re not going to fly around the whole world, why do you need to download it all? Same with airplanes: if you tend to only fly one or two, there’s no reason to have the entire fleet living on your drive. The updated cloud system means you only download the data you need. The rolling cache, as well as the physics, are on your local client, so the lift on your data is much lower. Great news for people with slow internet speeds, bandwidth caps, or anyone who might be running low on storage space.
Graphically, it’s really hard to say authoritatively just how much of an improvement it will be on my personal computer, but I can say, on the monster machines at the preview event, the level of realism massively exceeds MSFS 2020. I flew the Grand Canyon races multiple times chasing that world record, and the level of detail is astounding. I’ve flown biplanes into the Canyon in MSFS 2020 and the difference between the two is almost like the difference between PS1 and PS4. Whereas before there were smooth walls with textures approximating the rocky cliff walls, in MSFS 2024 those cliff walls look like actual rocks. The details, the shadows, the way it all moves and changes in the lighting, it’s fantastic. Even though I’m not running a top-end gaming rig, I’m really looking forward to seeing how it runs for 2024.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 officially releases in November, and for me, a person who spent a lot of the pandemic (and the years since) obsessed with Flight Simulator and aviation as a whole, it cannot come soon enough. I am suitably impressed with what I saw, and I didn’t think they’d be able to improve on MSFS 2020 much more than an iterative update, but this is a reimagining of the entire franchise. Everything good… is better now, and everything new looks awesome and fun. I can’t wait to build my fleet of world-dominating commercial aircraft, rescue hikers stranded on the sides of mountains, and just fly the same flight path off the coast of Maine I’ve flown a million times before. I’m more excited about 2024 than I was about 2020, and from me, the guy who gave Flight Simulator 2020 a 10 out of 10 review score, that’s saying something.
Rather sheepishly, I must admit that my own experience with Armenian art begins and ends with System Of A Down. Cheers then, The Bird Of A Thousand Voices, for showing up in my inbox and giving me a second reference point next to Sugar. This one’s a simple though very striking platformer, inspired by folk legends and scored by composer Tigran Hamasyan. It’s part of a multimedia project based Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul (Firebird). It’s completely free, and you can find it here.
The mad lads at Square Enix have released a demo for their remake of 90s RPG Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven, in which you play a whole dynasty of customisable protagonists fighting vengeful ancient heroes. It’s a turn-based battler with an empire-building component in which you play as several emperors in succession, passing on abilities and knowledge to your heir. In what I consider to be a poetic complimentary flourish, you can also pass on save data from the demo to the full game. Look, this is what counts for “poetic” just before lunch on a Thursday.
Gotta redraw ’em all.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pokémon Emerald for the GBA, 130 artists have collabrated on a project to redraw the sprites for all 386 Pokémon included in the game (thanks, gamesradar).
Not only that, but the revised sprites have been implmented into a fully playable ROM hack called Pokémon Emerald: Respirited, so you can try it out yourself and check out the new representations (we won’t provide a link to the download directly here, but locating it won’t prove particularly difficult).
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Even though there are some major seasonal sale events right around the corner, Xbox has plenty of excellent deals for fans to take advantage of right now. At the moment, one of our favorite offers is on the 3 month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership, which is discounted at Woot to $33.49 when you use the code ‘ULTIMATE’ at checkout. With a price hike now in effect for Game Pass users, there’s no better time to stack these codes so you can play all of their newly-announced games the day they’re available. It ultimately saves you $26.48 versus the new price for Game Pass Ultimate monthly, which is well worth taking advantage of.
That’s not all, as there are also offers on games, storage, and so much more. Check out all of those excellent deals at the links below.
Two new variants of Xbox Series X are currently up for preorder alongside a new 1TB Series S. If you’re interested in picking one of these up, the fancy 2TB Galaxy Black Series X will set you back $599.99, the 1TB All-Digital Robot White Xbox Series X can be preordered for $449.99, and the 1TB Robot White Xbox Series S goes for $349.99. They’re all set to release on October 15.
One of our favorite Xbox Game Pass Ultimate deals has returned at Woot, providing another opportunity for users to stack their membership at a discounted rate. You can get three months of the service for just $36.49, which is a great price on its own, but by using the code ‘ULTIMATE‘ at checkout you can knock off an extra $3 to bring it to $33.49. This price won’t stick around for long, so act fast to secure your membership.
Considering the new price of Game Pass Ultimate is $19.99/month, you’re saving $26.48 with this 3-month deal. This is the best way to avoid the Xbox Game Pass price hike. By stacking these codes you can set yourself up for success to play all of their upcoming releases at a lower price.
This time of year is great for finding games on sale. At the moment, you can score some incredible deals on a wide variety of physical games, including a whopping 70% off Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, 50% off Unicorn Overlord, and 50% off Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1. Check out even more excellent game deals at the links below.
Xbox’s summer showcase was a home run, with one of the best presentations of upcoming games on the Xbox ecosystem in quite some time. This included titles like Black Ops 6, Doom: The Dark Ages, Perfect Dark, Fable, Gears of War: E-Day, and plenty more that will be coming to Game Pass in the future. As for September, here’s what’s in the Xbox Game Pass September Wave 2 lineup:
In even bigger news, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is officially available to play on Game Pass right now for console, PC Game Pass, and Game Pass Ultimate users. It comes with the full package as well – campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies!
If you’re looking to save on an Xbox controller, there are quite a few deals worth checking out right now. Our favorite at the moment is at Lenovo, where you can score the Carbon Black Xbox controller for just $39, about 30% off its MSRP. That’s not the only deal going on right now, though. Below, you can find a few more of our favorite Xbox controller deals.
More Xbox Controller Deals
Looking to pick up some extra storage? Amazon is here to help with an excellent deal on the WD_Black 1TB C50 Expansion Card. At the moment, its price has dropped down to $127, 21% off its MSRP of $159.99. This is a deal that likely won’t stick around for long, so take advantage of it while you can! We also consider it one of the best SSDs for Xbox, so there’s no better time to grab it.
Does your family complain when you stay up playing loud shooters late into the night? They’ll stop complaining if you pick up an Xbox headset that lets no one but you hear the delightful explosions you cause on the screen. Right now, you can get 28% off the Turtle Beach Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX wireless headset and 45% off the Razer Kaira Pro wireless headset at Amazon. To see even more gaming headsets on sale, visit our roundup of the best gaming headset deals.
The recent discomfored surrounding Xbox can be isolated to a recent round of brutal layoffs. Microsoft is closing a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda. Alpha Dog Games, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom, will also close. Roundhouse Studios will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios. Microsoft, currently valued at over $3 trillion, did not say how many staff will lose their jobs, but significant layoffs are inevitable.
Microsoft’s announcement of the cuts at Bethesda come over three months after the company announced plans to cut 1,900 staff from its video game workforce, and amid a boom time for Bethesda’s Fallout series following the breakout hit Prime Video TV show.
Microsoft has confirmed the arrival of Call of Duty Black Ops 6 day-one on Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft made the announcement alongside the release of a live-action reveal trailer called ‘The Truth Lies’. In it we see world leaders including Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Saddam Hussein, delivering cryptic speeches. Black Ops 6 will be set during the events of the Gulf War during the early ’90s.
Activision has also clarified that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 won’t actually require a 300 GB download despite previous messaging. Players began to panic about the size of this year’s Call of Duty after noticing its Xbox store page.
At the time, the page listed that the game would require a 309.85 GB download for those hoping to hop into the post-Cold War first-person shooter when it launches this fall. That’ll put a pretty big dent in the hard drive of most PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S consoles, so players were, understandably, very concerned.
In general, it is advisable to keep an eye out for sales and restocks throughout the year, as availability has improved since the initial launch of the console. Unlike the Nintendo Switch, there is no specific recommendation to wait for a sale regardless of the time of year. Instead, it’s a good idea to monitor various retailers and online platforms for restock announcements and promotional offers.
However, certain events like Black Friday or other holiday seasons may bring about unique bundles, discounts, or promotional deals specifically for the Xbox Series X. These bundles may include additional games, accessories, or exclusive limited editions. While quantities for such promotions might be limited, they can provide an opportunity to get more value for your purchase. See our guide to Xbox Series X prices for more info.
Choosing between the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S ultimately depends on your gaming preferences, budget, and specific requirements. Let’s compare the two consoles to help you make an informed decision:
1. Performance: The Xbox Series X is the more powerful option, offering native 4K gaming, higher graphical fidelity, and faster loading times. It has more advanced hardware, including a larger storage capacity. On the other hand, the Xbox Series S targets a lower price point and offers a less powerful performance, targeting 1440p resolution gaming and upscaling to 4K.
2. Price: The Xbox Series S is more affordable compared to the Xbox Series X. If budget is a significant factor for you, the Xbox Series S provides a cost-effective option while still delivering a next-generation gaming experience. For example, the Series S can play Starfield at 1440p 30fps (vs 4K 30fps on Series X).
3. Storage: The Xbox Series X comes with a larger internal storage capacity, allowing you to store more games directly on the console. The Xbox Series S, however, has a smaller storage capacity, which means you may need to manage your game library more actively or rely on external storage solutions.
4. Disc Drive: The Xbox Series X includes a disc drive, enabling you to play physical game discs and enjoy a wider range of media options, including Blu-ray and DVD playback. The Xbox Series S, in contrast, is a digital-only console, meaning you can only play games downloaded from the digital store.
5. Graphics and Performance: While both consoles support ray tracing, the Xbox Series X provides a more immersive and visually impressive experience due to its superior hardware capabilities. If you prioritize cutting-edge graphics and want the best performance available, the Xbox Series X is the preferable choice.
Consider your gaming preferences, budget, and whether you prioritize top-of-the-line performance or cost-effectiveness. If you have a 4K TV, want the most powerful console, and are willing to invest more, the Xbox Series X is the recommended option. If you have a lower budget, a 1080p or 1440p TV, and don’t mind sacrificing some performance, the Xbox Series S offers excellent value for money.
With how expensive gaming is getting in 2024, we’re trying to save you as much money as possible on the games and other tech you actually want to buy. We’ve got great deal roundups available for all major platforms such as Switch and Xbox, and keep these updated daily with brand new offers. If you’re trying to keep costs down while maintaining your favorite hobby, stay tuned for more incredible discounts.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
Lethal Company was one of last year’s surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they’re not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer’s next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It’s an “open-world, auditory text-based adventure” which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Palwoods and hunt large, electric yellow animals of entirely original design whose names rhyme with “peekaboo”, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have announced that they’re taking Palworld developers Pocketpair to court for “infringement of patent rights”.
Shambling out of the seventh-generation graveyard for its second remaster, Capcom at least deserves credit for bringing Dead Rising itself in line with accepted zombie lore. That is, it too is now officially a stubborn corpse that refuses to stay dead. However, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster earns credit for more than just that. Capcom has injected a series of smart tweaks to the gameplay that make surviving a zombie-infested mall less frustrating than it was 20 years ago, but it does so while still preserving the feel of the original’s challenging, time-limited experience. Combined with a fresh visual overhaul, the result is easily the best way to play what’s still the best Dead Rising game – even if the occasionally creaky combat is certainly showing its age through a modern lens.
Remasters and remakes of already strong video games can be a little hard to appraise. They can be fantastic yet inescapably inessential, like The Last of Us Part 1 – a remake of an existing, excellent remaster that was already hard to fault on a console just a single generation old. Alternatively, they can be literally nothing more than a small resolution bump, like the 2019 remaster of 2009’s Ghostbusters: The Video Game. I adore Ghostbusters but, aside from saving it from being marooned on PS3 on Sony’s side of the fence, what did re-publishing it as a bespoke product achieve that the ‘Enhanced’ 4K updates delivered to dozens of Xbox 360 games for free did not?
In fairness, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster makes a far clearer case for itself, because it isn’t just slightly better looking. Crucially, it’s also a better game to play.
For clarity, this is not a ground-up do-over in the same spirit as its undead Capcom cousins, though it is driven by the same RE Engine that powers all recent Resident Evil remakes. Cutscenes and conversations are all running on the same rigging, and it does largely feel like the 2006 classic is chugging away under the glossy surface most of the time.
It is a vast visual improvement, but that’s hardly a shocking revelation considering the 18-year-old source material. The increase in fidelity boosts the facial animations to a level that was virtually non-existent before. I don’t really have a position on Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s older and wearier Frank West. More dad bod, less heartthrob; it makes no meaningful difference to me. I am jealous of his shoulders, though, which seem slightly more immense this time around. Seriously, the bloke is built like a 4:3 man in a world of widescreen.
At any rate, it’s the world of Willamette Parkview Mall that remains the real star here. Exploring the detailed stores, each with their distinct themes and ranges of weaponisable products, was deeply nostalgic – doubly so considering how much I desperately miss CD and DVD shops, and Willamette has four of ’em.
It’s not without defects, though. Pop-in is particularly prevalent in the outdoor Leisure Park area, which is disappointing. There are also occasional textures that are consistently late to sharpen up, and some literal signs of AI-upscaled nonsense (on a door plaque that’s overtly closed in our faces during an early cutscene, no less) do make me wonder about how many human eyeballs passed over these assets on their way into the finished product.
However, the more important tweaks in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster concern how it feels rather than how it looks. While the original control scheme is still included, I warmed to the new controls instantly. I certainly couldn’t go back now.
The ability to move while aiming is a sizeable shift. Even though it makes cheesing some of the dopier bosses a lot easier, it’s a big part of what makes the new controls feel far less clunky. Special moves have been shifted to button presses rather than requiring expert manipulation of the right stick. On the flip side, answering radio calls and issuing commands to the survivors you have in tow has been moved to analogue stick presses, meaning we can continue moving in any direction without being interrupted. I found I could jog, carve a path through zombies, and bark commands at the moronic mallrats I’d mustered together without skipping a beat. It also helps that survivors are noticeably smarter than they were in the original. They’re not completely immune from pathfinding problems, and things begin to look quite janky when herding large groups, but it’s a tidy improvement overall.
Weapon durability is now illustrated, and navigation is also improved markedly. The original’s nebulous arrow has been replaced with a working compass and distance indicators, which help distinguish when objective locations are on different floors and make it clearer when fresh objectives are close by. It makes it a lot easier to see whether a newly noticed survivor is worth diverting for on, say, your current trip back to the security room. Combined with the new auto-save mechanic, it’s a real timesaver. I’ve picked up far larger groups of survivors in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster than I ever dared to back in 2006.
The constant loading times between areas are admittedly a bit draining in 2024, but the auto-saves that trigger upon passing between them are a game changer. Yes, it’s true a certain degree of frustration is part of the original Dead Rising’s DNA. It asked players to make difficult and timely decisions, settle on sometimes-unfortunate compromises, and improvise when things went wrong. That said, I think the new auto-save system is a fair and modern middle ground. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is easier because of it, but it does remain a rigidly time-sensitive experience that demands a considerable amount of plate spinning. If you do want to schlep all the way back from a save point as a matter of principle, there are now 20 save slots and you’re certainly free to play it that way. Personally, I’m okay with the challenge without the tedium.
In contrast, there are some changes that don’t work, including portions of the re-recorded voice acting. It’s good that all the survivor and radio dialogue is fully voiced now (although there are times where the survivor chatter sounds like a completely different person than you initially spoke to). However, some of the replacement performances for central characters are a little more stilted, which only tends to highlight the awkwardness of the script’s clumsiest lines.
Speaking of the script, there are also some slightly baffling changes in that regard, too – but none more so than the scrubbing of Cliff’s history as a Vietnam War veteran. To refresh, Cliff is the “psychopath” found in Crislip’s Home Saloon who’s suffered a complete break from reality; the horrors of the zombie outbreak have sent him directly back to the war. If there was a genuine concern here regarding trivialising PTSD amongst combat veterans, I’d get it, but Cliff is still overtly a military man. It just comes across like someone didn’t want Cliff to call Frank a “filthy communist.” That’s pretty inane censorship in a game that saw fit to leave, say, its hugely horny hostage-taking cop otherwise intact.
Of course, it’s hardly game breaking, but it’s a shame something so small has been prioritised over things that would’ve made Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster genuinely better. For instance, the prisoner psychopaths in the Humvee still respawn after a few hours. That always felt like a mistake (or, at a minimum, a cheap trick to pull on players) and it doesn’t make any sense. No other unique psychopaths respawn like that.
The elevator to the roof is eventually always still full of zombies. That was dumb then, and it’s still dumb. Having it filled with zombies occasionally would be a shock. As it is, it’s just tiresome, especially when all you need to do is dart in and spam interact to trigger the elevator anyway. As long as your survivors were close enough to the lift to begin with, you’ll all still appear safe on the empty roof regardless of how many zombies were in the lift. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster could’ve massaged that.
Then again, maybe it couldn’t have. Maybe some of that jank is too deeply baked into the original gameplay to be removed without breaking something else. I also guess it isn’t the only stuff that comes across as a little shonky by contemporary standards. We are talking about a game where you need to shoot a woman in the face with a sniper rifle until she calms down, or fill a man’s body with bullets until he runs away healthy, leaving your ally totally crippled with the one shot in the entire shootout that seemed to matter. Hey, it’s old. It’s how we used to do things.
