Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 includes every airport on Earth

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 already looks to be an immensely impressive flight simulator, but developer Asobo has explained how the title is going above and beyond to create the quintessential flight simulator game.

Revealed through a new developer diary on the game’s official YouTube account, Asobo revealed that the game will recreate every airport on Earth.

Of these airports, 37,000 have been manually edited from their high-resolution Bing Maps scans – plus advanced Microsoft Azure generation – for added realism. 80 of the world’s most iconic airports will also be given “extra attention” to fully recreate them.

These 80 airports will be given unique properties to bring them to life within Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This could be with from unique vegetation outside Heathrow to a better recreation of John F Kennedy International Airport’s hustle-and-bustle.

“In order to reach a new level of reality in flight simulation, we needed a new approach,” explained lead game designer Sven Mestas. “That’s why we decided to innovate by editing airports from real satellite pictures.

“This technique involves editing each airport manually. This means that particular attention to detail has been given to every single one of them to bring them a step closer to reality.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator is an impressive-looking title, but it’s also an important one for Microsoft Azure. With the game’s reliance on streaming Azure data constantly, this will be one of the few games that use Microsoft’s servers to their full advantage.

With the undeniable failure of Crackdown 3’s cloud-based destruction technology, this is Azure’s time to shine.