Taking to the skies in the comprehensive VR update.
It has been a remarkable year for Microsoft Flight Simulator, the technically stunning and incredibly detailed celebration of all things in aviation that are taking the simulator into the mainstream, but the best has been left to the last. The long-awaited RV update, released earlier this week, does everything you expect and more.
As it’s starting, I won’t be able to go into all the details until the beginning of next year, and sorry for the lack of capture – I spent yesterday in a tangle of cables while getting involved in the complicated business of setting up a new headset, as well as being tangled. in strands of Christmas lights while I place the tree – but suffice it to say that Flight Sim in VR works very well, the immersion it adds takes everything to the next level.
Having initially been programmed to debut on the Reverb G2, which I am testing, it is commendable that the update is now available on all headphones. In fact, convenience is included in this update, with VR mode enabled or disabled at any time at the press of a button. It requires a fair amount, of course – running on a 3070, I can’t get very close to the G2’s full optical resolution while maintaining a stable frame rate – but it’s easy to find a sweet spot where Microsoft’s splendor Flight Sim isn’t very diluted.
And what you get is immeasurable. It is similar, in its own way, to what you get when playing an RV racing game, only that it now helps to hit the track approaches instead of the corners of the curves. This helps you appreciate the overwhelming details of the Microsoft Flight Simulator cockpits and cabins (there is something almost spiritual about seeing the interior of a 747 in VR for the first time), so it’s a small pity that there is no support for the VR controller that can allow you to fiddle with the controls. This is due in a future update, remember – but it does mean that the already bewildering task of flying a commercial plane is a little more complicated, unless you know where to find all those important keys while using an RV headset.
Be fun for a passenger, though, and even on smaller planes, jump out of the pilot’s chair and return to a window seat. Just watching the world go by is one of the great pleasures of Microsoft Flight Sim, something more true than ever when you push your face against the virtual glass and look for glimpses of the landscape between the clouds.
That heightened sense of familiar emotion for those who used to devote themselves over long distances is there in all its glory – which may explain the tingling I felt as I slid an Airbus A320 home over France’s snow-covered field as I approached Charles de Gaulle, an incredible glimpse of a wider world that really started to look like Christmas. Which is almost happening, so sorry to be brief. But what a nice gift from Microsoft and Asobo – and I can’t wait to find out more.