As open worlds go, it doesn’t get much better than a 1:1 scale replica of actual planet Earth. Slap on a flight model good enough to get the nod from serious aviators, and heartstopping visuals that remind you why you’re still paying off that GPU, and you’ve got Flight Simulator 2024 - the best flight sim around, and it’s available on PC Game Pass.
Flight sims used to be tedious things, once upon a time, all squinting at 2D altimeters and peering down at 256x256 textures of some grass. Then Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 arrived with showstopping graphics and some clever streaming tech which - let’s not even pretend we’re going to try to understand - but the end result is the whole world, rendered via Bing Maps data pulled in dynamically via the cloud and some smart procedural elements to populate 3D objects like buildings and foliage.
