Microsoft Flight Simulator is a big, meaty game; the Steam page says it requires at least 150 GB of drive space, and the actual download size is even larger. Large games come with the territory in this exciting digital age, but even so, that's a heck of a lot of space for someone with a slow or unstable Internet connection.

Fortunately for all of us (and especially those with poor Internet connections), the latest update cuts the size of the initial download in half or less, from over 170GB to just 83GB. Microsoft did not reveal exactly how they pulled off this pants-tightening magic, saying only that they "performed several optimizations to the first full download of the title."

I checked for myself, and sure enough, it was shrunk as promised. The first Steam download weighs in at just over 700 MB, and once this is activated, the launcher downloads another 81 GB of data to complete the installation. This is still quite a bit of download, but a big improvement over what it used to be.

Another major change is the reduction in bandwidth usage for weather data, which could lead to improved in-game performance. As mentioned last year, Flight Sim uses various streams of data to achieve "realistic" weather, air traffic, and satellite information, especially when there are other things consuming data in the background, such as downloads and Netflix, all of which can cause frame rate may be reduced. The patch notes do not specify the amount of reduction, but every little bit helps.

The patch introduces a number of changes related to navigation, weather, planes, and of course a number of bug fixes related to the game and its editor. There is also a warning that VR users may experience a crash when exiting VR mode: the developers are not entirely sure why, but speculate that the OpenXR preview runtime v106 may be affected. Full patch notes can be found at flightsimulator.com.