Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to take a few years off from gaming and peek back through the curtains once you've left? Microsoft Flight Simulator often makes us feel that way. In its scope and fidelity, it seems to come from a future where a realistic Earth and the freedom to explore it are commonplace. A time when you could hop on an airplane and fly over your own city under the same weather conditions and lighting that you see outside your window. That is exactly what "open world" means.

How dramatic that the Microsoft Flight Simulator series is back after several years under the one-sided control of Dovetail's DLC, and that people will be talking about the impossible details of the 1:1 world map for years to come. We will read retrospectives on how this software has changed environmental design, and we will walk through other games that utilize petabytes of real map data and cloud AI grunt as a matter of course.

This is a seismic moment for PC gaming. What is clear, however, is that this is just the beginning of Microsoft Flight Simulator's journey. It is a moment in a roadmap that will include regular monthly content updates and, inevitably, should also include fixing a few technical issues. The release date has arrived, but whether it represents the launch of a finished product or an arbitrary break in the road to full completion is debatable.

The standard version includes a total of 20 planes, consisting of three airliners, two jets, and 15 props. With any one of them, you can stand on any runway in the world, fly through the sky, and recreate the region below with amazing accuracy, a terrifying, terrifying moment for anyone who has invested in FSX's scenery add-on packs.

This is a premise with appeal far beyond the usual scope of a flight sim. Who wouldn't want to fly around in a playable 4K light-mapped version of Bing Maps, with voluminous clouds and incredible weather effects? Who wouldn't want to resist the urge to search for their own home (I haven't succeeded in finding mine yet, but the search continues)? This speaks to a much broader audience than the previous 30+ years of the series.

On the game side, the structure to your experience is only a whisper, and you are implicitly invited to invent your own adventures. Career advancement exists only insofar as you complete flight school and take on landing challenges and bush flying, some of which provide an excellent slice of curated content, with leaderboard elements that give it the addictiveness of a chocolate digestif. But you won't be spending 100 hours on it.

Instead, you draw a dark tourism tour on a map of the world, ticking off Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk polygons, and the Dilatov Pass. You check off every Formula 1 circuit on the racing calendar. And you will have a great time. That said, it's a lot of work to explore an entire planet.

In short, it's a simulator for those interested in flying, and a magical virtual tourist portal for those interested in peering into meal mines with pad-operated props. The dividing line between the two is the method of operation.

Traditionally, the simulation community responds to an influx of casuals, like the locals in the pubs of American London dressed as werewolves. The simulation model is more detailed than ever, and the game settings allow users to switch between "modern" and "legacy" models to try it out. Its realism is scalable, allowing for stress-free virtual sightseeing with the Xbox controller, or full power simulation with HOTAS and Yoke.

Considering the plethora of features needed to fly an airplane, Xbox pad pilots are well served here. Rudder and trim adjustments are oversensitive by default, but can be easily corrected in the options menu. It seems silly to control such an exacting physics model with the pad, but not only does it work, it feels great.

However, setting up HOTAS and some cockpit panels is more difficult. By default, the game double-maps certain features to my Logitech X56. It's easy to fix in the menus, but it took me a few takeoff attempts to figure out which controls cancel each other out. But once everything is adjusted and the plane is in the air, using HOTAS is pretty magical.

Its approach to teaching you how to fly an airplane is that of a classroom, not a teacher: how to set up a flight plan with ATC, how to power up an airliner from scratch, how to set the VOR vector to cruise altitude, and how to make an ILS approach to land at your destination, Everything you need to learn is right here. They just don't teach you any of it.

I get it. Flight school will teach you the basics in eight lessons, from taxiing to the runway to takeoff, VOR navigation, and landing in a sturdy little Cessna 152. But for the novice, there is a vast amount of unknowns that one would not think to search YouTube tutorials for. Because you don't know it exists, and you don't even know why you need to use it in the first place; ATC is left largely untouched in the tutorials, and navigation is not explained in enough detail to move you from flight school to a custom flight plan. All the game tells us is that the pilot who flew the last long-distance flight sat in front of the yoke for hours, making small adjustments step by step. This problem will not last long, but it will not be the game itself that will solve it, but the content creators in the community.

However lost you may feel staring at a mass of flashing warning lights in the captain's seat, you are not alone. Each time you go through your pre-flight checklist, the layout of the cockpit becomes a little more clear in your mind. A few hours later, without a second thought, you're cranking up the crash level and setting the source to BATT.

If the complexity of the simulation is a bit of a barrier to getting started, the technicalities of Microsoft Flight Simulator are barbed wire at the door. The first problem is the installation, which downloads a 500 MB client with a full 90 GB installation. Once the installation is complete, the game installed on an i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, RTX 2080 TI, and SSD takes about 3 minutes to reach the main menu after pressing "Play" and the same system can produce about 25 fps in large cities and major airports at 1600p ultra settings It is possible to do this.

In reality, this preset is a bit future-proof. However, while the video quality is certainly scalable, the performance does not scale proportionally. This means that the landing at JFK airport still falters no matter which preset I use, including low, which on my system generally produces 30-35 fps in urban areas and a more stable 60 fps in the wilderness. Crashes are also fairly routine on my system, with immediate CTDs when devices are unplugged or plugged in, and seemingly infrequent but frequent crashes in scenes where the frame rate drops. At the time of this writing, a few days after its release, Nvidia's game-compatible drivers have made a slight improvement in FPS performance. Frame rate dips are generally annoying, but here they interfere with the ability to control the plane. Landing requires responsiveness and light input, but you can't land properly if you're looking at it in flip-book-o-vision.

No matter how frustrating the performance issues are, there is a voice in your head that says, 'Give me a minute to render the whole world. There is a voice in your head that says, 'Is that enough? Still, it is true that low frame rates affect your ability to fly the plane, and on most systems, you simply can't get a consistent 60 fps by turning the settings down to a lower preset. In other news: The PC gaming community has found a new Crysis.

Its annoyances are noticeable, but forgivable, in the shadow of Microsoft Flight Simulator's amazing achievements. The poor frame rate is no reason to miss out on the chance to explore the earth in a way that games have never been able to do before, and the real payoff is the slow and deliberate process of getting to grips with the planes. Just don't expect perfection from day one.