Microsoft Flight Simulator – MASSIVE Updates – Biggest Month Yet
This is the largest month ever for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. We’ve got a whole bunch of new content this month and that includes a sim update for the Red Bull Air Races, the PlayStation 5 launch, and unexpectedly the Stranger Things expansion for the Fly Sim. So, let’s start off with a rather nice bit of news. There is a brand new aircraft available for the sim. This is called the Boom XB1. It come along with SIM update 4 and it’s available completely free for everyone who’s got Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and that’s across all platforms. Now, if you enjoy Fast Planes, you’re going to like this one. Head on over to the marketplace, find it for free, and download it. You then be able to use it and get up to speeds of around about 750 mph. And you can see footage of that plane on the screen right here. Microsoft have stated that this is a digital twin of the real plane. So yeah, for being free, this one’s well worth checking out. And talking of speed, the latest update for Flight Sim includes another free update. This is the Red Bull Air Racers. Of course, these are world famous. They’re a real race that have been around for a couple of decades at this point, and Microsoft have finally added them into Flight Sim 2024. Now, you can access this through the activities menu. So, jump in there, and you’ll see a new Red Bull Air Races option. This will allow you to try a variety of different racing courses all around the world. And this includes locations such as Abu Dhabi, Budapest, Rio de Janeiro, Monument Valley, Spielberg, and they claim more locations in the future. So yeah, that means if you’re interested in new activities for Flight Sim, then you now have the Red Bull Air Races. Plenty of stuff to be getting on with. But it’s not just ending there because there is another activity that’s also been added in here. And for this one, you’re going to have to first go to the in-game marketplace and download it. Look for the Stranger Things update. Once it’s downloaded, you’ll find it in the activities menu, and it actually includes a variety of different activities. All of these are set within the Stranger Things universe, specifically in an accurate recreation of Hawkins. You’ll take control of the helicopter, Bella UH1HE, under the guidance of the character from Stranger Things, Murray himself. So you’ll go through some training here. This is the first option. You don’t have to do training, but it’s available if you want to do it. I myself haven’t used the helicopters a whole lot in flight sim, so this was a good opportunity to jump in and get a bit of a refresher. And if you find helicopters in the flight sim a little bit too challenging, don’t worry too much because a new update in update 4, sim update 4, enabled helicopter vortex ring state protection. What does this do? Well, it can automatically adjust the collective to help prevent entry into VRS during excessive descent or rapid deceleration, essentially making the whole process of flying helicopters that much easier if you want to keep this option enabled. Elsewhere in the Stranger Things update, you’ll find five brand new missions. These are generally centered around helping or rescuing residents of Hawkins using the helicopter. From what I can see, each of these missions gets progressively more intense. And ultimately, you’ll end up in some pretty grim locations. And yes, you’ll also find that some demigorgans will be causing you some issues. Now, some people may feel this is a little bit out of place from a sim like Microsoft Flight Simulator. But over the years, Microsoft have added in some pretty interesting content over that time. That includes the Pelican spaceship from the Halo game series, as well as the Ornithopter from Dune. And if you want to try out something a little bit more relaxed, you do have a helicopter tour of Hawkins itself, where you’ll find 40 around about 40 different locations from the TV series. And yes, apparently this includes the upside down as well. Right, moving on, we come to something quite different. This is the launch of the flight sim on the PlayStation 5. Now, I know a lot of people have always wanted to try this option out. You’ve had uh access to the PlayStation 5 console, but not a Microsoft platform. So, this is the first time you’re probably going to get the chance to really try it. Now, it launched on the PlayStation 5 just yesterday as of this recording. That’s the 8th of December with early access beginning for the deluxe premium editions on the 3rd of December. So, a little further back. And incidentally, uh this is pretty nice because you can connect a mouse and keyboard to your console and that will make things such as navigating around the menus that much easier. You don’t have to use that, of course, but it is available if you want to use it. There’s also going to be a PSVR 2 option for this. So, you’ll be able to play on VR on the PlayStation 5, although that update isn’t active just yet. It’s coming later in 2026. In terms of general performance, as you can see on the screen right here, it does work pretty nice, especially in open locations such as this. But people have expressed some concerns and some disappointment in terms of performance in some of the more builtup areas. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s no crossplay between the PC and Xbox editions of the SIM. So, if you have the uh PC version and you want to crossplay with PlayStation 5 players, then that’s not going to be a thing. Also, keep in mind that if you have purchased anything on the Xbox or PC versions of this sim, these purchases do not carry over to the PlayStation 5. For all intents and purposes, the PlayStation edition is completely separate, completely cut off and isolated from the PC and Xbox versions. That’s both in terms of multiplayer as well as in terms of your user account. You don’t need an Xbox account to uh play this. And also in terms of the marketplace, all of these are completely separate things. Now, in terms of user sentiment, this seems to be fairly mixed. I do see a lot of people out there who are quite happy. There’s quite a lot of positive coverage about this because yes, this does look pretty nice on the consoles as you can see from the footage here. That’s with the obvious caveat that this is never going to be as good as pretty or as uh performative as what you may find on a high-end PC, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting that from a PlayStation 5. I’m sure most people are just happy to have access to it. That said, there are some a few negative comments out there where people aren’t quite so happy with how things have turned out. Generally, this comes down to loading times, a few bugs, as well as some crashes. But yeah, hopefully these are all things which should be fixed over the coming days and weeks. By no means am I excusing these here. I really feel that games at this point should be launching without these type of issues, but it really seems to becoming a part of the process, unfortunately, and that’s by no means a good thing. Ultimately though, it seems that the uh launch of the PlayStation 5 edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator is working pretty nice overall. And then we come to SIM update 4. Now, this is a pretty big patch, a pretty big update aside from introducing the Red Bull Air Races and coinciding with the release of the new Boom XB1 aircraft. What this does is bring quite a lot of fixes, some improvements to the game, some stability fixes, as well as a few changes to the game overall. So, these are things that are often quality of life changes. Things such as adding a loading spinner in the avatar creator page, adding a new graphic setting on consoles to display or hide seat belts, and then this one’s quite nice. Added helicopter vortex ring protection assistance, which we touched on earlier. Then there’s a lot of fixes here, a lot of stability improvements. fixed a rare crash during boot video when using FSR, optimized grass rendering, performance optimization of input systems, fixed a crash in the tissue simulation, and it goes on and on like that. There’s literally dozens, if not hundreds of fixes overall. So then, if we take all of these things collectively together, what we get is a package that’s actually a vast improvement over this time last year. A lot of new content here, the Red Bull Air Races, the Stranger Things expansion, which gives some five very nice repeatable missions, as well as a new area to explore, and of course, the PlayStation 5 relaunch, not to mention all of these fixes coming in the latest Sim update. So, let me know what your favorite thing here is about all this in the comments section below. Which missions or races are you going to be trying out yourself? Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks for watching this video all the way through. Do take care and I catch you next time.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is seeing its biggest month ever, with loads of new content available for the sim. These include the Red Bull Air Races, a Stranger Things DLC, Sim Update 4 and the release of the PlayStation 5 version of MSFS2024. There’s also a new plane available free to all players of the sim.
More on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 can be found here:
https://www.flightsimulator.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-stranger-things-expansion/
Music by Epidemic Sound