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Microsoft’s eagerly awaited Flight Simulator 2024 pre-orders have gone live and if you thought the top-of-the-range Civilization VII edition was expensive, your eyes are going to start watering here.
The game’s Aviator Edition comes in at a wallet-crushing $199.99, and while it is jam-packed with as much content as any flight simmer might ever need, wow, just wow.
Even the Standard Edition (which, to be fair will be included on Game Pass for PC and Xbox) is $70, with two more intermediate editions – the Deluxe Edition and the Premium Deluxe Edition costing $99.99 and $129.99 respectively.
The price of AAA video games has crept up steadily over the last year or so at a time when the industry has been decimated by cost-cutting layoffs across the board.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s Standard Edition will come with 70 different aircraft to fly and 150 upgraded airports, whereas the Aviator Edition will pack all the content included in the other versions as well as 30 aircraft that were released for the last iteration between 2021 and 2024. This will bring the total of aircraft to 125 for Aviator purchasers.
Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann said, “We are making this new simulator for the community, and we are working directly with the community and it is through this fantastic collaboration that MSFS 2024 is able to take flight simulation to the next level,”
“We can basically get every rock on Earth now; it’s unbelievable,” Neumann added. “We updated the aerial imagery for the entire world, and we set up a team of specialists that gather digital elevation maps from across the planet. The result of these last four years of work is that we now have an unprecedented level of ground detail. Nobody else has anything like this.”
All pre-orders of the game get the DeHaviland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft immediately unlocked for Microsft Flight Simulator (2020) should you have that installed.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 releases on 19th November for PC and Xbox consoles and can be pre-ordered now.
