The wintry new environments briefly feature in Microsoft’s 2020 holiday commercial, which sees a pair of pooches take to the skies in between causing a ruckus in Minecraft and blowing up John Halo. Sure, alright.
Arriving next Tuesday, December 22nd, Microsoft Flight Sim’s long-anticipated VR update is bringing more than just the ability to slap a pair of plastic goggles over your face for a more immersive flight. To celebrate the season, Asobo’s digital Earth will receive “real-time snow and true-to-life ice coverage” - which I have to imagine means you’ll be seeing snowfall where it happens, as it happens, rather than just a blanket white overlay across the entire planet. While that means I can hope for a sprinkling of icing at best in fake-Scotland, you should soon see overwhelming snowfall over your mountain-caps and northern-most (or southern-most!) cities. That includes Pittsburgh, which gets a brief showcase in the above vid, and next week’s update will even let you swoop overhead in those two new pup-themed plane liveries. No dog pilots, though. That’d be silly. All this was announced in an end-of-year post for MSFS. Included is a nifty little infographic logging the virtual flight industry’s year so far. Somehow, between 2 million pilots and 50 million total flights, only 72% of the Earth’s surface has been flown over - probably because everyone keeps visiting New York, which is by far the most popular destination. The post closes up with confirmation that we’ll see 4 or 5 more World Updates next year, as well as “a few other surprises”. Are we talking about dog pilots, Microsoft? Because I think we should be talking about dog pilots.
