Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is coming in November, and it's bringing blimps, balloons, and somehow even deer photography with it

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 â€“ Xbox Games Showcase 2024 - YouTube

Lots and lots of jobs in the sky: that's what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 promises. Don't get me wrong, flying around in full-scale simulation of the entire planet is amazing on its own. But the next iteration of the 30+ year franchise will add some much-needed structure with a bunch of cool-looking jobs you can do in planes, choppers, blimps, hot air balloons, and more.

For those who enjoy simulating commercial flights, here's something to be excited about: passengers. Instead of just parking next to the gate and sorta pretending, the trailer shows passengers walking down the jetway and actually boarding the plane. It also shows the pilot—that's you—walking along the tarmac before the flight. You have a body now. Congratulations!

More sky jobs are shown: an air ambulance landing to help an injured victim get to a hospital, a VIP charter service in a sleek private plane, crop dusting in a helicopter, and even one of those little planes that pulls banners ads across the sky at the beach. I mean, I sorta hate those planes in real life, but I'm interesting in piloting one in MFS 2024.

Things kinda go off the rails toward the end of the trailer as Microsoft seems to be telling you to do anything you want. Even telling you get out of the plane and do stuff on the ground.

Land in a field, get out of the plane, and take pictures of deer in the woods! We don't care! Buzz the giant Jesus statue in Brazil with a blimp! Why the hell not? Take a hot air balloon directly over Paris and point at stuff! Parisians will love you for that.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be out on PC Game Pass day one, as well as on Steam, on November 19.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.