Microsoft Flight Simulator's world update 6 delayed into September
Germany, Austria and Switzerland are getting polished
Microsoft Flight Simulator was released a little over a year ago, has been updated substantially since, and developers Asobo are planning at least another year of significant additions. The next to come, World Update 6, will focus on Germany, Austria and Switzerland, although Asobo said this week that it has been delayed by two weeks until September 7th.
"In order to ensure that World Update 6 reaches a very high level of quality, we have decided to move back the release date to September 7th," Asobo wrote in the patch notes for a smaller update. The next major update will feature 4 new hand-crafted airports, nearly 100 points of interest, "and new discovery flights, landing challenges, and bush trips."
It will also feature new cities upgraded using photogrammetry, the scanning technique used to make Flight Simulator's cities as accurate as possible, as opposed to the algorithmic guesswork that populates a lot of smaller towns.
There's a lot to admire about the way Asobo have continued to manage Flight Simulator, not just with the frequency and quality of updates but in posts like the one linked above. There's details of not just the patch, but the status of their bug and feature trackers, and highlights of community-made videos, screenshots, and free mods. The Flight Sim community kept the series alive for years when it had no official custodian, and I'm happy to see them being well served.
Among the 'Feedback Snapshot' section of the post, you'll find some features currently marked as "Planned" for 2022. Those include helicopters, with continued world updates to Europe seemingly stretching as far as 2023. Top stuff.