Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is already one of the biggest hits of the year, offering a whole world for its pilots to explore in a year when travel is otherwise limited. With such an enormous world to build, Microsoft Flight Sim relied on algorithms to generate most of it, resulting in some interesting new landmarks and other unusual sights. You can check out some examples here that have been documented by players.
In one case, the simulator downgraded the Queen’s house, and transformed Buckingham Palace in London into a fairly distressed block of flats. While The Shard and the O2 Arena in London were modeled and added manually, it seems that Buckingham Palace did not receive the same treatment.
Likewise, while Sydney Harbor sports a loving recreation of the Opera House, the iconic Harbor Bridge has been replaced by a much more generic highway bridge.
An error caused a reasonably tall building in Melbourne to appear, shooting into the sky.
The error was later corrected by another @openstreetmap user, MA, meanwhile, Microsoft took an export of the data and used it to build Flight Simulator 2020. The result … this incredible monolith (2/2) pic.twitter.com/wXKBK03Gcd
– Liam O 🦆 (@liamosaur) August 20, 2020
Edinburgh Castle in Scotland does not escape the divine wrath of Flight Simulator.
A bridge in Portland contains a wallpaper paste of trucks.
And apparently the game does not really know what to do with certain types of leaves.
My bad Microsoft Flight Simulator joke is that it does not know how to handle palms, so Southern California is full of these horrible obelisks that jump out of the sidewalk like so many teeth. pic.twitter.com/OqkmuSfimn
– Hayden Dingman (@haydencd) August 19, 2020
But perhaps best of all, Melbourne, Australia sports an impossibly tall and thin skyscraper that greatly invades your airspace.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, a bizarre eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne’s North as a suburban Australian version of the Citadel of Half-Life 2, and I’m all for it. pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg
– Alexander Muscat (@alexandermuscat) August 19, 2020
Players on Reddit have collected a number of similar landmarks, such as the ancient Roman Arenes de Nîmes, which also has a few terrace buildings in its center for good measure.
The longest statue on the planet, the 182m Statue of Unity in India, has also been replaced by … well, not really much.
The golden Shwedagon pagoda in Myanmar is barely recognizable in play, and even more strangely, some of the green-covered pagodas that surround it have been transformed into enormous apartment blocks.
While it may be understandable that MSF’s world building technology was a bit confused by some of the more uniquely designed monuments in the world, it also seems to have a tendency to place buildings where they do not belong, such as in a football stadium, or even an airship.
And then there’s … what it is I’m.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is now available for PC via Steam or the Microsoft Store for $ 60, or via Xbox Game Pass. Check here to see if your PC can handle this mammoth game.
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