Video games are big, and as new technology supports greater visual fidelity, they’re only bound to get bigger. That’s why it’s always nice when the developers behind bulky games like Microsoft Flight Simulator figure out ways to decrease those download sizes.
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s base file size was reduced from over 170 GB to just 83 GB in its latest update, a trimming down of more than half. This puts the flight sim around the size of Final Fantasy XV, for example, and a far cry from notoriously hard drive space-hungry games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Red Dead Redemption 2.
The update also brings a variety of gameplay adjustments to Microsoft Flight Simulator, the importance of which largely escapes me. Let’s just pick out a few: Hey, a bug that sometimes saw the AI disable the autothrottle on all planes has been fixed. That seems like a big deal. Oh, and the weather radar now displays precipitation instead of cloud coverage. Pretty cool.
You can see the full list of changes on the game’s official site.