Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s career mode uses AI voices

The game's massive scale requires a very data-driven approach to every aspect, including career mode dialogue.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

If you fly a Cessna 172 at cruise speed, it will take you 40 years without a break to see the entire planet in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Well, I say the entire planet, but I’m not counting the oceans here. You can – and people do – take a commercial transatlantic flight from London to LA and fly there in 11-12 hours of real-time. 

The scale of this simulation is mind-blowing. Sure, we’ve had games that give us entire galaxies and the distances between them, but nothing has attempted to capture every city, sleepy village, and wonder of our own Earth. With Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the developers are taking this even further. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

As well as introducing animals in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, there’s also a whole new career mode. Pick any non-commercial airport on the planet and start as a propeller plane pilot before working your way through licenses for various other competencies – fire and rescue, crop dusting, stunt planes, VIP charters, aerial photography, and more – while buying new craft for your fleet and running a successful aviation business. 

Because of that scale, Microsoft and Asobo have to take a very data-driven approach to every aspect of the game. 

“There is no way you can QA every single piece of the planet,” Sebastian Wloch, CEO and Co-founder of Asobo Studio explains. “We try to find every single type of biome. We pick up areas on the planet that are representative of this sort of fauna and take the temperature to see, for example, if Mediterranean vegetation behaves correctly. Are there too many conifers? Are there not enough? What is the density? How tall they are depending on the altitude? 

“We can run a program that basically takes pictures of every single airport during the night. There are more than 40,000 airports, so it’s quite easy to ask the machine to compare the screenshot you’ve just done to the screenshot you made last week.” 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

This ethos spills into the career mode in a controversial new way – AI voices. Since you can start your career at tens of thousands of locations in every language and country on the planet, under any weather condition, with any flight plan, there’s no way Microsoft could have voiced every line of dialogue in the game. Even as a hardcore generative AI hater, it’s difficult to argue with that, though I personally would rather read text blocks than listen to these robotic humans spit out machine talk. 

• Read more: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 preview

Career mode, along with improvements to physics, wind simulation, and its digital recreation of Earth make Flight Simulator 2024 somehow even better than it was when it launched in 2020. I just hope this one decision doesn’t undermine all the good work the studio is doing, both inside the game and outside, where the teams are helping to map the Earth, from its helipads to its natural wonders.