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Mod communities tend to follow predictable arcs, so it’s often possible to predict what work users will create long before it exists. For that reason I thought to myself today: Microsoft Flight Simulator has been out for a while, I wonder if anyone has made a mod that lets you drive a car around its world yet.
There’s no video of it by its maker MrFace, so here’s YouTuber AviationSimulation driving around various locales for an hour with (I think) no narration:
As I say in the headline: it looks just good enough. Juuuuuuust. Flight Simulator’s recreation of planet earth is astonishing and gets better with each update, but it’s designed to be viewed from thousands of feet in the sky. Buildings and vistas still look pretty good from ground level, but you quickly spot the errors in its tree placements and the blurriness of its ground textures. There’s also only limited collision, meaning you’ll crash into buildings but can drive through cars and trees. Don’t expect Forza, is what I’m saying.
But for me, it looks good enough that I’m considering re-downloading all two billion gigabytes of the game. I’m always interested in seeing a game world from a new perspective, and I’ve always loved driving games that recreate real places. How could you not want to drive around all the Flight Sim cities created from photogrammetry?
What I would really like, of course, is for Flight Simulator’s developers, Asobo, to do this themselves. They previously made Fuel, a late-00’s racing game which took place in a miniature, post-apocalyptic United States which was partly created from satellite data, and I am ready and waiting for a Fuel 2 which uses Flight Sim’s vastly improved aerial scans for something similar.
That will probably never happen, but you can download the MSFS driving mod by MrFace here, and we provided instructions on how to install them alongside our picks for the best Microsoft Flight Simulator mods.