Microsoft Flight Simulator Update Reduces Game Size by Over 80 GB

[Tsing]

Image: Microsoft



Microsoft Flight Simulator is a relatively massive game that weighs in at over 170 GB. Thanks to a new update (1.16.2.0) released by the developers at Asobo Studio, who decided to perform some optimizations, Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s base installation now only costs 83 GB of disk space. That’s an admirable reduction of nearly 90 GB. Microsoft Flight Simulator’s new Sim Update IV also introduces a long line of improvements and bug fixes for the game, which include adjustments to Live Air Traffic, weather radar, and autopilot.









Some packages in your community folder may not have been updated and, as a result, may have an unexpected impact on the title’s performance and behavior. Please move your community package(s) to another folder before relaunching the title if you suffer from stability issues or long loading times. We performed some...

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[Brian_B]

Now, I don't play this game, nor do I know exactly what the patch addresses...

But on first glance - if someone shipped a game with over 50% bloat, and it later gets cut back out after release... the person who did that initial release should be fired. That's a HUGE delta, and you'd think something that big would be caught in some level of QA/QC. They ~did~ ship a physical edition ... 10 discs... half of which was just patched out. And even beyond that, even for downloads, which we like to think of as "free" - aren't really free. That's a lot of data that had to get moved around.

I'm glad to see they got it fixed - but wow. It blows my mind that something that egregious was allowed to ship.

 

[Nanobot]

Wait, Microsoft put out something bloated and not properly “finished”?

 

[MadMummy76]

The game is already streaming a ton of data from online, maybe they moved more data server side.

 

[AntiQuark]

They probably had too large a performance penalty decompressing assets and held back full compression until they solved it.