Microsoft Flight Simulator(MSFS) released Summer 2020 and is going strong to this day 2 years later, This sim features possibly the best photo textures and building and fauna generation. Scenery is based on Bing Maps, it shows roads and buildings placed where they should be, lots of cities feature custom buildings in their respective central business districts, Cleveland being one of them, Im waiting on Akron to find its way into an update with buildings that represent the city. You can basically sight see around your neighborhood and see a basic house modeled where you would expect it to be, sometimes in the general shape of the house from above.

MSFS features a wide variety of included aircraft in 3 tiers, Standard, Deluxe, Premium Deluxe, each tear includes a selection of aircraft, if you buy Deluxe, you get deluxe aircraft you also get the standard game aircraft, If you buy Premium Deluxe, you get Premium Deluxe as well as Standard and Deluxe, There are also specially designed airports included in their respective tiers.

Third party developers havent been shy about producing aircraft and airports as well as game enhancing tools, Both payware and freeware, There is an in-game marketplace where many addons can be purchased, but some devs stilll decide to sell on their own sites and selected Flight Sim stores. flightsim.to is currently the main go-to for freeware addons as well as they are venturing into the payware world. Before buying addon aircraft, please make sure to read the descriptions of some of them, Once-renowned devs are putting out aircraft which do not include flight decks, Some call them scams but they usually list what they have and do not have included, the ones without flight decks are more for third person view flying, There is also some shovelware addons being sold which may only include basic features.

MSFS is also available on the current Xbox Series X/S consoles and features many marketplace addons that can be found on PC version. MSFS can be purchased outright or paid with a monthly subscription via Xbox Gamepass. MSFS is available on the MS Windows Store as well as Steam.

MSFS will have a 40th Anniversary Edition slated for November 2022 release, it will introduce official support for helicopters and gliders as well as a much anticipated Airbus A300 study level aircraft made by Inibuilds.

MSFS is expected to be a 10 year project with official update support for 10 years, Several updates to the game thus far have included updated regions around the world with detailed cities and a few airports each.

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Asobo(MSFS devs) Have released an expansion pack named after the recent Top Gun movie which includes missions and 2 aircraft models for free. There is also a payware expansion pack named for the Reno Air Races which includes a race course and 4 aircraft classes of different aircraft, You could buy the entire expansion pack or single aircrafts of your choosing.

MSFS is also Vatsim friendly and devs are currently working on AI aircraft models for traffic use in base game and Vatsim use.

MSFS is an always online game, Which means you need to keep an internet connection while playing it. The game is around (currently) 180 gigabytes in size with the option to precache mapped areas of your choosing.

X-Plane 12 is looking to release sometime in the near future, X-Plane, while not featuring the same level of eye-candy as MSFS, It is more renowned for their flight models and physics.

DCS: World is the popular of modern military simulation featuring well designed and well featured aircraft modules using mostly publicly available manuals bordering on study level.

Flight simulator hardware is most likely at the best it ever has been for the general market, You have the lower end Logitech which bought out the Saitek line of flight sticks and yoke and rudder pedals.

Thrustmaster has released an Airbus edition flight stick and throttle quadrant with the ability to add on an additional throttle quadrant for 4 engine operations as well as an air brake lever and flap lever, Thrustmaster has also released a Boeing style yoke and throttle quadrant(Boeing TCA), the yoke is designed to look like a 787 yoke and its main feature is that the yoke moves like one could expect on a yoke equipped airliner, not the old tried and true back and forth yoke seen on earlier entry-level yokes, It is also Xbox compatible.

Honeycomb Aeronautical has come into the world of Flight Simming with their own product line which started with a yoke(Alpha) followed by a very versatile throttle quadrant(Bravo) which comes out of box equipped to do 2-4 engine airliner as well as single to twin engine general aviation, it is a 6 lever quadrant, the Honeycomb Bravo Quadrant even has a modding community behind it which had the ability to 3d print lever handles, Honeycomb is currently working on rudder pedals(Charlie) and a HOTAS flight stick(Tango Foxtrot). Honeycomb is in the process of making their hardware Xbox compatible.

Turtlebeach has also entered the market with their Velocity One yoke and throttle set which features Xbox compatibility, 4 lever throttle quadrant and a 3 pull lever TPM. The Boeing TCA and Velocity One feature rudder buttons in their respective yokes.

VPC and Virpl are leaders in the flight stick category. There are also more expensive hardware options for yokes and pedals and throttles and radio and control modules.