At a time when games can have patches bigger than most other games (looking at you Modern Warfare!) I didn’t really want Microsoft to step up and make you have to consider building your own data center to store your games but it looks like that’s what you’ll soon be facing with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Having decided to try it out via Game Pass on my PC I had the pre-load ready to go weeks ago and was ready to get my HOTAS setup plugged in, anticipating I’d soon be flying over my house and crashing into landmarks but that was before the game told me it needed to download another 100GB of data. All up it’s apparently around the 150GB size. Once the game is installed it’ll happily play offline however if you want to take advantage of the best the game offers expect to also see it stream a lot of data too (careful if you have a download cap). Unfortunately it’s the price gamers will need to pay if they want to see the world at this level of detail. I still have plenty of downloading to go and I’ve been doing this for a few hours already…

The video below shows how much the series has changed technically over the years and is worth checking out not only from a game perspective but from a technology one too. There’s 40 years of computer history in there!

Microsoft Flight Simulator is out now for PC.