Recently, Microsoft Flight Simulator add-on developer SamScene3D released the “Seoul City Wow” package featuring the capital of South Korea.
The Asian country is one of the major nations included Microsoft Flight Simulator that has received the least attention from add-on creators, including freeware.
On top of that, the default local scenery in the base simulator is far from stellar, making the Republic of Korea look a lot more boring than it actually is.
Funnily enough, I was able to find more (freeware) add-ons portraying secretive North Korea than the whopping zero I found enriching its southern counterpart.
One of the reasons behind this issue is that South Korea’s political situation dictates part of its legislation, including some really strict regulations about maps. This is the reason why no Google Maps 3D view exists of Seoul, despite the fact that it’s a massively-relevant capital city home to almost ten million people.
Luckily SamScene3D has come to the rescue to improve what’s otherwise a rather dull landscape. If you want to take a visual tour of what Seoul City Wow offers, you can find a lot of images here, and a flythrough video just above.
This package is rather different from the usual airports we reviewed before, as it beautifies a much larger area which isn’t designed to be seen from as close. Overall, it’s more of a backdrop for your flights.
Seoul City Wow, which can be purchased from SamScene3D’s own website for $16.95, comes with no installer. Luckily, Microsoft Flight Simulator makes installing this kind of add-ons very easy. You just unzip the folder in the Community folder of the simulator, and you’re done.
The package promises over 200 landmarks plus 500 Korean-style apartment buildings covering the area of the city. That’s quite a lot of stuff.
The first thing you’ll notice when flying over this new Seoul is that there are a lot of apartment complexes that look very much the same. Almost too much. Those who aren’t familiar with the city may mistake this for a flaw of the add-on, as its skyline is rather unique.
The truth is the opposite. This is actually what Seoul looks like in the real world, as you can see in a few aerial pictures. SamScene3D made a laudable effort to recreate many of these apartment building clusters and their positioning, creating a very authentic feeling.
Starting in the late sixties, the Korean government enacted a military-style plan to solve a dramatic housing crisis left by the war, combined with a massive population boom. This resulted in a lot of bulldozing and the building of the large, uniform apartment complexes we see today, which are correctly reproduced and rather precisely placed in the addon.
Of course, there are plenty of unique landmarks to discover, from the Sebitseom Seoul Floating Island to the Little World Magic Island, passing by Seoul Sky and the iconic Namsan Tower.
I’ve spent several hours exploring, and I don’t think I’ve found all of them yet.
The models and textures are a bit on the low-polygon, low-resolution side, but this is very much justified by the number of objects in the scenery.
This kind of package tends to be an extreme resource hog, often tanking even powerful gaming rigs by 30 frames-per-second or more from some developers who go overboard with detail.
As you can see below, Seoul City Wow only eats about 10-12 FPS from the performance of my PC (RTX 3070, Ryzen 9 3900x, 32 GB RAM) at 1440p resolution and Ultra settings. That’s remarkable in perspective.