The launch disaster that is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

After waiting damn near two hours just to get this thing downloaded and installed (ACTIVATING PACKAGES!), I finally get ingame, and it's choppy as hell. Even the menu stutters. What was there so far seemed improved over the original I guess, but it's not like I got to spend any quality time with it. I'm currently stuck at a queue screen trying to get back in and it doesn't seem like I'll be playing it again anytime soon.

For a company that was just touting that everything is an Xbox now, this is reflecting badly on the pOweR of The ClOudz when a game that leans so heavily on streaming isn't even playable to all of the public on it's opening day.

Is anyone playing this on console? Is that going better? The one game I wanted from Xbox this year, and it's going down in flames so far. Great job!

I installed but didn't try yet because I saw on Twitter the servers are unresponsive, likely they weren't prepared for launch traffic.

Forgot that the game came out today. I will wait to download it on Game Pass once everything works well.

Oh I thought it came out in December.

Oh well, I can wait. STALKER 2 tomorrow. MSFS2024 next week lol.

Loved the last installment, and this one sounds even better. Bugs will get ironed out.

Is it, for lack of a better term, "cloud powered"?

I know the texture system for all the terrain is pretty advanced and the last came (iirc) had some sort of texture streaming software or used AI or both or something. Been a while, but I remember reading about it and being pretty impressed both with the concept (before release) and the result (after release).

I remember cruising by my parents house in a small STOL airplane so I could get really low and, sure enough, there was their house lol.

MSFS 2020 had the same problem and this doesn't surprise me either way. MS didn't learned its mistake in 2020 and having more Cloud computing was gonna turn into a disaster launch form MSFS 2024.

LOL same. Totally forgot about 2024 despite it's on my list. Sadly, I won't have time to check it out as Stalker 2 is coming very soon.

Just another Spencer **** up. He was on a speaking tour late last week and not once did he even mention that a first party game was releasing within a week, what a 🤡

I feel sorry for Asobo, they make such awesome games.

Pathetic that most games launch with problems.

Still they seem to get brushed under the carpet

9-10 GS

Lems/Herms complain about movie games, but are ok with floating around doing nothing for hours? Hypocrites!

My install took 10 minutes and I was flying. It’s pretty awesome. Thank you Phil!

That's disappointing considering how much I've enjoyed the previous one from the very first day. Once I'm done with stalker I'll give it a try.

My last big adventure was to traverse Africa from north to south. I'm thinking Australia next for the new game.

Phil didn't even put Warcraft I and II remastered on Game pass. He's going insane, he's off the hook, totally ludicrous.

Tried firing it up on my BS Jive Bro...

Poo cows, BS Jive has no games. lol :P

Looks like the streaming works really well!

I was pretty excited to try this one out in VR. I guess I'll stick to FS 2020 for a few more weeks while this new one gets ironed out

Just landed at LAX. This game is sexy AF.

@SecretPolice said:

Tried firing it up on my BS Jive Bro...

Poo cows, BS Jive has no games. lol :P

Yea the Ps5 pro really makes use of the triangles..

@SolidGame_basic: Goof… it’s a flight SIMULATOR. The purpose of the game is to mimic flying an airplane in real life.

Thanks for your honesty but I must say that's very unusual for a cow. ;o

lol :P

MS will learn from this and the next cloud game will not have these problems.

Surely it's better to overshoot on server capacity at launch and scale it back as needded. Especially since it's an MS title running on their own servers. I can get the reluctance on a 3rd part spending money on extra capacity they may not need....but this is MSs own game.

As a demonstration of using the cloud in gaming, It is impressive in the way it's used but it's just another reminder of the bloody problems with its use.

£69.99 please (soon to be even higher when GTA6 gives them the get go)

I finally got in again. Was met with a big update. The game world loaded slow, but I was in. May continue to be dodgy, but it seems to be functional for now.

Its always amazing how both people and companies seem to be caught by surprise when a game that relies heavily on servers has launch issues with everyone trying to play at once.

these Flight Sim games stream in a ton of data, so i'm not surprised one bit. MS probably knows that the vast majority of people will probably only play it for a few hours, do some training, fly over their house, and uninstall it. so maybe they are willing to weather the initial wave of problems rather than set up the server infrastructure that will only be used briefly.

but seriously. when was the last time a sever reliant game DIDN'T have launch issues? maybe Call of Duty? I find it so funny how gamers get so furious about it when its the most predictable shit ever and will probably sort itself out in a few days like always.

yea, you'd think of all companies MS would be equipped to deal with this quickly given they own a major cloud computing platform.

Yet another broken game at launch.

SO freaking dumb. Just started being able to play it. They changed up all the controls for no reason too.

It wasn't even just that. Apparently someone looked into the process and when you first boot up it tries to download files from a CDN It doesn't download a compressed file like you'd expect. Noooo, it downloads each file it needs one by flipping one. Now have thousands of people trying to download files one by one all at once. How did they not think that'd be an issue?

@BenjaminBanklin: you are streaming the full game from cloud at launch?? You have never played msfs before, otherwise you wouldn't have attempted such a foolish thing. I played msfs20 for a while and installed on my Xbox. All 200+ gb of it. Even that wasn't the full game since a big chunk had to be streamed, all of the live in game data, weather patterns, etc. I remember just loading up the game took a minute or two, which is surprising because it's running off the internal SSD. The game tries to make a faithful recreation of the entire world. So an 8h flight in game is the same as in the real world.

I reccomend you play it on pc, make sure you have a decent system, and a super fast ssd, gen4 or gen5 nvme sdd.

Also, this isn't really a game, but a true simulation. It gets boring if you're not into these sorts of things.

I'm not playing this on Xbox, not that it matters, you can't play 2024 offline either way. You obviously haven't played this version. This game only has a 30GB initial install with streaming doing all the heavy lifting, moreso than the last game. This was to reduce the load compared to 2020 which required at least 150-plus GB, to use a pun, get it off the ground. Trying to download all assets of the game would be impossible for the average user as it would be many petabytes. If the servers are borked, your game is affected, period.

They did that to alleviate performance and make the game more accessible for a wider group for configs. Now, excuse me while I laugh at the hubris of MS for even thinking they had this under control. 2020 is one of my favorite games of all time. That had its growing pains at launch, this is a complete debacle in comparison. I think they were probably better off trying to upgrade that version

Games are rough at launch these days. Definitely would wait to play something like this personally.

They are, and they want more money. Segmenting shit as launch as a "bonus" for your barely working game.

We've normalized this shit show.