Fix the UI - unnecessary eye-candy, arcade-feel, form over function, annoying - MSFS 2024

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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The current UI and menu in MSFS 2024 is EXTREMELY clunky and unpractical to use, with unnecessary, flashy eye-candy features that prioritize form over function, with stupidly annoying and distracting features that feels completely out of place in a flight simulator. It gives an off-putting feel and makes the whole experience feel like an arcade minigame, meant to trigger every dopamine receptor at once.

An extremely annoying example is the zoom-in/out overview effect when accessing the menu.

Every time you press the escape key to access the menu, the camera rapidly zooms and swoops out, creating an “overview effect” that is corny, unpractical, and feels like its only purpose is just for show. This weird design choice feels like a gimmick rather than a thoughtful feature, and it ruins the immersion during flights.

Here’s why this effect is so frustrating:

  1. Extremely Distracting: The rapid motion completely disrupts focus and immersion, making it hard to stay engaged in the simulation.
  2. Unpractical and Unnecessary: There is no practical purpose to this effect—it doesn’t add functionality, realism, or value. It feels like it was added purely for flash, but in a simulator, users value practicality over “showy” transitions.
  3. Feels Out of Place: This feels like an arcade game, and clashes with the “professional simulator” that MSFS promotes itself as. It’s a weird design choice for a product meant to emulate realism.
  4. Repetitive and Frustrating: When accessing the menu frequently during a flight, this effect becomes tiresome, repetitive, and outright irritating. It may be cool the first time, but quickly gets on your nerves.

There should be an option to disable the zoom-out effect entirely. Instead, the camera should simply remain stationary in its current position when accessing the menu, maintaining immersion and avoiding unnecessary distractions.

As it stands, this feature feels like a poorly thought-out gimmick that prioritizes flashiness over practicality. All it does is make the entire “simulator” feel extremely unprofessional, like it is trying to be something which it isn’t, fulfilling multiple roles at once and never doing any of them well. The entire UI seems to prioritize looks over practicality, there are so many strange design decisions.

62 Likes
2

100% agree, in vr it’s even worse

7 Likes
3

100% agree-it also affects performance on my PC, wish Asobo would add a way to disable the zomm out/zoom in effect.

12 Likes
4

I love the three-second lag and stutter every time I try to open settings, all thanks to this awful camera movement. Please remove it!

15 Likes
5

Got my vote. I thought it was neat the first time, but it quickly became annoying and takes up unnecessary time accessing and leaving the menu because you have to wait for the camera movements. There’s also a big stutter when the sim starts to process the camera movements, so you can’t even call this a smoothly operating feature.

11 Likes
6

Ah it is so annoying. I use a triple screen setup and it is impossible to line up the windows because of this. I had to re-open 2020 and use my settings from there to get them lined up.

3 Likes
7

Yes. Cool the first couple of times. Annoying after that. My grandson may love it when he comes over, but this old fogie? Nah.

It’s even worse if they aren’t 100% smooth.

Please make it optional.

6 Likes
8

I agree. Especially when it stutters.

2 Likes
9

Yes! And it causes so much performance issues. My VRAM spikes and I get a lot of stutters because of the sudden movement outside. Everything has to reload

6 Likes
10

Agree 100%. Especially in VR the zoom out effect is super annoying and a huge step back from 2020, where the menu was instantly superimposed on the screen. And you could then achieve what you wanted to do with very few clicks, unlike 2024. The whole menu has been inflated with redundant clicks compared to before.

2020 also didn’t suffer from stutters EVERY SINGLE TIME you leave the menu to continue flight, I wonder why :thinking:

3 Likes
11

And it doesn’t even work properly with Xbox Controller. Change the UI please and bring back the cursor from MSFS 2020 for Xbox controller users.

3 Likes
12

As a triple screen user, I have to go to the Advanced Settings and delete my peripheral screens each time I go into settings to make changes due to the constantly rotating camera making me nauseas. Its HORRIBLE!

Also, please provide an option to turn off the “trailer” footage as the game is loading. As a former professional pilot who uses the sim for development and currency, I prefer an understated, professional splash screen. The current loading screens scream arcade game. I know that works for many people who use it just like that but perhaps give us an option.

4 Likes
13

Yes Correct… there was nothing wrong with the 2022 menu… why not use the 2022 menu in 2024???

3 Likes
14

The UX experience could use improvement:

  • When loading the sim, were taken to a welcome screen which requires an additional action to get into the main screen, which seems unnecessary. After game loading, it could take us straight into the main menu
  • Selecting aircraft variation and livery seems overly complicated and takes too long. When updating aircraft configuration, it takes us to another screen, which animation and loading takes considerably longer than MSFS2020. The experience does not seem snappy and for someone doing VA’s it’s quite convuluted.
  • Also, please give us the ability to create favourites and / or show a more compact list of the aircraft
9 Likes
15

Just use back the 2020 UI design if you don’t have time to improve the 2024 UI.

8 Likes
16

Agreed and well said.

17

It is depressing that the last time this post was seen was 2 months ago :(. People don’t even care about the basic things that should annoy them. Clunky UI that lags everytime you click on elements like liveries/aircraft selection, duplicate control bindings. Makes me so ■■■■■■ off while attempting to use this alpha product.

3 Likes
18

you are not the only one on this, I uninstalled 2024 until it has a proper UI for a SIM
The livery / aircraft selection menu is single handedly the worst UI/UX I´ve ever seen on a simulator
Whoever designed that … has never had any contact with a flight simulator

4 Likes
19

The UI is the worst part of the simulator for me.

  • The plane selection menu is frustrating to use. Thumbnails and text are inconsistent, leading to a cluttered look. The tiles are too large, wasting space while still cutting off text. There’s also no option to filter aircraft by category (e.g., airliner, turboprop, GA) or mark favorites for quick access.
  • Selecting variants and liveries requires loading the 3D model, which makes the menu laggy—and often, the model doesn’t even load.
  • The control bindings menu is a mess—confusing, unintuitive, and difficult to navigate.
  • The UI is bloated with unnecessary animations and effects. I don’t need flashy transitions or fancy visuals—I just want a snappy, responsive menu that is easy to navigate and doesn’t slow me down.
  • No UI scaling option—For some reason, the ability to adjust UI scaling like in MSFS2020 is just gone. Why was this even removed? Now I’m stuck with oversized menus taking up half the screen with no way to fix it.

This should be a top priority to fix, as it makes even the most basic tasks unnecessarily difficult and frustrating. A smoother, more intuitive UI with better organization, filtering, and proper scaling options would massively improve the overall experience.

10 Likes
20

For real, it’s the worst part of the sim, the thing you look at all the time, yet people just don’t care. I really hope they do a rework of the UI at some point…

1 Like