Hi everyone,
I’ve been using MSFS 2020 for a while now with around 2000 hours of experience, and I’m wondering about the following before considering the upgrade:
Does MSFS 2024 actually bring enough value to justify moving from 2020?
How stable and well-functioning is the new career mode?
Are the new features like crop dusting or firefighting missions available for us to create on our own?
If you were in my place, which version would you prefer right now?
Lastly, do you think MSFS 2024 will go on sale/discount anytime soon, or is it better to wait?
I’d really appreciate your insights and experiences.
I personally enjoy MSFS 2024 but I only play free flight. I have 6,852 hours in MSFS 2020 and don’t use it anymore. It isn’t even installed. For my purposes MSFS 2024 is just better. I hop on VATSIM or PilotEdge and fly high-end addons such as those from Black Square, A2A, Just Flight, FSReborn, COWS, ect and it works very well. Very stable and performance is great. This is with the sim maxed out aside from Terrain LOD set at 300 with a ton of addons. Rarely do I see FPS below 80 and most of the time it’s 100+.
As someone who flies exclusively in 2024 now, I would say it depends on what you want out of it. I only use the free flight mode, and it especially shines for VFR flights, but is also fine for airliners, with some issues (notably instrument lighting problems at night).
I don’t fly career at all, but I hear it’s still quite buggy and limiting in terms of what missions are available for certain aircraft. Additionally, it sounds like 3rd party aircraft are very slowly (if at all) becoming available for career mode.
The missions you’re asking about are currently locked behind career mode, although there are some 3rd party addons addressing that kind of thing somewhat.
I have no idea about a sale or discount, but I’d definitely give it a try on gamepass or something similar before buying, if you’re still happy with 2020. If you’re like me and lots of other people, a few of your favorite 3rd party planes are still not available on 2024 (PMDG 737s… ahem).
I enjoy 2024 and get similar or better performance compared to 2020, and generally appreciate the smaller footprint. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for you (yet).
It entirely depends on the type of flying you’re doing. Free flight bush flights and VFR GA, it’s probably worth it. I can’t speak for other types of flying really.
It’s not. Don’t buy 2024 for the career mode unless you like addictive early access grinding games. Not trying to be disparaging, but that’s the reality of it. Career Mode is plagued with issues and is largely unfinished still. The people who are most engrossed in it seem to be addicted to leveling up and amassing money and a fleet of aircraft, not because they actually love flying the missions.
Not out of the box. You can spawn some of these mission types from developer mode but it can be janky. It doesn’t take long to unlock these mission types as most of the checkrides are fairly trivial and only take a few minutes each. You do have to grind a little bit to get the money needed to unlock them. Career Mode is intentionally designed so that you become addicted to the grind, and so they don’t want you bypassing the grind. It’s not really about how much you’ll want to replay the missions because, to be honest, once you’ve played each mission type a couple times, you’ve pretty much seen and done everything and it becomes boring. The missions are all cookie cutter templates that are randomly generated and very arcade like. So if you could just spawn a firefighting or crop dusting mission, I think you’d quickly tire of it after trying it a few times.
This is entirely subjective. The cost of flight simulator is fairly trivial to some given their disposable income and the thousands of hours they’ll put into it, but it really isn’t to others.
As others suggested, I would sign up for gamepass and try it for a month.
I don’t think you should buy the aviator edition. The aircraft are bare bones ports from 2020, many are janky and have broken features. I would also only get the higher editions unless there are a couple of aircraft that you really really want and that can offset the price of just buying them separately.
I’m a relatively casual flight sim user, though it is something I very much enjoy doing.
I removed 2020 quite a while ago now, flying 2024 exclusively. A lot of the early problems have now been mostly resolved with SU3 and I think that for most people 2024 now works fairly well, though do be prepared to spend a lot of time fiddling with settings to get a compromise you like.
To fly - well the scenery and surroundings are stunning, providing you can get the settings well balanced. The flight models and systems seem pretty good to me and at least a bit more realistic, but if you only fly high end 3rd party aircraft I don’t suppose they are massively different.
I’m not particularly interested in missions or career mode. I occasionally did a challenge in 2020, but I haven’t seen the attraction in 2024 - I just enjoy planning and flying relatively simple stuff. From what I read about career mode it seems rather frustrating, not particularly reliable and still needs work to make it genuinely enjoyable.
Overall, its probably worth a try but it might need a couple more Sim Update cycles before 2024 becomes the truly brilliant experience it really ought to be.
2024 is slowly evolving, much like 2020 did in the beginning. You would have thought a new iteration would be much better right at the beginning, but it is supposed to be a full re-write, so…… that’s computer programming for you.
I held off buying 2024 until the reports showed it had finally become reasonably stable at SU2. SU3 has made it much better, but I still get frustrated on how different the system setting up is from 2020 - they could at least have used similar bindings!
So I still fly both, depending on what aircraft I want to use, as 2020 aircraft haven’t moved across very well. I do appreciate the much faster loading times, but I do have a pretty fast internet connection and on balance the scenery is nicer. But yesterday I did two flights in the new Citation X, one in each of 2020/2024, covering the same ground, and I actually enjoyed 2020 more.
So for now I’ll keep and use both. My only thought about upgrading is the speed and reliability of your internet connection, as you’re depending on a stable streaming situation.
I’m 16 days into my migration to from FS2020 to FS2024. It’s been a lot of work and frustration, but overall I’m pretty happy with 2024 at the moment.
Things I like:
2 minute Sim load times (vs. 8+ minutes on 2020, with a ton of markeplace and community content)
Night flying is very visually appealing, though maybe a bit “overindulgent” and a tad unrealistic.
I mostly use Spad.next for peripheral mappings for all my planes, with only the basic mappings in -sim. The FS2024 scheme works for me well, and I’m glad it saves the mappings per plane so I (usually) don’t have to mess with them. Spad.Next and most of my other utilities ported over pretty seamlessly.
Negatives:
Super low framerates/stuttering when landing at some custom airports. I bumped up my cache file to 32Gig, so will start seeing if going back to said airports (KLAX, etc.) might be improved now.
They still haven’t fixed the “Recent Airport” list on the Flight Page from 2020. You’d think it would remember where you landed last? Annoying, but easy enough to reach over and type my airport code.
The process of optimizing my graphics has been a long slog, but at least I learned some things.
Addendum: I’ve never even clicked on the Career Mode tile. I fly a couple of virtual airlines, good enough for me.
For free flight, 2024 is performing quite well now. VRAM is still a problem. I see no reason to go back to 2020. For career mode, don’t bother, still riddled with issues.
You’ll only get better graphics, that is OK. Apart from that, MSFS 2024 is a frustrating bunch of bugs. I asked for it as a Christmas present, which means someone spent 140 euros, and honestly, I deeply regret it.
The amount of bugs makes it more frustrating than anything else, and with every update they release, they break more things.
The career mode, while it seems interesting at first, is extremely repetitive and always the same. And of course, it’s full of bugs too.
It’s supposed to bring real-time maritime traffic, but it works terribly. Seeing the ships is an insult that ruins the experience—you’ll see half of them floating out of the water.
It also has more training lessons and exams to unlock different licenses (night VFR, multi-engine, instrument, etc.), but they add nothing. The lessons are poor and the exams are a joke.
If your idea is to spend a lot of money (because I don’t think this is going to drop much in price, at least not until the next FS is announced for 2028 or so), I’d say NO. It’s absolutely not worth it. Just graphics, which are of course important and look nice, but nothing else.
For me it now is becoming close to 2020 in behavoir and ‘fun to play’.
SU3, for me, solved a lot of issues. Still can’t fly airliners to and from busy airports with live traffic on, but free flight vfr flights are fun.
I personally, now, find 2024 better then 2020. Still a lot to improve, but imo SU3 should have been te release version and ik would have saved a lot of ■■■■
It still has many bugs on aircraft (e.g ICON A5) , turbulence “““realistic”””” effect, ATC airports etc…. but I hope that with 2 more updates many problems should be fixed.
Otherwise I fly free flight with C172 with turblulence at Medium to enjoy some vfr flights.
MSFS 2024 isn’t just MSFS 2020 with better graphics even if you take the career mode out of the picture. I don’t think I would be using MSFS 2024 if that was it. I would be content with MSFS 2020 if that was the case because to me the graphics in MSFS 2020 were fine when I used it but like I said I don’t even have MSFS 2020 installed anymore. Part of the reason that MSFS 2024 exists is because Asobo wanted to do things with MSFS 2020 that they simply couldn’t.
I tried career mode and got bored with it. It becomes repetitive after awhile, so I just use free flight now. I don’t use 2020 anymore. I just wish PMDG would hurry up with the 737 and get it working for 2024.
I think the PMDG 737 for 2024 went into internal beta last Thursday.
I’m looking forward to that, the JF 146 and the Black Squares. But I have plenty of planes to keep me busy on 2024. (And I’m keeping 2020 around until they kick me out.)
Nothing specific, just a general idea that it was easier to operate, probably due to the still confusing (to me) control/settings differences which I haven’t fully got a handle on yet. This ancient aviator isn’t as good with change as he was once was!