MSFS 2024 disastrous release puts me near quitting sim flying

[SebastianJ7210]

Talking with a friend of mine, both of us long time simmers (imagine, I have the printed manual for MSFS 95, lot of current flyers weren’t even born), both noticed how it’s been almost three weeks and we have practically logged zero hours, not in 2020 or 2024. The joysticks and pedals have dust on them (literally) and are stowed under our desks on to the side, unplugged.

Both of us feel completely deceived since the release in 2024. I’m tired of making lists of issues and reporting bugs, since I’ve done it multiple times, and as time passes, I’ve only seen little things getting fixed but the overall feel is that we’re alpha testing. Completely making sense with a bad release in alpha stage, some small bugs get a fix, some others are profiling as “deal with it” bugs, and the overall feel is that it’s not getting anywhere out of alpha stage.

You see, a lot of things were promised with 2024. First of all, fix all that was bad in 2020, which of course not only hasn’t happened, but amazingly, some things worsened the overall experience. For example, the UI is a disaster. I know some users like it, but the general feel I have is that for long time simmers, the UI is cumbersome, laggy and requires a completely unnecesary amount of slow steps (slow because the “stream everything” experience is horrible) to perform a very simple task.

I’ll have to add that the EFB being the primary interface for flight planning, it’s full of errors and things that do not work. The EFB errors regarding airplane loading (fuel, cargo and passengers) have been reported since day one and to this day, it hasn’t been fixed, more than two months after release. For a huge amount of airplanes, “send to avionics” does not work. Also I’ll have to add the terrible experience that is something as simple as choosing a variant or a different livery. We had something straight and simple, a matrix with airplanes and main variants with all their performance data. Now we have to go into each plane, wait five seconds for it to load which is a horrible experience, and then if you change the variant or the livery, each thing takes a ridiculous amount of time, and it sometimes fails to correctly load textures. It’s a completely cumbersome and sad experience.

Then I’ll add the poor flying experience. As soon as you get a few miles from a given point, detail is lost to a point that it it looks like if you’re flying with TLOD and OLOD at 50. I understand that this is a way to improve streaming experience. It also makes you wonder where are the marvelous terrain details that were shown on all pre release videos. In this sense, I’ll also add that most airplanes still have some kind of bug, be it on flight dynamics, radios, navigation, systems, etc. So far I think I can count the amount of airplanes without bugs with one hand. Oh, and I don’t know how but they managed to break things like callsign, and not only don’t fix but actually break more the ATC.

Then again, we have the backwards compatibility promises. This not only failed (most airplanes do not work if you just drop the 2020 versions in community), but also, if a dev released a fixed updated version, but you bought the airplane in marketplace, you’re pretty much screwed.

Lastly, the much announced and showcased missions, are only available if you have the time to involve in career mode. This is something I’ve complained several times (in general and in whishlist), and I feel it was a scam, just as the whole release was a big lie. Half of the sim is unavailable unless you can dedicate hours of flying (and I have more than a thousand hours logged in 2020, and another 500hs lost when I did a cloud reset years ago).

I know some people will reply or think “this happens with all AAA games”, “it’s a common trend lately”, or “same happened with 2020”. But if we also consider the encrypted data, the difficult for developing liveries, or just trying to use LNM with 2024 nav database -which still is impossible, unless I missed something-, the overall feel is a big scam. After so many years it’s reasonable for us to expect something improved. The only thing I’ve seen improved is night lighting, and tarmac textures… when they load.

Can’t really say anything good about this. I know some people are actually happy, and perhaps for someone the sim actually works, I guess if you just fire up the airplane in the runway and do a quick flight, things are ok, but my feel is that we are not being heard by MS, there’s no clear schedule and communication of priorities, and we’re just being “talked” to gain time for who knows what.

It’s really sad, we were hard time simmers. We both made significant financial efforts because we really liked simming, but this turned us down to the point that opening MSFS2024 and just dealing with the UI lead us to close it after a couple of minutes. And while we could just fly 2020, we were waiting for 2024 to have the 2020 issues fixed. In short words, we feel we’ve been taken (and are taken) for fools.

Seb.

[SebastianJ7210]

Talking with a friend of mine, both of us long time simmers (imagine, I have the printed manual for MSFS 95, lot of current flyers weren’t even born), both noticed how it’s been almost three weeks and we have practically logged zero hours, not in 2020 or 2024. The joysticks and pedals have dust on them (literally) and are stowed under our desks on to the side, unplugged.

Both of us feel completely deceived since the release in 2024. I’m tired of making lists of issues and reporting bugs, since I’ve done it multiple times, and as time passes, I’ve only seen little things getting fixed but the overall feel is that we’re alpha testing. Completely making sense with a bad release in alpha stage, some small bugs get a fix, some others are profiling as “deal with it” bugs, and the overall feel is that it’s not getting anywhere out of alpha stage.

You see, a lot of things were promised with 2024. First of all, fix all that was bad in 2020, which of course not only hasn’t happened, but amazingly, some things worsened the overall experience. For example, the UI is a disaster. I know some users like it, but the general feel I have is that for long time simmers, the UI is cumbersome, laggy and requires a completely unnecesary amount of slow steps (slow because the “stream everything” experience is horrible) to perform a very simple task.

I’ll have to add that the EFB being the primary interface for flight planning, it’s full of errors and things that do not work. The EFB errors regarding airplane loading (fuel, cargo and passengers) have been reported since day one and to this day, it hasn’t been fixed, more than two months after release. For a huge amount of airplanes, “send to avionics” does not work. Also I’ll have to add the terrible experience that is something as simple as choosing a variant or a different livery. We had something straight and simple, a matrix with airplanes and main variants with all their performance data. Now we have to go into each plane, wait five seconds for it to load which is a horrible experience, and then if you change the variant or the livery, each thing takes a ridiculous amount of time, and it sometimes fails to correctly load textures. It’s a completely cumbersome and sad experience.

Then I’ll add the poor flying experience. As soon as you get a few miles from a given point, detail is lost to a point that it it looks like if you’re flying with TLOD and OLOD at 50. I understand that this is a way to improve streaming experience. It also makes you wonder where are the marvelous terrain details that were shown on all pre release videos. In this sense, I’ll also add that most airplanes still have some kind of bug, be it on flight dynamics, radios, navigation, systems, etc. So far I think I can count the amount of airplanes without bugs with one hand. Oh, and I don’t know how but they managed to break things like callsign, and not only don’t fix but actually break more the ATC.

Then again, we have the backwards compatibility promises. This not only failed (most airplanes do not work if you just drop the 2020 versions in community), but also, if a dev released a fixed updated version, but you bought the airplane in marketplace, you’re pretty much screwed.

Lastly, the much announced and showcased missions, are only available if you have the time to involve in career mode. This is something I’ve complained several times (in general and in whishlist), and I feel it was a scam, just as the whole release was a big lie. Half of the sim is unavailable unless you can dedicate hours of flying (and I have more than a thousand hours logged in 2020, and another 500hs lost when I did a cloud reset years ago).

I know some people will reply or think “this happens with all AAA games”, “it’s a common trend lately”, or “same happened with 2020”. But if we also consider the encrypted data, the difficult for developing liveries, or just trying to use LNM with 2024 nav database -which still is impossible, unless I missed something-, the overall feel is a big scam. After so many years it’s reasonable for us to expect something improved. The only thing I’ve seen improved is night lighting, and tarmac textures… when they load.

Can’t really say anything good about this. I know some people are actually happy, and perhaps for someone the sim actually works, I guess if you just fire up the airplane in the runway and do a quick flight, things are ok, but my feel is that we are not being heard by MS, there’s no clear schedule and communication of priorities, and we’re just being “talked” to gain time for who knows what.

It’s really sad, we were hard time simmers. We both made significant financial efforts because we really liked simming, but this turned us down to the point that opening MSFS2024 and just dealing with the UI lead us to close it after a couple of minutes. And while we could just fly 2020, we were waiting for 2024 to have the 2020 issues fixed. In short words, we feel we’ve been taken (and are taken) for fools.

Seb.

[NixonRedgrave]

That is an excellent synopsis, and one who’s premise I share with you.

[SebastianJ7210]

Thanks for the reply, makes us not feel so alone. I often see you at the bug report hub, and have also read your statement of being tired of doing it since it seems to be pointless. Completely share your thoughts.

[NixonRedgrave]

If I could give you some words of encouragement that I have given others — try to spend some time rekindling your love of flight simming with 2020.

It is what I have been doing. I have found, very quickly, that the time I am spending in 2020 is making 2024 absolutely irrelevant to me.

I don’t think about it, I don’t feel tempted to check it out, and I don’t miss anything about it.

The distance from the ill will is cathartic.

2020 is a great sim, which always was for me since day one. Sure, it has, and has had, its issues, but they never were like what I’ve experienced with 2024.

I had a great flight yesterday in 2020 and I’m sitting here in front of it again, planning on what I will do with it this AM.

Push through the malaise, it will reward you.

[XP12Fanboy]

Don’t quit, stick with it a bit longer as i’m sure it will improve !
For me, although i started right at beginning of eighties, there have been some big downers - FSX kept crashing on me and got a bit disheartened, im glad i stuck with it. Give MS a bit more time to sort out 2024.

[CMCollazo71]

Hang in there it’ll get better.

What I am doing to bide the time is I installed DCS (which is free) and downloaded the A4E (which is also free) and I am learning to fly it correctly (not an easy thing to do).

That way I am enjoying flying, learning, and not constantly looking for news on the status of MS24.

When an update drops for MS24 I will take a look and if it’s still not there - I have the “hill” to climb in DCS.

And I am keeping (nay I may say improving) my flying skills!

[DaveBGaming]

Agree. I genuinely don’t think it deserves ‘simulator’ in the title. It just isn’t.

It’s so buggy, straight up broken in some area’s & incredibly half-baked. I’m just not excited or energised to use it anymore.

[talgmar]

They ended my interest with flight simming. I am mostly just annoyed at myself from even partially believing in the marketing hype. Thousands of USD invested in what I thought would be a enjoyable experience, and which turned out to be mostly troubleshooting and bugtracking. And now its clear that they and their partners want me to spend even more. Im not THAT sadistic.

I have come to understand that the development team must be massively underqualified or understaffed. Couple that with the vision and direction of this franchise I realize it is no longer for me.

I have been looking at this sinking ship for a while wondering why noone at the helm is taking charge and turning things around, pushing out fixes, communicating, hiring people with expertise, whatever needs to happen. Steamcharts shows a steady decline in users, remarkably few active users. Of course that is just on Steam, but to me it shows clearly the trend. There are so few active users (average around 3k) now that it cant be much more than the people working on or with it plus a couple hundred.

I could go on and on about how I hate that corporate greed seems to ruin everything it touches, being flight sims or studios like Disney/Activision and what have you. Like always the never ending goal of “reaching more players (wanting more money)” ends up alienating the core consumers that made the product popular in the first place. Anyhow I will leave that topic all together.

I was shocked to see how unfinished and even regressed fs24 was, even compared to fs20. They somehow made it less userfriendly and more buggy, and on top of that the whole selling point is eye candy and gaming aspects. The game was launched with bugs that made it clear to me they hadnt even tested fundamental things before launch. I must be some cultural thing but I do not understand for the life of me how some of this is even allowed to be sold at full price. I worked many years as a art director and designer and I can not understand how it seems like noone has any integrity or selfrespect in this business anymore.

This forum seems to end up being what the Cyberpunk2077 forum ended up being, a echo chamber for the few diehard fans that were left praising the franchise no matter what. For the most part I have stopped interacting with the forums other than trying to help users troubleshoot here and there.
This forum also shows clearly the giant disconnection between the developers and the userbase, where we are left with little to no communication with the community managers or forum moderators. The complaint about poor communication has been present from early days of fs20 and is still a issue to this day. Maybe most people forget the promises of better and more transparent communication, but I dont. The development updates are mostly just marketing and very little about the actual development roadmap and progress of the simulator.
I stopped paying for products until they deliver what they marketed, that is the only “power” I have as a consumer, and I would encourage others to do the same. I am not here to fund a kickstarter project for fs24 for nintendo switch 2.
Another nail in the coffin for me is this new expectation that we all have to get rtx 5090s to even have the sim run remotely fluid. If this sim is THIS badly optimized and requires the AI voodoo of a 5090 to run at 4K then I am not interested and this should be clearly stated in the description of the game before you buy it.

People talking about if this is a simulator or not, its not really that complicated. The term simulator isnt a copyrighted term meant only for million dollar official FAA approved simulators. The term simulator can be easily googled and wikipedia’d. The term simulator is literally just the description of something that immitates real life. In other words, ANYTHING, any game or anything that tries to simulate all or portions of real life IS a simulator. Now, if its a GOOD simulator is a completely different topic - and in this case can be argued (and clearly is).
So please just let that discussion end with understanding that the term simulator is just something that imitates real life, which MSobo is trying to do (to some extent) with this franchise. So no matter what it says on the package, game, simulator, whatever. It IS a simulator as it is trying to imitate real life. What is important to me in that regards is not what the packaging says, but what the developer claims. The developers of Farming simulator probably doesnt claim that their game is super realistic. Whereas for MSobos FS24 it is literally one of their selling points.

Like most others here, I have been patiently waiting for hotfixes or patches every day - yet basically nothing has been fixed. It also doesnt help that we cant really fix much ourselves because of the way it is all streamed now, so we dont have the local files in the same sense anymore. I see from the very limited marketing BS communication that they expect some fixes in SU1 and SU2 - which is mindblowing to me. How thieir investors arent pushing them harder to fix this broken mess is beyond me. FS20 was broken, but the promise was to just wait for years for it to be fixed and good, after 4 years of course FS24 releases - and Im expecting the same treatment up until fs28 is released following this same trend. Now I actually believe this will be the last few iterations of this kind of flight sim from Microsoft, similar to what happened with their MS Flight. You can only ruin your own franchise so much before you have to make a change, somehow,

Sorry for this wall of text and horrible formatting, but I have been bottling up much of this stuff inside me for too long, and I probably need to just formally say goodbye to this. I think we all need some positivity in this community, I just worry that MSobos vision might not encourage that.

[Jimrh1993]

I’ll cast my vote with the “Don’t give up the ship!” crowd.

There are times when I get SO BUMMED with flight sims, (and this also includes X-Plane), that I want to get my money back - not for the sim, that’s pocket change - but for the huge amount of money I spent on a machine with the gumption to run it.

I have two robots that use the Raspberry Pi as the main robot controller.

. . . .and sometimes I get SO BUMMED with them, Python, the operating systems, and everything else that makes robotics much tougher than the marketing mavins suggest.

My answer to both is the same:

1. Don’t give up. “You haven’t failed, you just haven’t finished succeeding yet.”
2. Switch to something else for a while. I switch back-and-forth between them.
3. Take a vacation, an “away-from-home” type vacation, (if only for a weekend), to recharge.

Things will get better.

[TOLOWTERRAIN723]

@Jimrh1993

Things will get better.

will they get better?

i dont know… i get the feeling there is some sort of a fundamental problem here… something like the devs not understanding why everyone’s so angry… like they were taken by surprise

[NonstopOyster0]

I’m one of those who was excited when FS24 was announced and watched the impressive trailers. Then I realized there is a lot in FS20 I haven’t even looked at. I decided to stay with FS20 and, from all the flack on the forum, I’m glad I did. The constant quest of always having the latest and greatest hardware and simulator is a great profit builder for the vendors but doesn’t do much for our wallets. The disappointment and frustration expressed here is very justified. The program should work and users should not have to put up with the constant stream of errors and promises.

[FeatDragon42620]

They’ve now bricked the entire franchise. They released an update for 2020 this morning. It’s only a 20 MB download and it’s stuck - and won’t D/L anything. This is beyond maddening.

[NixonRedgrave]

I downloaded the update and I’m flying 2020 right now.

[FlyingsCool5650]

Perhaps something will show up in the dev update today in regards to communication, but, I’m shocked there’s been zero communication. I know the SDK team is hard at work fixing things, but, I was expecting that they’d provide perhaps a little update to fix many of the easy things that are so annoying at least. A couple of days ago, SU1 still didn’t have a release date assigned.

And I thought by now Jorg would have said something about the progress being made. Just few words, maybe a little information about SU1. Just something to let us know that the team is ok and they hear us.

At this point, I pretty much go into 2024 for 5 to 10 minute flights at this point, occasionally. The UI makes me so angry, I just can’t really face using the sim. Everything is harder to do in 2024 than it was in 2020.

[SebastianJ7210]

I just fired up 2024 to check it. It gave issues five times, fired up in the sixth try. First two times told me that there was an issue checking my license, and next three times that there were issues connecting to xbox service. Finally it fired up. I didn’t have any connectivity issues nor changed anything. Just to try, fired up 2020 with zero issues.

Then, I went to the marketplace to see my disabled packages. J3 Cub and Maule were disabled, so I enabled both just to try if anything was fixed. Then decided to try just the Maule. Rebooted, and the J3 got enabled but not the Maule. As I read a few minutes ago on a different thread, this looks like a monument to bad programming. It’s a frustrating, disappointing, tiring and sad experience.

My frustration and sadness isn’t just related to how badly developed is the sim, how premature the release was, or how big the lies were about this release. It is strongly reinforced by the extreme lack of care from Asobo/MS towards the community, the feedback we’re giving, and the absolute lack of communication.

We’ve seen bugs widely checked being disregarded. We’ve seen anything but a clear path of improvement on next releases. We’ve seen almost zero improvements in two months. We have tested, reported, documented bugs, and most of the work seems ignored or disregarded with no explanation whatsoever. We’ve made clear requests, we reported everything, and yet here we are, apparently in the same page after two months.

Is this whole scenario what, as Dave mentioned, takes all the excitement and energy away and we feel just not attracted to it. I know I can go to 2020, but thing is that aside development, I know 2020 pretty well, I even created my own bush trips with BuffyGC tools. And while I think that resting on the previous version until things get sorted out is valid, I also think that after two months, we shouldn’t be at this point. I do think that eventually some things will get fixed -unfortunately, no one knows what will get fixed-, but still the whole experience is disapponting and doesn’t look promising.

I’m a university professor, let’s assume I don’t lose my job, hence I don’t have the time for career mode… will I ever be able to fly a firefighting mission? Because it was never said that missions would only be available to those who can dedicate six hours per day to career mode. Will downloads be available to avoid those horrible streaming issues, like when you’re on final and airport hasn’t loaded, as several flyers reported? Will airplanes stop being streamed so we can have a decent working hangar and selection?

It’s the whole pack that is unbearable, disappointing, frustrating, tiring, and sad. And the community looks invisible to MS/Asobo. We’re all reporting, discussing, sadly also slowly giving up and living on hope, and we don’t get a single decent communication -and I’m talking about just a communication, because the actual needed fixes don’t look anywhere close in the near future.

[Flusingo]

Wow, the crowd is beginning to become really annoyed. It’s like they took the money and ran!

[MCgendraft]

Starting out on MSFS 1.0 when I was a kid, started a life long hobby of simming for me. When I heard the date of release, I couldn’t wait… and I mean, I was so excited, and took the week off, on launch. I spent ALOT of money, to upgrade my equipment, thinking… now I’m broke, and will struggle… but I have my sim… I went all in…
I’ll just leave it at that, I’m exhausted. I feel your pain.

[ANCRM114]

Like others I am also extremely disappointed in MSFS 2024. However that has not stopped me playing MSFS 2020 as I have since FS 4.0.

Knowing that 2020 has four more years of support I’m sticking with the hobby at this version.

I will not be buying any more add-ons. Not knowing how 2024 will work out has left me very uneasy about any future spending. I will not be putting in any money into flight simulation unless a core piece of hardware malfunctions beyond repair.

[FPVSteve]

There’s always X-Plane, and I say that seriously.

Yes there are graphical limitations, but it’s very tolerable if you are not a VFR pilot and even if you are, it’s still usable. To be honest, I find it more immersive than MSFS but that doesn’t mean I think it looks better (because it obviously doesn’t when you factor in the ground textures). That’s just a personal opinion though.

I recommend firing up the free demo and using it based on its own merits rather than comparing to MSFS. It’s a very, very good flight simulator.

Spawn in the Citation X → CTRL+Shift+E to save some time - > Add weather → Do some quick pattern work.

Nothing’s stopping you from using MSFS as well but I think at this point if you are a simmer the safe bet is to spread your bets. Asobo aren’t exactly inspiring confidence and if you feel your only option is to quit flight simulation for good surely it is worth a punt?