Over 6 months after release, MSFS 2024 is still a mess. SU improved some aspects of the game (at least for some people) in terms of stability and performance, but there still is an incredible amount of bugs, some of which were introduced by SU2 instead of being fixed.
Listing all of the issues and bugs would take pages, so let me bring some relevant examples to illustrate the disastrous state of the game. Let me also add that the level of incompetence shown does not seem promising for the future.
In my opinion, there are reasons to believe that this game will never be fixed and will possibly be abandoned at some point (but more on this later).
Some people argue “for me and for what I do the game works well and it feels great and much better than at release”.
This is a fair statement, and it is not necessarily a false one, but it involves a lot of “if”.
If you do not play career mode, if you play on a powerful device, if you use the aid of some external addons, and if you limit yourself to only flying certain (almost) bug-free planes, then yes, MSFS24 can look and feel great to play. In other words, you can see its full potential.
However, this is a very specific scenario, let’s take a wider one instead.
If we consider that the majority of MSFS24 users are interested in career mode, which was one of the main selling points of the game, as well as one of the main reasons to upgrade from MSFS20, things look quite grim.
Let’s take VIP missions as the perfect example (but we could be talking about several other mission types instead). The missions have good availability, are usually enjoyable and not as buggy as some other ones. Dialogs can be a bit cringe, and the ATC is a mess, but other than that, not terrible.
However, here are your choices in terms of planes:
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PC-24: V-Refs were finally fixed in SU2, but the update made it completely unusable on computer, as the throttle control is bugged and does not work at all. The pressurization system is partially bugged, the fuel use is about twice what it should be, meaning you will fail missions that the game suggests you to accept on this plane.
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PC-12: Despite marking the oxygen & pressurization bug as fixed in every update (SU1, SU2 both marked it as “fixed”), you will die of hypoxia and fail the mission for flying the plane at its intended cruise altitude. A temporary fix for this was made available by the community months ago, it worked fine, and it still saves you in SU2, but now you get a very annoying warning from the plane pressurization system. In short, SU2 did not fix the main oxygen bug, and added a new one with the warning system.
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Citation CJ4: V-refs and fuel use are bugged, the effective range of the plane is about half what it should be, and landing V-refs are too low. SU2 brought some amazing new bugs too. The plane is now incredibly more expensive than before (I believe it was around 9M, it is now almost 35M), this does not make any sense, as it does not reflect its real life value, nor the value comparison with the other planes available in the sim.
More importantly, since maintenance costs depend on the overall price of the plane, flying the CJ4 will cause you to spend more money on maintenance than you make with VIP missions. -
KingAir 350i: Several levers and buttons in the plane have no sounds at all, all of the v-refs are completely wrong, the engine PDF page is missing, the checklist is bugged and incomplete, the reverse control is partially bugged and difficult to activate.
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KingAir c90: Similar issues as the 350i, and bugged Vrefs.
And that’s it, those are all your options.
There is not ONE single VIP plane that works as intended. Some cannot be flown at all (PC-24), some make you lose money for flying them (CJ4), some kill you for flying them (PC-12), some are so bugged that it is difficult to enjoy flying them (350i, c90).
Funnily enough, the PC-24, the PC-12, and the CJ4 were in a better state before SU2.
In 6 months, one step forward, two steps backward.
With several of these bugs which should have been addressed in a matter of weeks after release, not months.
Since, for some mysterious reason, they do not release hotfixes, it is likely that we will need to wait for several more weeks and months before seeing some relevant changes. We then need to hope that the changes actually improve the game, which is far from certain.
If we pair all of this with the fact that MSFS2024 is a massive failure (bad reviews, and steam charts showing MSFS2020 consistently outperforming MSFS2024, with less and less players playing the latter), there are reasonable doubts about the future of the game.
Even for the developers it could be easier to just give up on this mess and focus on the next project, since this one seems to have several important structural issues that probably cannot be entirely fixed. This is just speculation, but looking at the state of the game, so many months after release, does seem to point in this direction.
In all of this, I am always astonished by the amount of people seemingly happy about the state of the game and the progress being made…