I’m surprised by how few Quality of Life improvements MSFS 2024 has.
The obvious improvement (and this is debatable depending on who you talk to, but it is an improvement nonetheless) is the control binding interface revamp with aircraft-specific controls, but there is little else.
What has been glaringly overlooked, to me, are these:
No way to edit the Logbook – we can’t delete or edit entries, and the sort order selection isn’t retained between visits to the logbook. I don’t want to have to change it to descending by date every time.
No aircraft state saving – I can’t believe this isn’t a user-selectable thing. I’m tired of having to constantly tune my COMs/NAVs/ADF to my preferred frequencies from the defaults. While I love KSNS, I tire of their ATIS. I’d love, too, for the sim to remember where I parked my aircraft last time I flew it. When I launch the sim, it would be so cool to have my last used aircraft parked at the airport where I last landed as the default selection in the World Map.
World Map filter state saving – This is really ridiculous. It’s so bad in 2024 that if you set filters and then go back to the Home Screen and back to the World Map they are reset. Come on.
Not saving aircraft variant/livery for all aircraft – I hope this is a bug, but man it is driving me nuts. The sim can’t even remember which variant/livery I have chosen between sim quit/relaunches. I’ve been messing with the C172 Basic, but when I relaunch the sim I’m in the G1000 Cargo.
Pilot weight setting – I’m a svelte person. I don’t weigh 170 lbs or more. I want to set my pilot weight to what I actually weigh, and I want that to be saved with my avatar/pilot profile so I don’t have to alter it every-time-I-fly.
No way to set a default spawn type – I never want to spawn already running on the runway. I want to spawn C&D every time. Why can’t there be a setting for this? I tire of having to choose a parking spot every-single-time I fly.
I am sure there are more, but these are just off the top of my head. I don’t understand why these sorts of things get overlooked by the design team. I sometimes have to wonder if anyone at Asobo really uses their creation the way many of us do. How can they not trip over these sorts of things themselves and feel compelled to do something about it? Maybe they are so sick of MSFS that they hate it. This artist would seem to indicate that someone at Asobo certainly has an issue with the product they were hired to work on:
Volume controls in the EFB! One third of the experience is sound; it’s a cinematic experience. Every developer is different so have controls that allow us to dial in the sound experience.
I started making a list for you, then I realized you are arguing there are NO QoL improvements in 2024 and you are leaving me leaving me with the burden of proof.
Like ye olde, “(Insert radical statement here) prove me wrong.” meme.
I just set up the sim for my pilot dad who hasn’t played anything since FSX, and lemme tell you, initial setup is quite the hurdle for a new user to get through. Controls bindings, Aircraft selections (variants are not obvious to get to), the classic keyboard keybindings gone (why is G not gear anymore he wonders). He started career mode on his own and didn’t know how to walk around the plane because, well, if you’ve never played a game with WASD movement how would you know that…
Maybe I just need to put him through the initial flight training lessons even though he’s already a pilot IRL.
I’ve emphasized my language to indicate your statement about my intent to be incorrect.
You made a statement that:
I simply asked you to list a few, not all.
You’re making an assumption that I’m here to prove you wrong. I’m simply looking for those QoL improvements that I’m grossly overlooking, because I started this thread – as I do like any other – because I’m honestly missing what has been improved that I can see and feel every time I use the sim.
I didn’t even list what they have made harder to use – like the aircraft selection screen and its sorting mess, or the merging of Road, Ship, Fauna, Static Aircraft sliders into a single slider that controls quantity and quality simultaneously, or the removal of the controls to delete the cache to refresh it.
The whole liveries and dynamic registration is an important regress compared to 2020, liveries appear as airplanes and registrations are ignored and not saved. Variant of aircraft is also not remembered and the status for the worldmap is beyond my understanding. I want to use live weather and time always and never ever change anything yet I’m constantly checking against a magically appearing custom weather setting.
It seems the sim was only tested for the default planes and no liveries, I’m 100% convinced the testers are testers and not real simmers, it takes about 10 minutes of testing for any of us to compile a long list of bugs, annoyances and easy improvements.
A&O fixes that on the cheap. A more expensive fix is to have enough hardware that you can have 1-4 throttle levers, 1-4 prop levers, and 1-4 mixture levers, so you don’t have to change bindings - just use the levers appropriate to the aircraft you’re in.
12 levers covers all piston and turbine engine aircraft from 1 to 4 engines. Single piston - use levers 1, 5, 9. Twin piston - levers 1&2, 5&6, 9&10. Etc, etc.
Not enough rotary encoders? A spare gamepad for dedicated nosewheel, etc. Great for takeoff - when it stops rumbling, the nosewheel is no longer under load - now you can effectively use your rudder, ailerons, and elevator.
I’m not a fan of Musk, but he’s right about a hardware-rich environment opening up possibilities.
Stacked aircraft variants to keep the list of planes better managed.
Walk arounds and walking. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but an A2A style improvement.
The EFB, and better flight planning integration for all planes (when it freaking works).
A more streamlined startup from cold and dark for those who don’t have the proper gear to quickly flip all the switches.
Dynamic settings.
Flight model improvements for planes and helicopters.
And I am not going to type stream of consciousness QoL improvements any more, because as I said above, proving you wrong would be a futile endeavor.
This is a complaint thread and I jumped in with a counterpoint. After reading the room, I realize my intent was never the intent of the thread, and I would be better off if I just let folks complain in peace.
I wouldn’t say those are all QoL improvements. By QoL, I’m not talking about new features like Walkarounds or the Flight Model improvements or even the EFB.
I’m talking about the user experience functionality. UI quirk improvements, streamlining of common day-to-day usage functionality. Planning a flight via the EFB really is not easier than 2020’s World Map method. Yes, it is more full-featured, but it is less streamlined to use and feels like a tacked-on function in the World Map rather than an integrated interface as a part of the World Map.
The EFB is a great new feature, but I’m not yet convinced it is a QoL improvement. I’m stunned the route-finding algorithm is different in the sim vs. in the web-based tool. That seems like a very bizarre design choice.
I’m sorry you see a simple discussion as a complaint thread and all the negativity that seems to bring with that sort of a label.
I am using 2024 more and more, and as I do, I am tripping over things that I’m surprised were not addressed as part of a new generation of the sim. If making that observation is a complaint, I suppose it could be interpreted that way.
I find it more of an odd thing to me as someone who develops product and is always looking to improve upon what I’ve created – leaving no stone unturned.
You mentioned Wishlist items for some of what I indicated in my OP. I believe there are Wishlist items for many of them, and I know many have been discussed in threads-past.
I thought it would be nice to be reminded of some of the little things that do make 2024 a better user experience, because I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head, and there are some major misses to the 2024 UI that I dwell on. Like aircraft selection, in my opinion, is borderline disastrous. Students should study it for what not to do in human interface design.
What I do like: the world map now shows the actual sim world. So when you zoom in, what you see is what you get, not just a Bing map. This is real nice for scoping out airfields without having to load all the way into the sim.
Clicking on a parking spot while zoomed in tight no longer shifts the map on you, tricking you into starting a flight airborne. That’s just a bug fix, but man, fixing that one really does improve my quality of life.
I fly VR, it takes me no more that 2 minutes to determine if an aircraft can be flown in vr, there all bugged, I don’t believe ant validation was done on stock offerings
I wish there was a way to kick my co-pilot out of medium cargo missions. All they do is sit there taking up weight, sucking down my fps, while providing no value. They don’t even bother to preflight the aircraft, they’re sitting on their butt when you arrive to preflight. I would be more than happy to take a few extra pounds of cargo and not have to look at a useless copilot.
I just posted in another thread how I got the Sky Courier off the ground before the co-pilot could call out V1, and then three hours later they said it when I landed lol.
Me to the co-pilot after they snap at me for my speeds, and then sit there doing nothing as I miss a radio call:
It’s a good list of improvements. I also thought that they somehow made the UI harder to use and this is not just unfamiliarity. It just seems to take more clicks to get where you want in the UI.
I’m not even talking about the control configuration which is difficult but not too bad considering how many settings we wanted to have. MSFS 2020 had an exceptional control onboarding with many typical hardware products already mapped with pictures and all. The new sim seems to not have had that same level of care. It’s capable of all of that and maybe it’s coming at some point but certainly too late.
The best way to possible get some of these included in an update is to reframe them so they do not add very much to the UI. I believe that UI changes are particularly cumbersome for the studios and Microsoft because they have a higher risk. All UI labels will have to go out to the localization teams into their queues and probably also reviewed by legal. A long road.
So if a feature like state saving aircraft and payloads could be added as a single checkbox in the settings, it has a better chance. Even better if it’s just in a config file.
I think the EFB will be the path to addons that can do some of these things. Maybe not things like the World map, but things related to per-aircraft state saving and possible reloading to a saved location. It all depends on how much access such an app would have. But at least it’s a path to write code that can interface with the sim.
