Smaller ground lighting at night
City and road lights feel oversized. From the air, they tend to appear as large glowing orbs with little spacing between them—even at higher altitudes. I do like how the 2024 lights fade into the distance, but after +670 hours in 2024, the scale still feels off. The 2020 sizing felt much more natural.
Multiplayer nameplates
It would be great to have player aircraft type and altitude visible again. When not on VATSIM, that information was really useful for situational awareness when approaching or departing runways. Right now, it’s hard to judge how high and fast (based on AC) other players are, and that extra context also made it fun to see trends of different aircraft that people are flying.
Wind turbine lighting at night
The red obstruction beacons from 2020 seem to be missing. Without them, wind farms are nearly impossible to identify at night, which makes flying into areas like Chicago or the Bay Area feel less realistic given how many turbines are actually there.
Just my opinion, but these feel like relatively straightforward improvements seeing as we had them before — and they’re the things I tend to always miss when flying in 2024.
Hi,
I miss the breathtaking clouds and the beautiful ground textures in MSFS 2020 before it was dumbed down by SU 5 and SU 16 of MSFS 2020.
Totally agree with everything that’s already been mentioned, and I’d like to add a few more things:
The better rendering and LOD behavior for AI aircraft. Now in MSFS 2024, the landing gear only becomes visible when you’re really close, external lights are barely noticeable in daylight, and I liked the contrails more in the 2020 version.
The simpler menu navigation, especially when selecting aircraft, and the fact that on the world map you could immediately spot all handcrafted airports. In MSFS 2024, you have to zoom in quite a bit before smaller airports even show up as those “yellow star” icons.
And the overall simplicity when it came to creating and finding liveries. Now we’ve got compatible models, native models, native models with high detail upgrades, etc., which makes it way more complicated than it used to be to find the right livery.
ATC worked a little bit in 2020 but in 2024 it is still a dead loss.
How about the whole UI. 2020’s isn’t perfect but it’s a whole lot better than the disaster in 2024. Aircraft selection and having the fuel and weight and balance tied into that awful tablet in particular are really terrible.
*Checklist:Fs24 doesn’t work correctly and has some design errors.
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Music (FSX option): FS24 still plays the music in the starting video even though its muted/disabled.
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Night lighting: FS24 is too bright, too hazy, big startbursts that go through objects.
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Day lighting: FS24 is even more blown out.
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Textures (aircraft and ground).
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Navdata being streamed in FS24: I often have to restart the flight and game to preload the navdata.
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Unlocked file system: FS24 is supper annoying and sensitive. Accessing aircraft files requires the slow and locked virtual file system. RIP modding.
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Reliance on devtools for everything. FS20 let you freestyle. FS24 forces you to use the devtools which always crash or lockup if you do things in the wrong order.
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Many undocumented changes that we developers just have to figure out ourselves.
I miss being able to see traffic in the daytime without using nameplates.
For me it’s mainly the overall smoothness and predictability. In 2020 I felt like I knew exactly what kind of flight I was going to get, especially on IFR airliner legs. 2024 has things I like, but I still miss that more settled feeling sometimes, especially when I just want a clean gate to gate flight without wondering what random issue is going to show up this time.
Bring back my 2020 functional co-pilot that was replaced with a window blocking carboard cut-out which I keep having to remove before flights.
And setting up controls in FS2020 was a lot more “doable” and FS2020 did not forget your settings like FS2024 tends to do. I agree with what others have posted on this topic as well.
The one thing I miss most from FS2020 is the clouds in the early releases. They were sooooooo realistic.
Try the great freebie from Legacy Weight & Balance – Got Friends
Apart from the terrible UI/UX in 2024 (and locking of ability to mod it) I don’t really miss anything else, 2024 is an improvement over 2020.
This most certainly did happen, at least the “random” corruption of control settings.
It’s carried over to 2024 as well, which makes me suspect it’s the same issue at work - most likely the same code edge case being triggered. It’s never happened to me in either though, touch wood.
The main problem is that i have customers asking me once a month where the deice fluid is. Never had this problem with fs20.
Additionally the fs24 tablet writes random weight limits.
https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/t/fs24-tablet-random-weight-limitations/17486
Being able to turn off lens flare.
What possible reason was there for removing that option?
It’s a dead horse, but the clouds from early 2020 builds… as everyone mentioned, they were on another level. They still weren’t perfect, but they were so much more visually interesting. Downgrading clouds… one of the primary features of the sky… where aircraft fly… in a flight sim… 
I sincerely hope we get an entire SU dedicated to one thing: Clouds. Nothing else, no distractions!
Working Live Ship Traffic. And even better ones because of GAIST.
Wish we had the hangar view back, it was neat to check a new livery out before loading in
I miss the AI pilot feature for the times you just want to relax and enjoy the scenery.
Definitely ground textures. Even with the SU16 regression it feels like some of the aerials in 2020 are better.
LOD behavior on airport and ground objects is excessively aggressive in 2024. There are too many close up objects like taxi signs, wind socks, etc. popping into view at any given moment. While the 2020 xbox release also resulted in sim updates with overly aggressive object LOD behavior I feel like 2024 is much worse.
Night lighting is way too bright in 2024 (and big city night lighting is glitched on my 6800XT and everything has a grey glow).
GAIST working properly
Overall stability and especially ongoing wasm crashes in various aircraft.
It’s not to say 2020 was perfect as there are still plenty of things I miss from P3D even still.
Up to 10 options visible in the Comm panel instead of just 4.
I simply cannot believe this hasn’t been rectified 1.5 years into the product’s lifespan.
And that stupid-narrow scroll bar, that is so difficult to manipulate. Just, WTH, did a human even try to test this before signing off?!