Just curious what people find compelling about flying in 2024 today vs 2020…
Well for Xbox it offers a lack of cycling views, something so simple to just press a button to go from cockpit, external to custom cameras so I can fly as a passenger. So it removes some of the fun, and other custom views like Fly-by etc.
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For me it adds a standardized EFB to aircraft, some graphics fidelity/eyecandy like displacement maps and raytraced cockpit shadows, and a thinner client.
Thats the only positives I have found. The rest is just gimmicky game stuff and scenery simulator.
That being said, theres way too much that I dislike compared to 2020. They effectively made it worse in many areas as well. I am waiting for patch 3, if that doesnt sort most of this horrible mess out I am requesting a refund. No one should pay for this, and no one should ever pay for being a alpha tester and QA.
sidenote: does this forum autocorrect aircraftS to aircraft? 
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Download speed, taxiing feels better, crosswind landings are more accurate, clouds, default aircraft have more systems, EFB & charts & the music! Sure it has bugs, but even so I’ve not touched 2020 since this sim launched. I have been one of the lucky ones regarding stability and crashes though. Not a high end system….RTX 3070 with a 5800x and 64g.
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Clouds and lighting, that’s about it.
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which is worse than 2020 (look at the massive topic about lighting and asobo admited they gonna fix)
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It adds the ability to walk in the world! This to me is almost as much fun as the career. Weather is more realistic. Rural areas, especially rugged rural areas, are stunning. There is so much about this sim in its current state that upsets me. But gawd! is it pretty when it works!
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This is a good question and I hope it’s taken seriously.
I agree with this. I just want to fly from A to B and I don’t care about the rest. I won’t go into the negatives because they’ve all been documented here. I’d love to dive into the EFB to learn more about it, but I don’t want to do that until I’ve decided to leave 2020 behind once and for all. So thus the decision to see what Patch 3 offers - if it fixes a lot of issues then I’ll probably move on from 2020, but if it’s lightweight then I’ll stay with 2020 until something changes to convince me to move forward.
So to answer your question, right now for me the EFB is definitely promising but that’s about it.
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I like the quicker load times. I notice that Asobo has tweeked the general rudder action. Not as jerky as 2020. Faster and smoother frame rates are great. World environment is very nice. Looking forward to the further improvements to come.
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I appreciate all the comments so far. Yes there have been plenty of challenges documented and I agree with almost all of them. The small things I do enjoy are seemingly better ground handling (rudders/steering really drive me crazy in 2020), rudder control seems a bit better (as stated not so twitchy) and I think the EFB is potentially pretty cool. The UX on it though is a bit too buggy for me to really rely on it and I’m not sure if/how to get it to play nice with simbrief plans.
In fact the career mode wasn’t THAT much of a draw for me. MSFS2024 offers the following to me:
- a platform that was designed for the promise to be ready for future expansion using less disk space and making better use of new technologies like ray tracing and DX12
- a new engine that offers better perfomance and less stutters even when it’s main-thread limited
- many improvements to the aerodynamics simulation
- visual upgrades in autogen especially for the surface structures. Mountains fields, and forests are now much better looking when flying low and slow
- while I’m still sceptical if the server based approach is the best solution I can see the advantages. Still as soon as the option is available I will download DLC content to my hard drive in order to reduce my dependance on the cloud. We’ll see how that shakes out in the future
- of course it also “offers” a lot of stuff that’s not working yet as advertised. But to be honest I never expected wonders with such a seriously complex product and was fully prepared for much of what’s been happening.
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For now not much other than a big list of ‘potential’ things. Even career is more than a bit borked.
Ironically 2020 is getting a bit better performance and features added somewhat on the down-low that work. MP/Live traffic matching just appeared mysteriously in the sim. And even though I’m mostly full red pegged on the CPU waiting on the sim the frames are up and stutters are down, you just have to close the FPS menu or you’ll go nuts watching it. I was flying around with PG off(for maximum cartoon perfect draw) at 4K ultra 400/200, FSLTL, birds/3rd party airports yada yada and not dipping below 45fps. I ran out of settings.
I fly mostly GA and helicopters low and slow doing digital tourism, in VR.
I’ve only done free flight so far in 2024. Career mode was not something that really interested me, but now after watching some youtubers work their way through career mode, I must admit it looks fun. I’ll definitely wait a while and let others work out those career mode bugs first which you see a lot of on those videos.
I’m so happy with it just using free flight that I am now ready to remove 2020.
Why?
Faster sim load and also faster flight load by a lot.
Scenery is way better in my opinion. I flew around Auckland NZ yesterday, and Wellington and Queenstown today. I guess it is the same photogrammetry as 2020, but it looks much better to me in 2024. I think the PG looks better due to lighting improvements, shorelines look much better, roads and vehicles look much better, non-pg trees look much better. All these things make the PG look better to me.
I can now easily take 2d screen shots using the photo mode without leaving VR, wanted a way to do that for a long time.
There are now helipads everywhere, much more than 2020. Los Angeles for example has a lot more buildings with helipads now, but so does every major city I’ve flown so far. This makes helicopter flying much more fun than 2020.
Edit: I’ve also had some fun after spotting fields in NC with horses and cows in them and watching them panic and scramble when I buzzed the field. Never saw that in 2020.
I do have a high end machine and a 300 mbps internet connection, and my performance has been mostly good, not perfect every moment, but at least as good as it ever was in 2020.
There are bugs of course. I can’t use the EFB yet in VR but then I didn’t have one in 2020, I’m still using sky4sim which gives me the best road map tablet, and it works ok in 2024 though not supported.
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Replay mode on Xbox is huge
The EFB is a great addition, the online flight planner looks good too although I haven’t tried it yet. 2024 of course offers many new aircraft and several of the ones I’ve tried so far are awesome (Hawk Arrow II, Powrachute, Magni Orion). And definitely a better variety of aircraft than 2020 had. The new trees are a big deal, especially combined with seasons. They give the world a much more realistic look even if they are a bit too big and maybe too overpopulated in some areas (and also too many pines in my area makes my city look unrecognizable). The better lighting looks great. The ability to enter and exit aircraft is really cool. I landed at a small airport by a river, got out and walked over to the river. Really neat stuff. The new ground detail looks really good when you’re on the ground. Lots of little bumps and things that makes the terrain look a bit more real. Plus there’s logs, rocks, and even tiny details like pinecones/pine needles and such on the ground layer.
Bush flying and and low and slow sightseeing is where it’s at right now, which is right up my alley. I’ve stayed away from photogrammetry as much as possible, but with the new trees, the non-photogrammetry areas look much better.
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It offers a platform designed for the future. MSFS is pretty much at its limit; improving it further was probably impossible without doing what they had to do. I’m not a massive fan of the streaming but with the option to download scenery coming, it will help a lot.
I haven’t played much with career mode, it’s not my thing, but using free flight and adding the commanche and the Fenix, I have to say it feels better to fly in 2024 than in 2020.
The bugs can be annoying but pretty sure they will be sorted in time and we can start to see the potential of 2024 soon enough.
I hope they work on the autogen soon. With improved autogen, this sim will be insanely beautiful.
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In my opinion, the biggest improvement is that the world presented now has much more depth due to the new global lighting. Or rather that the world no longer feels a bit flat, but much more three-dimensional.
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Better graphics and lighting, better weather/clouds, better ground handling, faster loading to sim and back to menu, smaller storage footprint. DX12 and FG are now officially supported and doesn’t crash out all the time.
And more bugs.
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“Please stop”? Why the snipe? The question was asked as to what, other than the Career, 2024 brings beyond 2020. There is no wrong answer. There are features that I enjoy but perhaps you do not. Likely there other features that get you buzzed but me, maybe not so much. Also, let’s be real. This is a game as much as it is a sim. I was in the sim last month for recurrent. That experience shares virtually no commonality with what I’ve enjoyed with the likes of MSFS, X-Plane, DCS, BMS and so on.
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