Where do you think MSFS 2024 has improved the most compared to 2020 and which areas are you most disappointed with?
I’ll start.
Hits:
- Improved lighting
- More realistic biomes
- Better LOD system (less pop ups in mountains)
- Seasons
- Ground enhancements (detailled cliffs and rocks)
Misses:
- Blurry ground textures (bing images)
- No improvements in weather simulation (especially turbulence)
- Unintuitive / User unfriendly UI
- No new multiplayer features
- General instability (endless bugs)
8 Likes
It’s only misses for me atm.
- Trees on my side monitors (triple screen) randomly flash on and off.
- It fails to save what controller config I’m using for the 2nd of two input devices that have the same name. I have to keep reapplying it.
- Grass immediately in front of the plane vanishes as you get close to it, but only on the centre monitor. If you pan the camera the grass reappears on the side monitors.
- The image in the left monitor randomly has a weird scaling/aspect issue the makes the curve of the Earth look like an egg.
- Flying at night, the ATC almost doesn’t stop broadcasting and keeps repeating things.
1 Like
Hits:
- Visual realism and immersion on a basic, low-end, curved 1080 monitor.
- Night lighting. Absolutely wonderful.
- Flight dynamics. I’m sure plenty of real world pilots with actual experience flying may have some issues with accuracy, but overall it just feels better and more realistic to me.
- Easily customizable avatars for ourselves, visible copilots in the seats.
- Clouds and weather look way better to me than in 2020.
Misses:
- I’d love to get the buttery smooth performance I get from the sim limited to 33% Refresh Rate and using Lossless Scaling without the use of a 3rd party app. Basically the functionality of the Lossless Scaling app built into the sim.
- Live traffic would be best if it could be limited the same way as AI traffic. Everything loads as an A320neo and overwhelms resources, causing low frames and stutters when on ground. Occasionally I see a real world airliner and livery in there but there seems to be no model matching.
- Trees. In the Puget Sound region, in both 2020 and 2024, the tree types are wrong. There are mostly evergreens, a lot of really tall ones at that, in real life that are being rendered as creepy looking spires and blobs instead of trees. I was able to correct this with ORBX addon but I’d prefer it just be correct in the sim.
- Black lines in water…still. Kinda’ ruins things a bit but there are fewer of them in 2024.
- Inability to paint default aircraft…yet.
- ATC says weird things, like, “Runway Tree Four L” rather than "Runway Tree Four Left) or “Runway Three Four Left”.
- Some aircraft exterior lights and their effect (Landing, Taxi) aren’t visible from cockpit. (MAX, SR22 for instance)
Overall while the list of misses is a little longer, my enjoyment of this simulator, as far as overall flying goes…far surpasses my expectations and any other version since FS4. I’m loving it.
1 Like
Good
- Massive improvement in quality of default planes
- Good to great avionics + variety of systems vs 2020
- Existence of career mode.
- Overall improvements in game’s appearance
- Load time is less than 1/4 of that of 2020
(Bonus) ability to set up controllers for each aircraft and set it as default so it loads with that setting every time, rather than switching settings every time you fly a different type of aircraft.
Bad
- Game randomly crashes after longer flights (especially annoying after a career mode flight where you loose the money you would have earned on the flight)
- almost all VIP flights have female clients, ATC has to many female controllers, in career mode mostly female Copilots etc. I’m good with female aviators, and I have no problem with DEI, but if it starts feeling like being preached to it can be annoying. In the real world, I’m guessing at least 80% of those jobs are male, and I’d like the game to reflect it.
- Lack of (the promised) compatibility with a number of heavy hitter 2020 add-ons (PMDG is the most obvious)
- limited A/C choices in career mode
- inability of modders to improve the default ac due to encrypted files.
All in all, I expected to buy MSFS24, and find it pretty bad, and stick with MSFS20 for a long time. What has actually happened is I’ve only flown MSFS20 missions 3 times in the last two months, so pleasant surprise, despite the issues I have had.