Published , by Jan Ole Peek
Published , by Jan Ole Peek
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, or MSFS 2024 for the sanity of my fingers, was initially a surprise announcement to much of the flight sim community. MSFS 2020 was expected to stick around for a similar length of time as previous offerings from Microsoft. Around a decade is what most people expected. So the announcement of a sequel only four years after 2020, and at a time where MSFS 2020 was arguably at its most stable, supported, and most well-rounded, raised some eyebrows. It seems as though those concerns may have been warranted.
MSFS 2024 launched on a Tuesday, but most people weren't actually able to do much with it for several days, as server problems affected everyone, no matter your internet speed or hardware setup. Now, almost a month on, MSFS 2024 is stable to run, and players can return to the skies and see if 2024 has more to offer than 2020. In short, it does, but it has also transported us back to the early days of MSFS 2020, as bugs, poor design choices, and all manner of problems persist. This is one simulator that should have stayed in the hangar for another 6-12 months before letting it take flight.
On the surface, MSFS 2024 brings several exciting new features, including a new career mode, an expanded list of default aircraft, and the promise of improved environmental effects, including scenery and weather, all without an impact to performance thanks to streaming it from the cloud.
The new career mode is meant to bring purpose to your flights, and allows pilots to set up their own airline company and grow from small tours to profitable cargo flights. This mode mirrors progression systems in other simulators and sports games. You start with a small plane and tiny bank balance and accept a variety of jobs earning experience and money. These can then be spent to unlock licenses which lead to new and more profitable job types. This can be done in just about any part of the globe, as missions are generated by the sim no matter where you like to fly.
The career mode can serve as an excellent starting point for new pilots to learn different aircraft and flying techniques, setting them on a path to become more comfortable with how to operate the aircraft and eventually fly even the most complex airliners on offer. This mode also scratches that itch of progression and working towards a goal. Unfortunately, the progression can be quite grindy as some of the most interesting types of jobs, such as fire-fighting and search and rescue missions, require many hours of flying to unlock. These missions are only available to fly in career mode, meaning there is no way for a seasoned pilot to jump into arguably the biggest selling point of MSFS 2024 without slowly progressing through much more boring jobs.
Another huge feature of MSFS 2024 is the improved visuals, from everything on the ground to the weather, clouds, and seasonal effects. Players were promised that their sim would look better than ever, all while performing better than MSFS 2020. This is the piece that I was most skeptical about when MSFS 2024 was first announced, and it appears that Asobo may need to do some extra work to make this promise come true. The visuals are meant to be improved without affecting performance due to the heavy reliance on streaming scenery and content data from the cloud. This does in fact result in a much smaller footprint of the application on your PC or Xbox, something that especially console users will likely applaud. Unfortunately, it also means that if there are any hiccups at all related to the streaming services, the visual quality can be drastically impacted.
When things work smoothly, MSFS 2024 outperforms MSFS 2020 significantly on my system. The visual fidelity can be extremely high, and it's beautiful to see AI traffic at busy airports making its way across taxiways without bringing my framerate to a crawl. That is if I use a third-party add-on for the AI traffic, because the stock implementation, while better than in 2020, is still quite poor.
MSFS 2024 does greatly expand its stable of available aircraft that come with the simulator. This is a nice addition for those that don't purchase third-party add-ons from the marketplace or other sources. Unfortunately, this does also dilute the overall quality of the included aircraft. Some returning planes, such as the Cessna Longitude and CJ4, are as well-designed if not better than in MSFS 2020. The Longitude finally has a cabin, for example, and the work that Asobo and Working Title have done on the avionics in some of the aircraft remains very good. However, some newly added airplanes suffer from many of the same issues that the stock planes in 2020 did. Incomplete systems, non-functional controls, and errant behavior are still far too common on many of the airplanes available to fly in MSFS 2024.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room: streaming. For years, flight simmers have resisted the idea of requiring an online connection to fly in a simulator. If you don't want multiplayer, surely you don't need to be online for a flight simulator. MSFS 2020 slowly got players used to requiring online services, but even there, connection problems would frequently occur and result in minor annoyances. Getting friends into a multiplayer session was like a game of chance, with no real reason why you could see some of your friends but not others. So when MSFS 2024 announced that it would stream all of its scenery from the cloud, people were reasonably not very excited about the prospect. So when it turned out that not only scenery, but in fact the entire hangar of airplanes would be streamed, on-demand, problems were bound to happen. And happen they did. At launch, MSFS 2024 was entirely unavailable for a majority of users due to lack of capacity and bugs with the cloud services, sometimes for several days.
Even if we look past the initial nightmare that was the launch week, streaming problems persist to this very day. Users report frequently degraded scenery, to the point of a complete lack of detail, on a regular basis. Gamers with gigabit internet services still frequently find themselves in airplanes without cockpits fully rendered, and those who dare pause the sim mid-flight may experience their airplane just disappearing while it saves streaming data. If this sounds ludicrous, it's because it is. Simple as that.
Now, Asobo has hinted that players will be able to choose to download certain scenery and airplanes to their local systems to avoid having to stream the data, but that feature is not yet implemented and no concrete timeline has been given. This also applies to the in-game marketplace. It's still absent, meaning there is no place for non-PC users to purchase add-ons at this time. Not like there are any actual add-ons to purchase specifically for MSFS 2024. Sure, many add-ons originally created for MSFS 2020, particularly sceneries, are compatible with 2024, if you're brave enough to try it.
Over the past four years of MSFS 2020, there has been a plethora of excellent add-on aircraft developed by companies such as PMDG, Fenix Sim, and many others. When MSFS 2024 was announced, these developers and their customers were repeatedly assured that add-ons will be largely compatible with MSFS 2024 in some sort of compatibility mode. Reality paints a much different picture, however. One month in, and I can count the number of working third-party airplanes on one hand. Those who were able to make their products work either rely on external applications which make them less reliable on core Asobo code, or have been fortunate enough to build their add-ons within a limited framework that still works. However, many high-fidelity add-ons are nowhere near close to being compatible with MSFS 2024, with developers complaining about outright lack of support for features from 2020, as well as the reintroduction of bugs that took many months to get fixed in MSFS 2020.
To say that there is a high level of frustration among the hardcore flight sim community that heavily invests in the ecosystem that Microsoft Flight Simulator provides would be an understatement. But let's leave this aside for the moment and look at the built-in core functionality.
I already mentioned how the career mode can be quite grindy and time-consuming, but that's not dissimilar to other sims' career modes. The concern with the career mode in MSFS 2024 is how buggy and unpredictable it can be. Yes, it's a great achievement to be able to create your company anywhere in the world and be presented with missions local to that area. Unfortunately, sometimes this generation results in very strange job offerings. Scenic tour flights for tourists that cover thousands of miles are frequently offered up for Cessna 172 pilots. For reference, the Cessna 172's maximum range is something like 640 nautical miles, and even then, no pilot wants to fly that flight for several hours. Especially when the AI generated conversations that your passengers have will make you want to turn down the volume. You can do that, but then you also can't hear the ATC voices, which are kind of important, even though they're just as bad as they were in MSFS 2020. Worse than poor job offerings, however, are the somewhat frequent bugs where you'll land your plane only to have the career mode tell you that you've crashed it and are now out thousands of fictional dollars, i.e. hours of work.
The configuration of controls in MSFS 2020 was poor, to say the least. The control management in MSFS 2024 is somehow worse. What players wanted was a way to easily have different control schemes assigned to different aircraft. What players got was a convoluted system whereby there are different categories of controls, some which seemingly are tied to an aircraft, some which are generic, and then some others. There's no way to identify which controls belong to which category and, while the sim usually doesn't remember what aircraft-specific controls belong to what aircraft, it also frequently just deletes them all, just so you can experience the joy of setting them up again. I can't even blame this control management scheme on the Xbox console limitations, because it seems just as terrible for controller users as for anyone with a more advanced setup. Oh, and some controls are just plain missing, even though they're advertised in the pre-flight screen itself, and others either don't function at all, or function poorly. I'd like to insert a table flip gif here with "MSFS 2024 controls" written on it, but I'm not that artistic.
Many other long-standing issues from MSFS 2020 are also still present, such as the aforementioned poor ATC, ground vehicles that travel at will over runways, giant speed bumps in runways, giant canyons on runways, single trees just before the threshold of a runway, and massive rectangular columns of scenery just jutting out of the ground for no reason. But I think you get the point. There are issues here and it's not just a few.
Anyone who's been around flight simulator launches for a while knows that these types of launch problems are not uncommon. In fact, MSFS 2020 was quite rough for the first year or two of its existence. That makes the current state of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 all the more disappointing. Microsoft and Asobo have worked hard to bring MSFS 2020 to a very good place where it's stable and thriving. Anyone who purchased MSFS 2024 hoping for a continuation of that state is sorely disappointed and will likely continue to feel that way for quite some time.
If there is a piece of good news here, I feel confident that Asobo will continue to resolve these issues and, given enough time, we'll end up with a Microsoft Flight Simulator that is as stable as 2020 and benefits from all the additional technical improvements. We're not there now though, and now is when folks have spent their money on this product. The '2024' title feels premature; this game needed another 6-12 months of development and testing. It's apparent that it's simply not ready and much more work is required before it is. Flight simmers now have to decide if they want to go back to 2020, like many have, or be the beta testers for 2024 and accept that it'll take time before things are better.
This review is based on the Microsoft Store PC release. The game key was provided by the publisher for review consideration. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is for Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Microsoft Store or Steam on PC.