Wednesday, November 20th 2024
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Dives into Long Loading Times and Negative Reviews
Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator 2024 just launched, and it already appears to be riddled with problems. When internally testing, we ran into some issues regarding long loading times and eventual errors without getting to the game. Additionally, many others confirmed that they were experiencing problems. Launched on 08:00 am PT on November 19, the simulator has faced widespread server infrastructure issues affecting player access. CEO of Asobo, maker of this Flight Simulator franchise, Sebastian Wloch, has released a public statement via video addressing the widespread technical issues that plagued their latest game release. According to Wloch, while pre-launch testing had successfully simulated concurrent player counts of 200,000 users, the actual launch revealed critical weaknesses in the database cache system that weren't apparent during testing.
Additionally, the negative reviews stemming from these issues have piled up. On Steam, the game currently has 2,865 reviews, only 500 of which are positive. The remaining 2,000+ are overwhelmingly negative, with many users not being satisfied with the gameplay and quality of the release. The game's infrastructure is powered by Microsoft's Azure cloud, which is also not good marketing for Microsoft as the Azure platforms should signal better infrastructure scaling and stability. While these issues should be cleared in the long run, the short-term consequences are turning the launch into a colossal failure, as gamers expected more from this release. Lastly, the alpha version of the game was notorious for the massive internet bandwidth hog, causing up to 180 Mbit/s load.
Additionally, the negative reviews stemming from these issues have piled up. On Steam, the game currently has 2,865 reviews, only 500 of which are positive. The remaining 2,000+ are overwhelmingly negative, with many users not being satisfied with the gameplay and quality of the release. The game's infrastructure is powered by Microsoft's Azure cloud, which is also not good marketing for Microsoft as the Azure platforms should signal better infrastructure scaling and stability. While these issues should be cleared in the long run, the short-term consequences are turning the launch into a colossal failure, as gamers expected more from this release. Lastly, the alpha version of the game was notorious for the massive internet bandwidth hog, causing up to 180 Mbit/s load.
29 Comments on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Dives into Long Loading Times and Negative Reviews
I'd like to think people would have started to learn by now to not support this kind of game play experience of requiring online connectivity for single player games, but I guess a lot of people are still pretty daft.
Even the aircrafts were not locally installed once you install the game via steam/MS store.
Either you invest in some good Azure architecture to back your game or you stop with thin clients altogether...
I don't think it's a good design for a game, even a sim, to go all 100mbps-recommended persistent online,...even for that single player career sim experience.
Many simmers know they need hundreds of GB of local storage,..and it's not like SSD are super expensive. I don't understand why they changed this aspect over MSFS 2020 that deeply...rather than persisting on SSD, their infrastructure is continuously streaming, even with rolling caches and all, it's an absurd design.
They will likely struggle for a while and probably fix the major issues for the most part, but I’m betting it will never get fully resolved. Based on cloud-powered design decisions, it might just be a flawed result for the duration. If the product only functions well under ideal internet conditions, then it’s not exactly aimed for success for a large market.
Some things never change
£155 for the full version, ouch.
Seriously though, AI CPUs and accelerators my @ss, they couldn’t predict the load and strain on the servers…:slap:. A (functional) human brain would make a better prediction.
Its not terrible but glad i didnt actually pay full price for it.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks one or more of the big ISPs who enforce data caps are secretly pushing for more of these type of games in order to help drive their revenue.