From my perspective, I have looked forward to each new instalment of Flight Simulator since FS5.1 (1995). Each new version of this sim has elevated the level of realism for my central interest in VFR flight.
FS2024 did not disappoint this customer.  I am experiencing the smoothest and most detailed visual flight simulation since beginning this hobby. I am one who embraces the anticipation of advanced technology and certainly glad that Microsoft keeps pace with technology for implementation into the core of Flight Simulator. Would I rather wait for a near perfect release requiring many more months or years? NEVER.
This hobby is my passion and I enjoy every aspect that Flight Simulator brings into my life via the home computer.

My 2 cents: the sim is not broken. I just completed a successful and very enjoyable flight in the Fenix A321 from MK Studios Lisbon to Barcelona with FSHud v2 and a whole host of other addons. Performance was great - in fact much better than 2020 with the same addons. Sky and clouds looks great. The ground, taxiway markings, trees and vegetation looks awesome.

It did take me quite a while to wrap my head around the controls setup, but after watching a 30 min YT tutorial, I understood the new “logic”. Everything just works now, with some quirks here and there. Should they have delayed the release? Not in my opinion. 

I might be lucky to have everything up and running, I respect the fact that random things might occur due to different hardware configurations etc. But I’m a bit baffled by all the negativity at the moment. 

Edited December 4, 20241 yr by Cpt_Piett

Why bother. Half of those complaining have never tried it, an eighth returned it after a day, and the rest accept (and grumble quietly) about a bug or flaw and fly on enjoying what is great and looking forward to it being better. 

18 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

My 2 cents: the sim is not broken. I just completed a successful and very enjoyable flight in the Fenix A321 from MK Studios Lisbon to Portugal with FSHud v2 and a whole host of other addons. Performance was great - in fact much better than 2020 with the same addons. Sky and clouds looks great. The ground, taxiway markings, trees and vegetation looks awesome.

It did take me quite a while to wrap my head around the controls setup, but after watching a 30 min YT tutorial, I understood the new “logic”. Everything just works now, with some quirks here and there. Should they have delayed the release? Not in my opinion. 

I might be lucky to have everything up and running, I respect the fact that random things might occur due to different hardware configurations etc. But I’m a bit baffled by all the negativity at the moment. 

First, that is cool that you got it working on your end. I would say that maybe your internet connection is really good, and that is the reason, but I have 2.5Gbps fiber and I had a CTD the last time out. The software is just brittle and maybe now you are doing great, but tomorrow it may bite you. Glad it works for you, but as you can see A LOT of people are having many issues. Just a frustrating experience for many right now.  

On 12/2/2024 at 9:27 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

I fundamentally disagree with your premise.

The sim.is.not.broken - it's running just fine on my machine.

I fly big iron, GA pistons, GA turboprops and even helicopters.

I'm flying every day and finishing flights on my own terms.

And I'll tell you this, it's running BETTER than v2020 did when it released 4 years ago.

And I'll give you some professional IT advice: MSFS did NOT break your mouse 🤣

Ummm mouse acceleration being broken is a common complaint in MSFS2024??? I cannot stand it right now and until it's fixed I'm sticking to 2020.

My advice is to have patience and let the sim mature. It took over a year for MSFS2020 to even get to a point where decent addon aircraft were released. This sim is basically releasing with them. There is a lot of potential here and I think it will shape up much quicker than MSFS2020 did. I'm not thrilled about some of the GUI changes as I am of the opinion of if it isn't broken why fix it. But it's something I can live with but not love.

Long story short is it's not horrible and it's not great. Give it some time, which is never the popular answer.

7 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Have you ever purchased a new house? Like, I mean a BRAND NEW house that was just built on an empty lot in an also brand-new subdivision that used to be some farmer's field...?

The funny thing is that you came here with the statement that the sim is not broken and then you write a long post basically just confirming that it is, but that we should not make a story out of it. Even more, you give an example above that PERFECTLY illustrates why we should NOT accept this just because it is possible to do some nice flights. In your house example, the state of MSFS would mean: some water taps not working, no hot water, some rooms inaccessible, roof leaking. Can you move into such a house? Of course you can, but you would put a lot of effort into making the responsibles fix those things. And I guess you would not pay certain plmbers, electricians etc. UNTIL everything is properly done. So yes, a very good example, but you draw the wrong parallels...

What makes me angry in this whole discussion is the more we accept things in its current state, the less they will do about. It was like this the last four years, some things only got fixed if enough people complained and it ended up on the bug list with enough votes. Sitting still and hoping that things will work out «on its own» never worked. Not in the sim nor in your wonderful house example. You have to complain to get things fixed, whether you like it or not. 

And yes, MSFS2024 was released by a multi-billion company prematurely. And they should at least feel that a little bit, even if it is just by bad publicity like the mini review from FSElite. If not, they are basically confirmed in their current approach of releasing unfinished stuff. I mean, lets face the facts: those Carenado planes for example are not even properly migrated to MSFS2024, due to a too short project timeline. You do not use them anyway? Fine, but not using them does not make the fact better that they are bugged to useless.

10 hours ago, eslader said:

Not if your problems are caused by whatever's causing mine, because this happened to me in the 170 and the Beaver. And I'm still running the sim vanilla.

This is a much more reasonable position than the "review bomb them and campaign to get Jorg fired" stuff that's going around. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect on day 1, or day 180. And I'm sure that Jorg/etc were approached by MS corporate communications and told exactly what they could, couldn't and must say in the days/weeks leading up to release. I'm not willing to blame the Asobo team for any of this, because when the choice is "say the simulator is perfect or turn in your access card," most people are going to toe the line.

But I do wonder at the corporatethink that made someone decide that the... Overly optimistic comms ahead of release wouldn't come back to bite them when the game couldn't deliver as promised.

 

Not that I think this is going to be bad long-term. Look at No Man's Sky. When that thing released it was the butt of all the internet jokes. The lead dev promised an incredible game and delivered a 100% hot-garbage mess. But they knuckled down and worked their tails off to improve the game (and are still doing so) and it's now one of the top-rated games on Steam.

I'm fully confident 2024 will see the same reputation redemption, but it does seem silly for them to have forced themselves into needing to redeem their rep rather than just waiting to release until it was in a better state.

 

All this talk from various posters about MS pushing the release date etc seems a very popular angle, ok that maybe so - but we don’t know that do we, maybe it was Jorg decision alone.

who knows - I don’t.

10 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Yeah, sorry, unashamed evangelist though I am, this article is anything but balanced.

Are they supposed to be an authority on flight simulation? There’s a lot of text about the UI and initial sever problems and only ONE LINE about the flight model, which they admit is a vague ‘very good’. The positives are casually crammed into one paragraph of ‘yeah, the atmosphere, world and fm are great, now back to my problems with binding’.

I’ve seen mostly balanced reviews, maybe the focus on the negatives is because there is more negatives to talk about - and there are some big ones let’s be fair here.

there are also some great positives too.

Edited December 4, 20241 yr by hanhamreds

It really looks like an Early Acces state to me. 

Hopefully it won’t take a year or more to solve all those CTD’s.
 

51 minutes ago, GSalden said:

It really looks like an Early Acces state to me. 

Hopefully it won’t take a year or more to solve all those CTD’s.
 

I'm convinced if they'd released it as an open beta at 25% less than current cost with instructions on how to submit the included bug report /feature request forms and a visible "work in progress" tag line.... They'd have been revered as flight gods. Positive words would be flowing instead of negative and noone could be unhappy due to the honest and up front admittance that it was intended for full release in approximately one years time. 

Bottom line people would generally be excited that they got to enjoy a bold and new product a year EARLY, instead of complaining that a finished product was not delivered and they'd have to wait a year for it. 

First impressions last and all that. 

2 hours ago, GSalden said:

It really looks like an Early Acces state to me. 

 

absolutely 

It’s the bean counters that decide on a release date. It’s always been that way with Microsoft and flight sim releases. If it was left to the programmers they’d only give it the green light when they were satisfied no bugs remained. That could take yonks infuriating the bean counters.

They certainly wouldn’t include a year in the title release. Too constraining. 😁

1 hour ago, sloppysmusic said:

Bottom line people would generally be excited that they got to enjoy a bold and new product a year EARLY, instead of complaining that a finished product was not delivered and they'd have to wait a year for it. 

There does seem to have been a rush to get the new sim out the door in 2024 no matter what.

Calling it MSFS25 and releasing as early access probably would have made for a better release experience. Though, that would've dented the overall sales figures and ultimately revenue to report in 2024.

We don't know what (if any) pressures were exerted on the MSFS team to release this year. With significant numbers of tech layoffs continuing, perhaps Jorg was told that MSFS had to generate more money or he would need to lose X% of staff/sub-contractors from the project.

Whatever the cause of MSFS24's release in its current state, the sim's highlights are being overshadowed by a lot of negatives. Feel sorry for the devs to work so hard on new, exciting features only for the showcasing of their efforts to be undone by elements outside their control.

Edited December 4, 20241 yr by F737MAX

"Broken" is a subjective term, and really depends on what that person's use case are. For example, I fly the Fenix the most so the plight of folks on the default airplanes isn't my use case.

There were ample warning signs the launch would be rocky and frequent visitors to this forum should not be surprised. SU15, which did not get a beta had issues. The AAU3 update, which didn't have a beta, also had issues. Not having any prerelease copies available to reviewers because they were so close to the wire was also a warning sign.

And the biggest one of all: delaying the MP launch. MS likes money, and the MP is where they make a fair amount of money.

The steaming component also should not be a shock and is the likely cause of different user's experiences. I "only" have a 100mbs connection and I have had little issues with streaming. This is while my wife voraciously consumes Netflix. Of all the doom and gloom posts leading up to 24's launch, the streaming one was the one I gave the most credit towards.

I also felt the people uninstalling 2020 (other than space issues) to be rather optimistic.

Also, yes, the industry is moving more towards streaming and having the heavy lifting of processing into the cloud. MS already does this with the cloud gaming component of GamePass and GeForce Now is also a decent alternative for hardware constrained folks.

I imagine folks like us are a blip on MS/Asobo's radar. I paid for the standard version of 24. Unless there is a local legend or something that really interests me MS isn't going to see another dime from me for the next four years. I don't buy from the MP. 

What MS really wants I imagine is to make GamePass a good alternative. They would much rather I give them $15 a month to play a lot of games than $70 as a one time purchase. I think this is why the INI planes are all on the standard edition. To drive GamePass.

But, today, we are kinda where I expected my use of 24 to be, but in different ways. I expected Day 1 to be a tire fire because even a WU causes the servers to collapse. I expected a 3rd party plane to be the one I use the most, but my money was on PMDG working out of the gate or an INI a300 update. Instead we got the Fenix. I did expect the MAX to be better than it is now.

I did expect that 90% of my time would be in 2024 and it's closer to 99%. I flew in 2020 last night to reset the timer on the Southwest VA.

At the end of the day, this is something I do for fun to distract me from the daily pitfalls of adult life. If the thing isn't fun at that moment, I move on to the next fun thing I could do. This year has been challenging for me and I don't have any energy to direct angst at a hobby.

Edited December 4, 20241 yr by BrammyH

8 hours ago, AnkH said:

What makes me angry in this whole discussion is the more we accept things in its current state, the less they will do about. It was like this the last four years, some things only got fixed if enough people complained and it ended up on the bug list with enough votes. Sitting still and hoping that things will work out «on its own» never worked. Not in the sim nor in your wonderful house example. You have to complain to get things fixed, whether you like it or not. 

Gee whiz, you're angry because all possible issues weren't addressed w/o user input into what matters most?  In the house example you'd expect the contractor to know exactly what mattered to you the buyer and just did what he/she thought you wanted in your wonderful new house example without regular input from you the buyer?  That's a bizarre expectation.  When you're developing a digital twin earth and a flight sim within it there really are essentially unlimited areas of potential focus on where to allocate budgeting resources and using a wish list makes massive sense.   

10 hours ago, AnkH said:

What makes me angry in this whole discussion is the more we accept things in its current state, the less they will do about. It was like this the last four years, some things only got fixed if enough people complained and it ended up on the bug list with enough votes. 

Good point. I've voted on some topics, including this one: 

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/too-bright-unrealistic-and-overexaggerated-airport-and-night-lighting-in-msfs-2024-bloom-too-high-light-sprites-too-big-sepia-mask-is-unrealistic/667100

The bloom effect on airport lights is not good. Not sure why it's not possible to turn off bloom, like in MSFS2020 🤷‍♂️