Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 officially made its debut at 8 am PST today. However, upon initial exploration, it became evident that the game faced significant challenges. Many, like us, struggled to get the game running smoothly. One of our staff members even encountered issues during installation, with the game failing to install at all.

Xbox Game Studios' Decision and Its Impact

Xbox Game Studios' decision to distribute codes on launch day rather than providing pre-launch access created a domino effect. Reviewers and testers were now in a rush to post content without having the opportunity to thoroughly play through the game and assess its performance. This led to a chaotic situation where the true nature of the game's functionality remained unknown.

Download and Installation Challenges

The download process via Steam was relatively smooth initially. The initial download size of 11.6 GiB was manageable. But once the game was launched and required logging into the Xbox / Microsoft account, issues arose. The loading screen took an eternity, with the "0% — Loading language..." message stuck for at least ten minutes on the first launch. After about 30 - 40 minutes, it seemed that the game had finished loading, and an additional 16 GiB of data was downloaded into the AppDataRoaming folder, but the timing and rate of this download were unclear.

Another staff member faced a different problem during installation. The install stopped at 70% and never resumed. When they attempted to reinstall the game, they were presented with a specific screen. As of now, after six hours, the game still refuses to install for this staff member.

Yet another staff member experienced frequent crashes back to the Xbox dashboard and error messages indicating that the internet bandwidth was too low to load world data, despite having a 500 Mbps connection. Even when they managed to get into the game, it would freeze when trying to start a flight. Now, they are stuck in a queue and cannot even reach the main game Home Screen.

In-Game Functionality Glitches

After entering the game and exploring the settings, attempting to launch a flight proved to be a disappointment. The "go" buttons for various flight options, including the tutorial, were all greyed out. The Activities menu also presented mostly blank screens, except for tutorials. This led to a sense that a restart might be necessary, but even after restarting, the staff member was effectively locked out.

These issues have left us with a lot of questions and uncertainties. Microsoft has a status page for the Xbox Series S|X indicating that they are aware of the problems and working on a fix. But there is no clear timeline for when this fix will be available.

We are hopeful that these issues will be resolved soon. The loading screen video looked promising, and we are eager to see how the game performs in actual gameplay. Perhaps it won't be as CPU-limited as the previous Flight Simulator 2020 release. We will keep you updated with our performance testing and analysis once we are able to get into the game and run some benchmarks.

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