Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: the sky trucker

For me, the most anticipated game of 2024 was not S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. I was a huge fan of the previous installment, which I played for several hours every day from its release in 2020 until the full-scale invasion began, with the last flight of my interrupted round-the-world trip ending at 3:00 am on February 24, 2022. I bought airplanes and game add-ons like Microsoft Flight Simulator: Reno Air Races. For a long time, it was almost the only game I was interested in. So I've been waiting for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and I have to say that the game didn't disappoint me in general, but... the list of complaints and comments I have to Asobo Studio and Xbox Game Studios is very, very long. But let's take it one by one.

Catastrophe

I received the Steam key to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 a few days before the release, for which I would like to thank the Microsoft PR team. And on November 19, 2024, I hoped to plunge into the pilot's career, which was supposed to be the main course of the new game. Unfortunately, Microsoft Azure servers had a different opinion... The feature that was supposed to become the game's calling card and an advertisement for Microsoft's cloud services, dynamic loading of all content, this time not only the map but also planes, world updates, and everything else, went wrong. The servers were overloaded, the database was constantly crashing, and users were stuck in endless queues to create a character, download the game, download the world, etc.

It was getting ridiculous, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 could work in one part of the country, say Germany or the UK, and not in another, so users had to turn on VPNs to other countries just to run the game. MSFS 2024 wouldn't load, notifying that there was not enough 1 Gbps channel, crashed for no reason, hung in an endless download, etc. In the first week since its release, only 7% of players on Steam. It was a real disaster, one of the worst game launches in history. Not surprisingly, the Steam rating of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 still remains at 44/100 (out of 10 thousand reviews).

I made my first flight only a week after the game's release. The second flight did not work, the game went into endless world loading. The server problems, along with the power outages in Kyiv that occurred in late November and early December 2024, made playing MSFS 2024, where a single flight can last 3-4 hours, almost unrealistic, and I put it off until better times, continuing to read the thematic forums and Reddit, where users kept complaining about the problems.

The game was more or less fixed in mid-December, but I wasn't feeling up to flying at the time. So I decided to try Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on the weekend after the New Year... and I've been flying every day for 19 days now. In fact, the game still has a lot of problems, but it gives me pleasure, although at times the developers from Asobo Studio want to poke their noses into small but very annoying bugs like puppies. MSFS 2024 is already working, but there is still a long way to go for Asobo Studio and Microsoft.

The sky trucker

The main mode of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is the pilot career mode, which is what Microsoft advertised in most of the game's trailers. The fact is that the previous part of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was a game without a clear goal, in which the player had to entertain himself. Someone was flying over their own home and country; someone was setting records for perfect landings; someone, like yours truly, went around the world in a light plane; someone was fixing errors on maps, adding new airports, and creating liveries for airplanes. Players unanimously begged Asobo/Microsoft to give them a career mode, and there were even a few third-party applications that connected to MSFS 2020 and allowed them to start a virtual pilot career. It was completely inconvenient because they had to manually enter flight data and cargo weight.

"The only thing I miss is a career mode similar to the one in American Truck Simulator/Euro Truck Simulator 2. So that you can build your own company, transport cargo and passengers, earn reputation and money, buy new planes, etc." I wrote in my review of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in August 2020.

Well, Asobo Studio and Microsoft have heard the players. Now the game has a career mode, literally analogous to the one in Euro Truck Simulator 2, with absolutely everything I asked for in the 2020 review.

You start with a small flying club and your first flight in a light-engine Cessna. Then you go through training, pass your exam, and start your career as a pilot for hire. You earn enough money to buy your first airplane, take additional exams, and eventually start your own business with a used Cessna 172 and a license to conduct sightseeing tours. Then new exams, accumulation of even more money, and new companies - cargo transportation, passenger transportation, aerial advertising, firefighting, medical evacuation, search and rescue, etc.

In fact, there are plenty of missions in the game. There's tornado surveillance from a special research aircraft, crane operations, water rescue, VIP transportation, and missions in the wilderness. But we still have to get to all this. Because new airplanes, exams, and licenses for this or that activity cost money, and a lot of it. And this means flying, flying, and flying again. Following the instructions of dispatchers, satisfied customers, and the constant fear of crashing the plane or making one of the many mistakes that are common in this game mode.

On the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 forums, there is even a standard phrase: "MSFS 2024 is a great game, just don't touch the career mode!". Unfortunately, this is true. It takes a lot of time and nerves of steel to move up the career ladder, because sometimes success here depends not on your pilot skills, but on which leg MSFS 2024 got off on today.

Missions in the career are generated automatically, so don't be surprised by "Reconnaissance flight to the 3rd Clinical Hospital" or "...to the fish farm". Accordingly, missions can start from any airfields and strips, even those that have not been used in reality for a long time. Moreover, Blackshark.ai and Microsoft Azure Cloud are not immune to errors, so your plane can be parked among the trees, which means an instant disaster, a lot of money for repairs, and a powerful blow to the pilot's rating. Or parked among "transparent" but obstructing cars. Or draw an invisible wall between you and the airplane, or an invisible threshold before entering the runway, or the runway itself will be like the waves of a stormy sea. And so on.

Sometimes the game refuses to give you IFR (instrument flight rules) parameters and let you take off, sometimes the Hold short command does not work, sometimes the landing approaches offered by the game are completely unrealistic and you are forced to violate them. All this leads to penalties that affect the pilot's rating and earnings. Sometimes the game just crashes at the end of the flight. And it's good if it's a 15-minute sightseeing route, not a four-hour VIP charter. And since the grind in a pilot's career is simply unrealistic, yes, you need nerves of steel to get ahead.

Since January 1, 2025, I have already flown 70 hours, 60 of them in career mode, and I am only now able to buy some aircraft that are not Cessna 172s (it is here in five different modifications, including a modification for aerial advertising and skydiving). My typical earnings from a flight are 30-100 thousand credits, plus the planes need to be inspected, washed, refueled, repaired, etc. All of this is not free, so it's still a long way from passenger airliners and heavy cargo planes, which cost tens or hundreds of millions of credits.

But in reality, it's not that bad. It is very pleasant, for example, to conduct an air tour over Kyiv, taking off from the Antonov Plant runway and showing the city's guests the TV tower, Lavra, and Railwaymen's Hospital. Moreover, the free Kyiv City Landmarks add-on, created by Anton TedStricker Longvinenko for MSFS 2020, is still available in MSFS 2024. Anton was killed during the fighting in the Kharkiv region in November 2023, but his friends the modders support the add-on.

It's a pleasure to deliver a VIP to an airport where you've been as a passenger yourself. Rescue and firefighting missions are very interesting. Recently, a bunch of virtual pilots put out virtual fires in California using the same De Havilland Canada CL-415 as real firefighters. At times, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 generates interesting missions with landings in very difficult conditions on very difficult runways. In general, it's incredibly beautiful here, and it's very pleasant to hear "Dear passengers, fasten your seat belts and prepare for takeoff" again, especially in our conditions.

But yes, iron nerves will help, as well as knowledge of the MSFS 2024 "mood". For example, you shouldn't take off close to midnight, as you have an almost 100% chance of getting an "Unexpected Error" and a failed mission. Do not manually open the doors of the aircraft, especially during passenger missions, because then the likelihood that passengers will be "sitting" on the wing or under the wing, and your head will stick out of the fuselage, increases significantly. Do not refuel the aircraft before the mission, as this can also lead to errors. On the other hand, on long flights, you shouldn't trust the fuel level indicator. You shouldn't always listen to the dispatcher, because it won't take long to crash. And so on and so forth. This game has a really crazy bunch of little bugs that are sometimes very annoying

The sky is calling

As we have already mentioned, the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 forums say: "The game is fine, just don't touch the career mode!". And it's true. We have no complaints about the free flight mode, in which you can choose any runway anywhere in the world, or even start in the air. The opportunity to explore the entire planet is unique. And let someone say that some areas in the game look worse than in the previous part, I haven't noticed any. On the contrary, some photogrammetric cities look fantastic, try flying over Cologne, Barcelona (the cyclopean tree near the National Museum is not included), Venice, Prague, or Bratislava. It's fantastic!

Yes, there are glitches, occasional giant trees or overgrown houses, cities where photogrammetric ones merge with individual trees or mutate into some kind of rock... But at the surface level, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sometimes really impresses with a lot of little things. Cornflower or poppy fields and grasses, yellow leaves of trees, animals, the details of which will make even hunting simulators like Way of the Hunter or theHunter: Call of the Wild.

Thus, Bing maps in some locations are significantly behind Google, so there are no traces of hostilities in Ukraine yet, Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar, and Pokrovsk are still intact, Donetsk airport can receive planes, and the former Kakhovka Sea has not yet become a forest (MSFS is a bit glitchy here, Blackshark.ai does not understand how to draw what happened). But this was also the case in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, so the question here is whether Bing should update Ukraine's maps now.

As for aircraft, there are many more of them, some of the machines that appeared in paid add-ons to MSFS 2020 are included in the basic set, there are more rotorkrafts, and lighter-than-air vehicles. Among the interesting ones are the Air Tractor AT-802, the cargo giant Airbus A330-743L Beluga XL, Boeing 737 MAX 8, De Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver, the already mentioned De Havilland Canada CL-415, De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, and the light jet Cirrus Vision SF50, Diamond DA40 NG, the legendary Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II Warthog, the incredible Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose", Grumman HU-16 Albatross, Cessna 188 AGTruck, Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner.

The most complete version of the game, the Aviator Edition, includes all aircraft released over the past four years in the Local Legends and Famous Flyer series, including the An-225 Mriya and An-2 Kukurudznyk.

There are no problems in the training mode and the competitive league, where you have to pass air racing tracks, make precise landings, or fly among hills and gorges in jet fighters, trying to stay as close to the ground as possible. Everything goes well both in the observation mode and in the tests. Moreover, judging by the still closed menu items, the game will soon add the famous extreme Red Bull Air Race and the same air race in Renault that we mentioned at the beginning.

Technical details

The main feature of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 that caused so many problems at launch is content streaming, which is necessary primarily for consoles with limited SSD space. Ironically, it is on consoles that the game has the biggest problems, and it is better not to run it on Xbox Series S.

Thanks to streaming finally working without problems, at least on PCs, MSFS 2024 takes up not 200+ GB on disk like MSFS 2020, but... 10.6 GB, as Steam says. But this is only the basic version of the game, everything that is saved will fall into the cache, which I already have 68.5 GB, plus another 34.7 GB for additional user modifications, an improved map of Ukraine's altitudes, and a couple of new planes.

I'm playing on a system that was updated in 2023, including the upcoming Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. So on Intel Core i5-13600KF 3.5GHz s1700, ASUS DUAL-RTX4070-O12G and 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR5 5200, the game runs on Ultra settings, producing a picture in 2560×1440 resolution with a pleasant fps for flying... but not always. It's not clear what it depends on, but with the same airplane, the same airport, the same weather, the game can deliver 60+ fps and 10 fps. The latter happens infrequently, but it can be wildly annoying, especially if it happens during an important flight.

Another problem that the developers still haven't solved is screen flickering, which disappears when you switch to windowed mode, and DLSS, which simply doesn't work. DLSS sometimes turns the game into a slideshow with a double image. Again, it is not clear why this happens.

But when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is running, it produces a fantastic picture. Some of the full-resolution screenshots I posted online were perceived as photographs by my friends.

Compatibility

Asobo Studio and Xbox Game Studios promised that most of the purchases players made in MSFS 2020 will be available to them in MSFS 2024. And despite the fact that the game store is not yet operational (it should be launched this month), I received everything I bought a few years ago: An-225 Mriya, An-2 Kukurudznyk, MiG-29 with the Ghost of Kyiv livery, plus all the aircraft from the Deluxe edition of MSFS 2020 that were not included in the new game.

As for custom add-ons from Flightsim.to, the situation is twofold. Most add-ons that improve the terrain, such as the aforementioned Kyiv City Landmarks, work. New airfields and runways are added, but there may be conflicts with ICAO indices and coordinates, as with some Ukrainian airports. But a lot of liveries that were created for MSFS 2020 aircraft do not work in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. It's a shame, because I had several Ukrainian liveries created by modelers to my order.

However, the amount of content updated to be compatible with MSFS 2024 on Flightsim.to is growing every day, plus new aircraft, locations, and useful utilities are being added specifically for the new game. And new liveries are being actively drawn.

Way to the front

Yes, the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 did not go well. Yes, it still takes courage and endurance to play some MSFS 2024 modes. Yes, the list of bugs that need to be fixed immediately is still very long. But... it's still a great game, and I'm sure I'll spend many hundreds of hours in it. Let Asobo Studio work, the one who does nothing is not wrong.

Clear skies and a soft landing for everyone!