Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 players are currently in a bit of a whirlwind as thousands of users have review bombed the game due to it being practically unplayable. So, to try to quell the unrest, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, and Asobo CEO and co-founder Sebastian Wloch sat down and explained everything that had gone wrong and how the devs were trying to resolve it.
"We have been so excited for this day and to finally share Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 with you," Neumann says. "We are really proud of what we've accomplished with the sim, with all of our partners. We feel like we've done something really great for the hobby. But unfortunately, we knew the excitement was high for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but quite frankly, we completely underestimated how high, and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure."
Currently, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's Steam reviews are sat at a 24%, mostly negative rating, with players complaining about missing planes, clunky controls, or getting thrown out mid-game and being unable to rejoin. "I cannot recommend this game to anyone right now," one review says. "Default aircraft are streamed from the internet, and textures can take several minutes to load. This means that the buttons in your cockpit are white with no text until they're downloaded in real time." There's also a common issue that prevents players from starting the game, as it'll freeze at 97% and then crash and restart.
"We've been struggling for a few hours with our services," Wloch says. "At the very beginning, when players start, they're asking a server for some data, and that server is going to catch it in a database. It's a very big database, and there's a cache, and that cache is currently getting saturated.
"It's a cache that has been thoroughly tested during the whole takeout file. We've done load tests simulating 200,000 users, and tonight, it's just completely overwhelmed. We've tried to restart the services, and we've taken measures to try and throttle the number of people who can enter at the same time. At some point, it worked pretty well, so we increased the queue size and the speed by five times. It worked well for maybe half an hour or so, and then all of a sudden, the cache collapsed again. So we're restarting, trying to investigate, doing our best, and going as fast as we can to make sure everybody can go in."
Unlike past Microsoft Flight Simulator games, the latest version streams its assets from the cloud. This decreases the size of the game (it's only around 50GB) and means that a few of its PC requirements are lower than some predecessors. But it's also caused all this instability as the game constantly streams from the cloud, and it just can't keep up with the high demand of players flooding into the game right now, so the connection is pretty unstable.
"When the server fails, it restarts, it retries and retries, which creates an extremely long initial loading that is not supposed to be that long," Wloch says. "After a certain time, it will fail if the missing data is blocking, so you will not finish the loading and will stop at 97% and get a message, which means that you just have to restart. And if the data wasn't blocking, you may enter the sim, but there may be a few planes missing and some other content missing. It's all due to the same problem with that server."
Luckily, it's looking like the queue screen has disappeared as more players are able to log into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 straight away. An admin on the game's Discord even confirmed this late last night.
"We're really sorry," Neumann says. "We want to apologise. We made this video because we're always here, and we want to be as transparent and as honest as possible. So we have some problems today, the team is on it and then we will keep going."
