Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has "overwhelmingly negative" Steam reviews due to launch issues, including endless load times caused by server issues.
Kinda wild that their previous flight simulator was met with near flawless reviews across the board, then the complete opposite for the immediate successor that probably shares 90% of the same code.
I think the issue was precisely that. They didn't plan for the surge of users coming in on day one and whatever cloud hybrid system they have for this game got overwhelmed. We'll get to know about the game's actual quality a week from now I guess.
God I love having a future where my ability to play a fucking flight simulator depends on both internet access and server reliability.
Completely unnecessary to boot. Store a low res copy locally, offer the high res as regional packs. 0 reason to stream this data in.
Wouldn't that end up being hundreds of gigabytes per region file?
For low res, no.
Hi res, sure. Make it optional, or let players download the region they like. Or just the airports with much lower res landscapes, etc etc.
Or just, let them have it all and make these choices. Memory is CHEAP nowadays. If you're a flight sim enthusiast, a few terabytes for the map data is the least expensive part of your setup by far.
This is what happens when you have monopoly status. They're too big to fail.
Sims are a captive market: all enthusiasts just buy it once, and there's limited number of enthusiasts. Companies either have finite money and resell the same sim again and again with a different coat of paint, or over promise and under deliver. Long gone are the days of a company that doesn't need to be profitable (like Microsoft with the early flight sims, made at a loss to showcase and sell their OS), and games are more expensive to make nowadays, not less.
To break a captive market you either increase customers (not gonna happen, in fact simmers and interest in aviation is trending down compared with the 80s and 90s), or remove the market part altogether.
Removing the market is the solution: be need an open source sim for the community by the community. Sims and libraries that can aglutinate all work done in academia, gaming, and different styles of sims under one umbrella, bringing a symbiotic work that is way better than the separate parts. We need to pull a Blender.
We are in 2024. Sims suck. They are barely multi threaded. They reimplement all planes again and again, losing all info in what they falsely call themselves "a sim museum".
We can do better.
If anything this reflects badly upon Microsoft's cloud business. Dynamically spinning up enough servers shouldn't be an issue nowadays.
It's a consistent issue for Microsoft releases. You would think a company that sells cloud services would be capable of having a smooth launch.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what's provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.
One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is "the cloud".
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Hey you! You with your logic and reasoning and reading the issue notes from developers. You aren't a real gamer, get out of here with that! We're here to dogpile on a new game here!
the cloud services are probably fine, their willingness to actually use the resources for a game may not be.
I bet the beancounters don't like keeping excess capacity ready to go
I'd say it's more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.
The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don't let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft's systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.
Lmao
game was too hard for my smoothie brain
also the AI voice actors are kinda rude and sound very bad by today's standards
the engine is off
you left the brakes on
stop fucking with the egg yoke I swear to god I will BSOD;youanyone have recommendations for flying games that were made for dipshits like me?
VTOL is better, but you hafta have a good VR system :c
anyone have recommendations for flying games that were mae for dip shit likee lik m
Ace Combat?
Ace combat is dope but I had to use my flight stick to make it playable.
war thunder?
Most renown as a cloud storage provider for classified military documents
I was surprised at the long load time initially and had a quick fly of an A10 warthog from a local small airfield.
This was on my Xbox Series S and it was a bit stuttery in places. It's clearly not meant for this console. This is for the pcs with big GPUs.