Facepalm: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 relies heavily on cloud servers to avoid its predecessor's massive download requirements. Unfortunately, this left the game vulnerable to overloaded servers upon launch, forcing many customers to wait hours to play the title they paid $59.99 for.
The latest entry in Microsoft's long-running flight simulation series immediately encountered serious problems upon release. Although Asobo and Xbox Game Studios have made some early headway in resolving the issues, fans have harshly criticized the game for buggy content and load times lasting hours.
High player counts overloaded the cloud servers that stream Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's life-sized digital twin of Earth, forcing Asobo to implement a temporary queue system. As a result, frustrated Steam users dragged the game's rating down to "Overwhelmingly Negative" on day one. The developer has since increased server capacity, but some players might still encounter problems.
Asobo CEO and co-founder Jorg Neumann recently told IGN that the company underestimated the hype surrounding Flight Simulator 2024. The company tested the servers for up to 200,000 concurrent players without issue, but congestion on launch day crashed the game's systems and forced them to reset. Neumann blames those crashes for the missing content that some players reported.
Ironically, Flight Simulator 2024 streams most of its terrain, objects, and textures to shorten start times and minimize download requirements. The previous entry, released in 2020, demands at least 200GB of storage space, often delivers updates weighing dozens of gigabytes, and features DLC that can approach the terabyte mark.
We have increased our server capacity and are seeing more players accessing the sim, however, we are still seeing access issues continue.
– Microsoft Flight SimulatorâÂÂï¸Â (@MSFSofficial) November 21, 2024
This is not the launch experience we want for our players and want to apologize to the community. We will continue to work around the clock…
In contrast, shifting the burden to the cloud shrank Flight Simulator 2024's client storage footprint to 50GB and allowed Asobo to release large updates without correspondingly huge downloads. However, the game requires high internet bandwidth, and data usage in early tests approached 81 GB per hour.
Neumann blamed those numbers on an unoptimized build set to maximum visual quality. He suggested that, as most players fly at higher altitudes and tweak the graphics options, the average user might stream 5GB per hour.
Moreover, the CEO recently explained how Flight Simulator 2024 generates assets using machine learning and AI. To make the planet-sized game look prettier on the ground than its predecessor, Asobo repeatedly trained an algorithm to assign colors and textures to various pre-defined terrain types.
When asked about GenAI's potential threat to jobs, Neumann said that the amount of human attention the technology required actually doubled the developer's headcount. Including support studios, nearly 1,000 people worked on Flight Simulator 2024.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is now available on Steam, the Microsoft Game Store, Xbox Series consoles, and Game Pass.