Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has "overwhelmingly negative" Steam reviews due to launch issues, including endless load times caused by server issues.
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”.
Something with a cutting-edge game engine like Bevy: Entity-Component-System architecture, Rust, immensely multi threaded, new graphic tecnhiques like Meshlets (same as nanite tech from UE5, the other only game engine I know that has it), physically based rendering, highly performing, customizable, with good multiplayer capabilities, using new techniques of software engineering (it’s not the 90s anymore).
Something with a community that embraces collaboration and the new tools (again, it’s not the 90s anymore). Git forges, chat platforms, RFCs.
Something that from the game engine to the flight models is open to be reused across academia, different types of sims such as land vehicle sims, civil aviation sims, combat sims. Something that wants to foster that kind of relationships.
All of this is possible, but not particularly easy. It doesn’t need to start big, just with libraries and utilities for academia and developers that one can build on top of.
Hence why I think the formula is “Bevy + Blender + some Copyleft licensed parts (GPL) + Community”. I’ve given quite the thought to the topic, and a custom ECS engine is paramount. One that is designed for working collaboratively and not by in-house devs with UI tools for it. One that is massive in the cutting edge of tech and at the same time easy to collaborate on remotely. That is Bevy: the shortcomings (no UI tooling l for now) don’t matter for Sim games, as we normally need just one model in Blender, rigid animations, and no level editors. It also is written in Rust, is performant, a bliss to work on iteratively and grow the size of, and people are actually looking forward to work on for free, contrary to C++.
Whatever we do, the best we can do with fellow enthusiasts is recognise that sim games are a captive market. This way we can change the Zeitgeist, and move away our attention from the hype and drama of this companies (Microsoft, DCS’s eagle dynamics, IL2’s 1C), and into collaboration.
Reminds me of Amazon Games’ disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at 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.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts
Well yeah, that’s why you would put some cloud experts on the project besides the game devs if you’re doing things like this. It’s not just game developers working on the game.
Doesn’t even have to be people feom the Azure team. Microsoft has plenty of resources to teach someone to be a cloud expert in other branches, they even offer certifications for outside people, surely they can manage a few of their own.
The asset streaming requirements are insane- they recommend having a 150mbps connection for a smooth experience with 50mbps as a minimum. Microsoft says they only planned for 250k players at launch, which is stupid considering FS 2020 had over a million sales at launch…
✋ Hi, person here who bought 2020 but refuses to buy 2024 because they didn’t deliver on half their promises for 2020, including that it would be the last sim they sold.
Maybe they were suprised this many people actually signed up for their next level bullshit. 🤷♂️
Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too. We know how their track record goes on that.
I’ve had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it’s served me pretty damn well so far.
they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too.
Iirc, they didn’t. There was one person who didn’t really have the authority to make such claims say something that could have been understood as win 10 is the last windows.
I hate to defend Microsoft, they’re an awful company, but this just was never really true.
Your not wrong. I worked for the company, and we were told that it wasn’t actually true like 6 months after launch. I had been communicating it for .o the to my clients.
Same. I’m still pissed that 2020 was left in the state it is in with tons of its own bugs and missing features that were promised. I remember talking to a friend and saying that MSFS2020 was a cool flight sim but still had the vibe of an early-access game at times… and then they drop an announcement for 2024.
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.
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!
From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn’t able to deliver what was promised in exchange.
Doesn’t mean I’m not a forgiving person who understands problems happen. At this point, if you expect a game to work perfectly you can’t buy day 1. Software is too complex to not expect any bugs day 1.
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.
They shouldn‘t have added it to GamePass on launch day but wait a few weeks or even months to stretch out the server load.
I bet there are tons of causal and first time players that are already subscribed to gamepass that wanted to try out MSFS24 just because they have access to it. Now those people are pissed off even though they would have waited longer to get a better experience.
I’m sure the Microsoft executive that made the decision is absolutely drenched in the “Azure scales infinitely if you give Microsoft more money” kool-ade.
Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.
This is one of the most dumbest Parts of this game, everyone’s complaint of the last iteration was the massive download times, and the inefficiencies in the game causing it to lag even on high end systems. And their solution to that was to increase the specs that it’s required to run the game and require a high speed internet on top of that? They more or less made it so anyone running satellite internet can’t buy their game and anyone that lives in like 70% of the US that still has absolute dog shit internet speeds couldn’t even imagine playing it. My mom still has a 5/5 mbit/s, that’s the fastest anyone offers in her area, even downloading the previous game took ages there’s no way in hell I’m going to recommend her buying this game
If you want a functional flight simulator that doesn’t require you constantly online , try out XPlane or Aerofly FS4. These games will work even if Microsoft puts out another steaming pile of shit in the next 4 years.
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.
Supposedly, the full map is measured in petabytes.
This is actually a perfectly reasonable use of streaming assets for full-resolution, since almost no players will ever experience even 1 percent of the map.
Precisely this – I don’t remember anyone complaining that the FS2020 install size was too large, even if its install size was the butt of a few good-natured jokes. They’ve solved a problem that didn’t exist and in doing so have turned FS into an always online internet-connected live service instead of a game. I’m not touching this game with a 40 foot aileron until an offline mode of some quality exists.
Sure, but it had an offline mode and had a base level globe that was downloaded when the game was installed that you could use immediately and didn’t require live cloud connectivity in order for basic functionality to work. Additionally, it allowed you to pre-download large chunks of high detailed land for offline use as well.
All I wanted them to change was the fact that the installer for the game in 2020 would download then decompress one file at a time, so it took forever for the game to install (on top of the fact that it uses an in-game installer in the first place).
I don’t have the new version, but based on what I’ve been reading they sure curled the monkey paw this time.
Yup. Comcast/Xfinity residential cable. I pay like $80/mo and still have that cap. They also had an outage yesterday for like 5 hours for maintenance that was clearly planned ahead of time, but they never bothered to tell me ahead of time, and when the outage happened, they still gave me a bad estimate of when it would be restored due to “network damage”.
After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.
The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.
I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
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.
You mean something like FlightGear ?
In soul yes , in reality no. I mean:
Something with a cutting-edge game engine like Bevy: Entity-Component-System architecture, Rust, immensely multi threaded, new graphic tecnhiques like Meshlets (same as nanite tech from UE5, the other only game engine I know that has it), physically based rendering, highly performing, customizable, with good multiplayer capabilities, using new techniques of software engineering (it’s not the 90s anymore).
Something with a community that embraces collaboration and the new tools (again, it’s not the 90s anymore). Git forges, chat platforms, RFCs.
Something that from the game engine to the flight models is open to be reused across academia, different types of sims such as land vehicle sims, civil aviation sims, combat sims. Something that wants to foster that kind of relationships.
All of this is possible, but not particularly easy. It doesn’t need to start big, just with libraries and utilities for academia and developers that one can build on top of.
Hence why I think the formula is “Bevy + Blender + some Copyleft licensed parts (GPL) + Community”. I’ve given quite the thought to the topic, and a custom ECS engine is paramount. One that is designed for working collaboratively and not by in-house devs with UI tools for it. One that is massive in the cutting edge of tech and at the same time easy to collaborate on remotely. That is Bevy: the shortcomings (no UI tooling l for now) don’t matter for Sim games, as we normally need just one model in Blender, rigid animations, and no level editors. It also is written in Rust, is performant, a bliss to work on iteratively and grow the size of, and people are actually looking forward to work on for free, contrary to C++.
Whatever we do, the best we can do with fellow enthusiasts is recognise that sim games are a captive market. This way we can change the Zeitgeist, and move away our attention from the hype and drama of this companies (Microsoft, DCS’s eagle dynamics, IL2’s 1C), and into collaboration.
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;you
anyone have recommendations for flying games that were made for dipshits like me?
XPlane 12 and Aerofly FS4. They don’t need always on internet and the loading times are measured in seconds, not tens of minutes+
Ace Combat?
Ace combat is dope but I had to use my flight stick to make it playable.
VTOL is better, but you hafta have a good VR system :c
Love VTOL vr but haven’t touched it since getting a nice civ aviation sim (not Microsoft).
The virtual controls are very nice in VTOL but nothing beats an actual yoke and throttle and rudder pedals
DCS. Easy peasy.
DCS is amazing much higher fidelity sim but its at the complete opposite end of easy.
Haha, yes, I was being cheeky. :)
GTA5
war thunder?
Most renown as a cloud storage provider for classified military documents
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.
Reminds me of Amazon Games’ disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at launch.
One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is “the cloud”.
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.
That’s the problem then, they should have hired some cloud experts if they’re selling a cloud-first service as a “game”.
Well yeah, that’s why you would put some cloud experts on the project besides the game devs if you’re doing things like this. It’s not just game developers working on the game.
Doesn’t even have to be people feom the Azure team. Microsoft has plenty of resources to teach someone to be a cloud expert in other branches, they even offer certifications for outside people, surely they can manage a few of their own.
When your game is a streaming service, you better put some cloud experts on the dev team.
I bet the beancounters don’t like keeping excess capacity ready to go
Scaling capacity up and down in real time should be Microsoft’s core business now.
the cloud services are probably fine, their willingness to actually use the resources for a game may not be.
The asset streaming requirements are insane- they recommend having a 150mbps connection for a smooth experience with 50mbps as a minimum. Microsoft says they only planned for 250k players at launch, which is stupid considering FS 2020 had over a million sales at launch…
✋ Hi, person here who bought 2020 but refuses to buy 2024 because they didn’t deliver on half their promises for 2020, including that it would be the last sim they sold.
Maybe they were suprised this many people actually signed up for their next level bullshit. 🤷♂️
Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too. We know how their track record goes on that.
I’ve had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it’s served me pretty damn well so far.
Iirc, they didn’t. There was one person who didn’t really have the authority to make such claims say something that could have been understood as win 10 is the last windows.
I hate to defend Microsoft, they’re an awful company, but this just was never really true.
Your not wrong. I worked for the company, and we were told that it wasn’t actually true like 6 months after launch. I had been communicating it for .o the to my clients.
“This is the last time, baby. I swear!”
Same. I’m still pissed that 2020 was left in the state it is in with tons of its own bugs and missing features that were promised. I remember talking to a friend and saying that MSFS2020 was a cool flight sim but still had the vibe of an early-access game at times… and then they drop an announcement for 2024.
Why hand out bug fixes for free when you can charge full price once more instead?
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.
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!
From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn’t able to deliver what was promised in exchange.
Doesn’t mean I’m not a forgiving person who understands problems happen. At this point, if you expect a game to work perfectly you can’t buy day 1. Software is too complex to not expect any bugs day 1.
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.
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.
Just like Windows versions.
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.
They shouldn‘t have added it to GamePass on launch day but wait a few weeks or even months to stretch out the server load.
I bet there are tons of causal and first time players that are already subscribed to gamepass that wanted to try out MSFS24 just because they have access to it. Now those people are pissed off even though they would have waited longer to get a better experience.
I’m sure the Microsoft executive that made the decision is absolutely drenched in the “Azure scales infinitely if you give Microsoft more money” kool-ade.
No one dared speak up against it, cause that isn’t a “growth mindset”.
Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.
X-plane 12 is looking better and better.
This is one of the most dumbest Parts of this game, everyone’s complaint of the last iteration was the massive download times, and the inefficiencies in the game causing it to lag even on high end systems. And their solution to that was to increase the specs that it’s required to run the game and require a high speed internet on top of that? They more or less made it so anyone running satellite internet can’t buy their game and anyone that lives in like 70% of the US that still has absolute dog shit internet speeds couldn’t even imagine playing it. My mom still has a 5/5 mbit/s, that’s the fastest anyone offers in her area, even downloading the previous game took ages there’s no way in hell I’m going to recommend her buying this game
Lmao
Let me guess,it doesn’t work on Linux.
It doesn’t work on anything, apparently. That’s kinda the point of the post.
Ah I see.
You don’t have to inject Linux into the conversation just because Microsoft is in the title
Nah am guessing, because when I see a game with negative reviews I always assume it doesn’t work on Linux.
Lmao, it apparently doesn’t work on Windows either.
Bruh 💀
Have you been on Lemmy?
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.
If you want a functional flight simulator that doesn’t require you constantly online , try out XPlane or Aerofly FS4. These games will work even if Microsoft puts out another steaming pile of shit in the next 4 years.
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.
Supposedly, the full map is measured in petabytes.
This is actually a perfectly reasonable use of streaming assets for full-resolution, since almost no players will ever experience even 1 percent of the map.
Precisely this – I don’t remember anyone complaining that the FS2020 install size was too large, even if its install size was the butt of a few good-natured jokes. They’ve solved a problem that didn’t exist and in doing so have turned FS into an always online internet-connected live service instead of a game. I’m not touching this game with a 40 foot aileron until an offline mode of some quality exists.
Fs2020 streamed assets, too
Sure, but it had an offline mode and had a base level globe that was downloaded when the game was installed that you could use immediately and didn’t require live cloud connectivity in order for basic functionality to work. Additionally, it allowed you to pre-download large chunks of high detailed land for offline use as well.
All I wanted them to change was the fact that the installer for the game in 2020 would download then decompress one file at a time, so it took forever for the game to install (on top of the fact that it uses an in-game installer in the first place).
I don’t have the new version, but based on what I’ve been reading they sure curled the monkey paw this time.
My internet service in Silicon Valley charges like $1/GB above 1TB of usage per month :(
Just so we’re clear, that’s a wired service?
Yup. Comcast/Xfinity residential cable. I pay like $80/mo and still have that cap. They also had an outage yesterday for like 5 hours for maintenance that was clearly planned ahead of time, but they never bothered to tell me ahead of time, and when the outage happened, they still gave me a bad estimate of when it would be restored due to “network damage”.
I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the absolute scam that are US Internet provider companies.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Works fine now that they fixed the problem, but that was an oops for sure.
deleted by creator
I heard that you can’t even fly a pterodactyl in it.
Pathetic
After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.
The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.
I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run
There’s a new flight simulator? Shit, I still haven’t played the one I bought like a year or two ago.