The hotly anticipated Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has endured a rough launch, with players reporting ridiculously long initial loading screens lasting in some cases for hours on end.
Things are so bad that Asobo Studio’s full price flight sim, which Microsoft Game Studios published across PC and Xbox and straight into Game Pass yesterday, November 19, is now on an ‘overwhelmingly negative’ Steam user review rating. Even those who do manage to load into the game are having problems, with players reporting missing content.
In a video message to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s disgruntled community, Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Sebastian Wloch, Asobo CEO and co-founder, explained why the launch had gone so badly wrong.
Neumann began the video with an admission: “We knew the excitement was high for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but frankly we completely underestimated how high and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure.”
Wloch then proceeded to go into more detail, revealing that even simulating 200,000 concurrent players during pre-release load tests failed to prevent the launch from causing catastrophic server problems.
“We’ve been struggling for a few hours with one of our services,” Wloch explained. “In Flight Sim 2024, there are a few new systems in the sim. People have noticed in the career mode there’s all sorts of missions, and when players at the very beginning when they start, they’re asking a server for some data, and that server is going to cache it in a database. It’s a pretty big database and there is a cache, and that cache is currently getting saturated.
“It’s a cache that has been thoroughly tested during the whole Tech Alpha. We’ve done load tests simulating 200,000 users, and tonight it’s just completely overwhelmed.”
Asobo’s initial attempt to fix the problems showed promise, but eventually buckled as this cache collapsed once again. “We’ve tried to restart the services,” Wloch said. “We’ve taken measures to throttle the number of people who can come in at the same time. At some point it worked pretty well, so we increased the queue speed by 5x. And it worked well for maybe half an hour or so and then all of a sudden the cache collapsed again.
“So we’re restarting, we’re trying to investigate, doing our best and going as fast as we can to make sure everybody can go in.”
So why are Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 players enduring this eternal loading? And why, when players do manage to get into the game, are they seeing content they shouldn’t or not displayed properly?
“The issue that causes this is pretty much, when that service fails it restarts, it retries, it retries,” Wloch said. “First of all, that creates extremely long initial loading, which is not supposed to be as long. And after a certain time it will fail. If the missing data is blocking, you will not finish the loading — stop at 97% — and get a message. That means you need to restart.
“And if the content was not completely blocking you may enter the sim and then maybe there’s a few planes missing, maybe there’s some content missing, and that’s all due to the same problem with that server and service.”
The hope is that Asobo fixes this problem as soon as possible; Wloch said that once the server issues are sorted out players shouldn’t see the queue screen they’re currently experiencing.
“While it’s a great launch day, we know a lot of people are frustrated,” Neumann concluded. “We’re really sorry. We want to apologize. We have some problems today. The team is on it, and we will keep going.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.