Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launch gets stranded on the runway (Updated)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 officially launched today at 8am PST. And that's about the best we can say about the game so far. Like countless others, we haven't been able to get the game to run correctly — and, for one of our staff members, it wouldn't even install at all. Making matters worse, Xbox Game Studios declined to provide reviewers pre-launch access, offering up this statement:

"Due to the availability of online services and scope of the planned Day One patch update, we will distribute codes on launch day rather than in advance. We also want to avoid reviewers being under unrealistic timelines to complete their reviews, and thus made the decision not to have a shortened review period."

As you can imagine, that's going to have the opposite result. Instead of being able to play through the game in advance and figuring out what to say, reviewers and testers will now be scrambling in a mad race to see who can post content first. Except... you can't post anything about how the game runs and how good or bad it is when you can't get into it at all.

[Update, 11/19/2024 at 8:15pm PST: Xbox says the issues have been fixed, or at least mitigated. We were able to finally get into the game and fly around a bit, but long queue times still seem to be a problem.]

Things seemed fine...at first. We were able to download the game via Steam without any trouble. It didn't take long, probably because the initial download was only 11.6 GiB. Steam knows how to handle massive game launches, including games that might be up to 200 GiB in size. But once you launch the game, it needs you to log in to your Xbox / Microsoft account. That shouldn't be a problem, and everything seemed to go fine, until I was greeted with the loading screen.

The loading screen took forever, and it wasn't clear what exactly was going on in the background. Initially, it said "0% — Loading language..." but that stuck around for at least ten minutes on my first launch. I stopped paying attention, and after about 30~40 minutes, I noticed that the game had apparently finished loading. I also found another 16 GiB of data downloaded (into the AppData\Roaming folder), but it's not clear when that happened or at what rate. It definitely didn't happen quickly, on a gigabit internet connection.

Once into the game proper, after poking around at the settings, I tried to launch a flight. And I was stymied. The "go" buttons for various flight options, including the tutorial, were all greyed out. I went into the Activities menu as well, and almost all of the screens there were blank (except for tutorials). Basically, things seemed like maybe I needed to restart, so I did... and then I was effectively locked out.

Two other Tom's Hardware staff members also tried to install the game, with one having the install stop at 70% and never resume. Then, they were presented with the screen above when they tried to reinstall the game. After six hours, as of this writing, the game will still not install for that staff member.

Yet another staff member experienced frequent crashes back to the Xbox dashboard and error messages reporting that the internet bandwidth was too low to load world data, even though he has a 500 Mbps connection. When he could get into the game, it would freeze when he tried to start a flight. Now, he is also told to wait in queue and can’t even get to the main game Home Screen.

Microsoft has a status page for the Xbox Series S|X that says it's aware of the problems and working on a fix, but there's no word on when it might be available. It also says in a tweet that "a subset of users may be experiencing slow download and install times" for the game. That seems a gross understatement, as we have three different people scattered around the US who are all experiencing the same problems.

We're sure things will eventually get fixed, but how long that will take and what state the game will be in at that point remains to be seen. The loading screen video looks pretty nice, so we're excited to see how the game runs. Maybe it won't be quite as CPU-limited as the previous Flight Simulator 2020 release? That's probably wishful thinking. We'll provide our own actual performance testing and analysis once we're able to get into the game and run some benchmarks, so stay tuned.