The hotly anticipated Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has endured a tough launch, with gamers reporting ridiculously lengthy preliminary loading screens lasting in some circumstances for hours on finish.
Issues are so unhealthy that Asobo Studio’s full value flight sim, which Microsoft Game Studios revealed throughout PC and Xbox and straight into Game Go yesterday, November 19, is now on an ‘overwhelmingly unfavourable’ Steam consumer overview ranking. Even those that do handle to load into the sport are having issues, with gamers reporting lacking content material.
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, defined why the launch had gone so badly improper.
Neumann started the video with an admission: “We knew the pleasure was excessive for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, however frankly we utterly underestimated how excessive and it actually has overwhelmed our infrastructure.”
Wloch then proceeded to go into extra element, revealing that even simulating 200,000 concurrent gamers throughout pre-release load exams failed to stop the launch from inflicting catastrophic server issues.
“We have been struggling for a couple of hours with certainly one of our providers,” Wloch defined. “In Flight Sim 2024, there are a couple of new techniques in the sim. Individuals have seen in the profession mode there’s all kinds of missions, and when gamers at the very starting after they begin, they’re asking a server for some information, and that server goes to cache it in a database. It’s a fairly large database and there’s a cache, and that cache is presently getting saturated.
“It’s a cache that has been completely examined throughout the complete Tech Alpha. We have achieved load exams simulating 200,000 customers, and tonight it is simply utterly overwhelmed.”
Wloch went on to clarify what Asobo had achieved to attempt to repair the issues. “We have tried to restart the providers,” he mentioned. “We have taken measures to throttle the quantity of people that can are available in at the similar time. In some unspecified time in the future it labored fairly effectively, so we elevated the queue pace by 5x. And it labored effectively for possibly half an hour or so after which impulsively the cache collapsed once more.
“So we’re restarting, we’re making an attempt to examine, doing our greatest and going as quick as we are able to to be sure that all people can go in.”
Going into extra element, Wloch defined why Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 gamers are experiencing this everlasting loading, and why after they do get into the sport they’re not seeing all the pieces as they need to.
“The problem that causes that is just about, when that service fails it restarts, it retries, it retries,” he mentioned. “Initially, that creates extraordinarily lengthy preliminary loading, which isn’t supposed to be as lengthy. And after a sure time it’ll fail. If the lacking information is obstructing, you’ll not end the loading — cease at 97% — and get a message. Which means you want to restart.
“And if the content material was not utterly blocking chances are you’ll enter the sim after which possibly there’s a couple of planes lacking, possibly there’s some content material lacking, and that is all due to the similar downside with that server and repair.”
The hope is that Asobo fixes this downside as quickly as doable; Wloch mentioned that when the server points are sorted out gamers shouldn’t see the queue display screen they’re presently experiencing.
“Whereas it’s a fantastic launch day, we all know lots of people are pissed off,” Neumann concluded. “We’re actually sorry. We wish to apologize. We now have some issues immediately. The staff is on it, and we’ll maintain going.”
Wesley is the UK Information Editor for IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You’ll be able to attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.