Departure with Flight Simulator 2024 is delayed for most players – long loading times and server problems are to blame.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has finally been released and is causing a stir – but not necessarily for the right reasons.
Thousands of players on Steam want to conquer the sky, but are literally stuck on the ground: Long loading times and crashes cause a lot of frustration.
A bumpy start
Many players are currently reporting loading screens that seem to lead to infinity.
It becomes particularly annoying when the progress bar freezes at 97 percent and a message appears stating that the loading times are exceptionally long. A reboot sometimes seems to help, but often the only option is to wait – or abort.
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Flight Simulator 2024 makes a big leap – and not just in terms of technology
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 relies even more heavily on cloud data than its predecessor – The approximately 2.5 petabytes of card data would ultimately not fit on any commercially available SSD. This saves space on the hard drive, but apparently puts a massive load on the servers. Especially now at launch, when many players want to join at the same time, the system reaches its limits.
The download on Steam only weighs around 3 GB, the rest is downloaded and streamed directly in the game from the Microsoft servers – and these are currently completely overloaded, even though Microsoft has the second largest cloud hosting service in the world, Azure.
Meanwhile, everyone who currently wants to log in is greeted by a seemingly endless queue.
Anyone who wants to play MS Flight Simulator 2024 will end up in an endless waiting line for the release.
The problem could get worse in the next few hours: At the time of the launch at 5 p.m., many European players had just gotten off work, and more users in the USA will soon be coming online. You probably shouldn’t have high hopes of being able to take off today.
That’s what Microsoft says
The Microsoft Flight Simulator support team has already commented on the problems. A statement on X says:
We are aware of reports from users complaining about long loading times on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Because so many users are initializing the sim at the same time, we have a large number of server requests. We are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.
For users whose initial load goes beyond 90% and stops progressing, we recommend a restart. Otherwise, we advise you to wait so that loading can continue as usual.
At the moment, many players only have hope that Microsoft will quickly get the server problems under control. There is already harsh criticism from fans on Steam, and the game only has 20 percent positive reviews.
What are your experiences? Have you been able to take off yet, or are you also stuck on hold? Let us know in the comments!
