‘Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’ Hits Problems At Take-Off

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has arrived on both PC and Xbox — but eager early players are struggling to actually play the game.

Long loading times and crashes (of the software, rather than the aircraft!) are causing frustration among players waiting to get their first glimpse of the revamped simulation.

Many players are complaining of long load times, with the game having to pull lots of data from the cloud before they can even reach the game’s start screen.

‘Loading Unusually Long’

Loading screens appear to be getting stuck when the game reaches 97% loaded, with a small message reading “Loading unusually long”.

In my tests using an Xbox Series X in the U.K., the game has twice taken over 15 minutes to load before getting stuck at the 97% mark. On the one occasion I did manage to get the game to fully load, a test flight was glitchy and entering Career mode caused the game to crash back to the Xbox home screen.

Many other players are reporting similar problems on social media.

One player responding to the official Xbox account’s announcement that the game was live on X described the game as “Loading Screen Simulator 2024”.

Others are posting images of their game stalling during loading:

Official Response

An update from the MSFS Support account on X stated that: “We are aware of reports of long loading times into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. With so many users initializing the sim concurrently, we have a large number of server requests. We are working to resolve the issues as soon as possible.”

“For users whose initial load is past 90% and no longer progressing, we recommend a reboot. Otherwise we advise waiting to allow the loading to proceed as normal.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is more reliant on data pulled from the cloud than the 2020 version of the game. That means the game takes much less disk space than its predecessor, but it does mean it might struggle to cope in periods of high demand, such as the immediate aftermath of the game’s launch.

The demand is only likely to get worse over the next few hours. The game launched at 4pm GMT, which means many players in Europe won’t yet have arrived home from work to start playing.

As players in the U.S. also begin to log on after finishing work later in the day, the demand may further increase.

As reported last week, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 takes advantage of a number of Nvidia graphics technologies from day one, which should make flying smoother when the game eventually settles down.