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.
