If you think Stalker 2 is buggy, wait until you climb aboard Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Last week I wrote about a particular bug in Stalker 2 and how similar it was to a bug I encountered in Stalker: Call of Pripyat way back in 2010. I wasn't mad about it: it gave me a warm fuzzy "some things never change" feeling you might have for a quirky old car whose radio volume goes up when you turn on the headlights. Weird, but harmless.
In the same article I also wrote about how that harmless jank can easily give way to immensely frustrating jank, like another bug I encountered: An artifact I was on a mission to collect never materialized, eventually forcing me load a save from much earlier in the game, which cost me an hour of progress. Nothing warm and fuzzy about that.
I ran into a similar situation in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's career mode this weekend. Things were going fine at first, with just a few amusing hiccups—the AI voice of the instructor mispronouncing the word "fuselage," for instance, or an NPC walking directly through the tail rotor of a helicopter: small stuff that I just smiled at.
But after getting certified to take jobs in a Cessna, I tried to do the same for the helicopter in career mode. That's when the wheels came off. Well, there aren't wheels on the helicopter. I guess the skids came off, then. While taking the license exam, I flew through the whole course and landed where indicated. The final step of the mission was checked off, my instructor robotically said I did a great job, and then… nothing happened. The mission didn't end. I took off and landed again, I tried different spots, but it never gave me credit for completing the exam. I eventually quit and tried again. I completed that exam two more times with the same result, which is to say, no result at all. Another hour wasted by a bug.
I'm not the only one finding bugs in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: the subreddit and Discord are full of them. The image at the top of this article is from Reddit user LordCrumpets, who says "Mr. Smith made sure to get his money's worth on today's Flightseeing trip." He sure did. I only hope his scalp didn't get scraped off during the landing.
Sitting on the bottom of a plane is impressive, but first you have to get into the plane, which can be an issue: here's Reddit user ArCeyDu3 hitting a little snag when trying to take the private pilot license exam:
Can't take my Private pilot license exam because of this bug. from r/MicrosoftFlightSim
Reddit user nihileternumest got an interesting mission: make a charter flight from Jacksonville, Florida to Málaga–Costa del Sol Airport in Spain, a trip of about 4,300 miles. That's gonna be a little tricky seeing as the plane for this mission is a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, which has a range of about 800 miles. The impossible 32 hour flight is only rated 3 stars of difficulty, somehow.
There are lots more reported bugs, from spawning at 88,000 feet (16 miles up) to helicopters teleporting and landing upside-down to planes crashing before the pilot even gets in them. Like Stalker 2, sometimes these bugs are funny but other times they're seriously frustrating. Personally, I think I might wait a couple of weeks for both games to do a bit of bug-fixing before I lose any more progress.