I rarely have an issue but I agree. It is over complicated and way too error prone. Just looking at the KB articles about it shows how awful it is.
Some of the issues appear to be:
- A dependence on the XBox apps and services. When we first installed the game at least some of these were beta. There were at least three services.
- Dependency on the Windows Store. That is fine for Windows Store versions but it seems the Windows Store is still required for Steam installs. Probably for security.
- Asobo are using their own installer, which obviously has to play nice with the services listed above.
- Every update seems to require updates to the XBox apps an. I only had one install fail and it only worked after I updated some completely (to me) unrelated Windows Store app.
- The installer system does not check prerequisites or handle the lack thereof gracefully. This is huge and I don’t understand how it can happen in modern software.
I think the biggest issues is the XBox integration coupled with a non-robust (or non-existent) dependency validation.
So for those of us that update “just right” with the expected versions and no system tweaks it mostly works OK. But heck, the game didn’t even check to see if you had enough disk space to download and unpack the data. As a programmer it simply stuns me.
Asobo have done some great work. It is almost like they do the a lot of the hard stuff fairly well but the more tried and true and more common stuff falls in a heap. I expect that isn’t actually true, but it is the way it feels. I have few issues but there is not one patch that hasn’t broken something I use or would like to use.
What can be done about it? Nothing but wait. The whole ecosystem needs to keep getting fixes so that it becomes reliable. It is completely unfeasible to change it to something else for a host of technical and marketing reasons.
I don’t care at all about the awesome new world updates. They are great but I thought we would have a working simulation to enjoy with them. I bought this game to fly. What is a flight simulator that looks great but only has rudimentary flight behavior because of masses of bugs, unimplemented features and some dumbed down features because a non-simmer thought they were unimportant?
It is certainly not something someone that wears the badge “simmer” or “pilot” really appreciates.
Going by the schedule we are at least a year away from anything approaching FSX functionality. There are no words.
■■■■, another novel.