The truth of the matter is that this issue is not important at all. It had little impact on the game experience, and no impact at all to any functionality. Yep, it got lots of votes because it was just annoying (I voted too), but not because it was an actual problem of something broken. Then unfortunately Asobo made it important by promising to deliver this simple change in the last patch, then didn’t.
The fix to remove “press any key to start” was what is known as in the IT support world as an “Easy Win” That is, the original function served no purpose, the change has little impact, the change is simple to implement, the change affects everyone and most people will be happy its gone, but no-one will be unhappy its gone. A win from every viewpoint. Unless you promise to deliver it, then don’t.
This unfortunately casts doubt over all the good changes they had made as well. All much more important than the “press any key to start” removal. It is normal then to think “If they got this wrong, then what else have they got wrong.”
Personally I found the “press any key to start” annoying and was happy to see it go. But if they said they were never going to fix it, I wouldn’t have cared much. And as far as I can tell there has been no official comment on what happened to this fix, which hasn’t helped. A missed opportunity for Asobo to do some damage control.
So this issue is not important, but caused a lot of unecessary negative comment, justified or not.
I dont really care anymore about what ms/asobo say… just finish the dam SDK, and allow the competent developers to do what you have no skill and knowledge to. Whatever comes from Asobo is bad. Probably the SDK will be too. I guess 2 years is a reasonable period to wait and try to use this software again. But, who knows, xplane 12 can bring they eycandy appeal before that, and there will not be any reqson to even comet back.
Why? Because the game takes forever to start up and you don’t want to babysit such games to press a key at a random point inbetween loading. Such games i just start and go to the kitchen or something to make myself a sandwich and expect it to be loaded when i come back.
This is why it got a lot of attention in my opinion. People want to be able to launch the game and walk away for a bit while it loads up. With the “push any key” in there, you have to be at your keyboard long enough to get there, and then click, then walk away.
Well according to countless people here in the forum who have “corrected” me at every turn, Asobo has multiple teams working on different issues. So the CTD team is solving all the CTDs, and the press-any-key-to-start team is working on removing press-any-key-to-start. Totally different people so we don’t have to prioritize.
I really dont get the issue, i mean its about 30 to 45 seconds after i click the icon that i have to Press Any Key… and a minute later the menu is up. Why would i be leaving the PC at that point anyway?
I don’t have any strong feelings about “press any key” one way or the other. Usually, it works OK for me, but occasionally when I push it, nothing happens. I have found that when this occurs all I have to do is a couple of left clicks on the mouse, and the problem is solved. The program proceeds as normal.
That said, I would argue that starting the game is a part of the experience. It adds several minutes of unavoidable down time to the game, and yes it does need some consideration. Same is true for installing and updating the game. These are things the player experiences for an extended period of time, and really shouldn’t be treated as trivial.
I do find it odd the issue was overlooked for this release, considering it was described as an easy fix - and even marked as fixed. I also personally experienced the download loop bug. So yeah, I’m scratching my head and asking “what’s going on?” It was indeed marked as fixed, and does make me wonder how many fixes they forgot to roll into the release of the patch.
