Features Microsoft Flight Simulator’s installation process is the worst thing ever designed by a human.

After install, there's the stupid "Press Any Key to Start" screen:

You press the icon to start, it takes a long detour to go through the logos. So you divert your gaze to something else on your desk.
It sits at "Press Any Key to Start" screen....... not doing anything waiting for you.
Once you notice it, press a key and it goes through ANOTHER long load the actual main menu.

The "Press Any Key to Start" screen could have been placed at the end of the main menu loading. Or not include all together because it is totally unnecessary.

Once in main menu, everything works great though. UI makes total sense.

 

You can use the volume mixer built into Windows to mute the game so you can watch videos/listen to music without the need to fight with the installation audio. Not sure it's that big of a complaint to warrant 2 paragraphs on the matter.

 

The complaint is greater than the sum of its parts.... if this were the only issue, it might barely merit a mention, but the point is about how badly they screwed up these early steps. And it appears to be even more jarring given how well the software itself works.

 

What got my goat was that if you want that data in another place, that's fine - But the game refused point blank to be installed on another drive for me.

If I installed it to G:, and told the download of the data in game to also go to G:, it'd dutifully do the download, unpack it all, declare it good and then hang on the blue loading bar.

It didn't then write config file that said "Look here for the data, dimwit", so every subsequent attempt to restart the software resulted in it whining that it couldn't find the data (As an aside, who the **** thought putting 100+ GB in appdata was a good idea?), had me manually point it at it, and then it proceeded to hang on the blue bar again.

With the game installed to the default directory, it wrote the config file and never asked again. Seems there's some hard coded paths somewhere that don't like not having <drive>:\Users\<user>\appdata on the same drive.

And then the UI looks like it was designed by someone from a dimension where there are only 90 degree corners, squares, and rectangles.

It wasn't a fun experience to try out a flight sim with.

 

Really bad installer, took me 5 goes to install on my games PC because of its numerous download issues and because wireless devices disconnecting crashes the game and therefore download, they were only disconnecting because I wasn't going to sit there listening to that bollox whilst installing.

After all that installling I didn't even bother playing it in my games PC, as I had played it on my laptop at much lower quality and decided its fun for a bit but need some game structure.

I might fire it up in the future to see what it is like in 4k glory but I am terrified it might trap me I the download loop frustration again

Many games do this two stage install, Forza did it and whilst it was annoying at least with that it downloaded the additional bundle of data via the store rather than requiring the game open for hours,.

 

This is very funny. I had only minor complaints during the installation:
- It needs quite a bit of GPU power in that menu screen.
- it apparently takes so long because the files are a) individual downloads instead of being packed into some archive on the server and b) it decompresses and stores them without continuing the next file download at the same time. There's room for improvement.
- Also maybe the "press any key" thing should have just been removed, it's useless and annoying.

But I just alt-tabbed away, it didn't crash or anything and I just opened the volume mixer and set it to 0 there. I didn't even notice any sort of inconvenience with these two things.

Maybe the experience is very different on other systems or maybe those steps are less automatic and intuitive to many users. But while it's not the best download experience, I'd say that in the long term, it's at least better than having to update Uplay twice a week when launching a game.

Edit: I signed up to this forum to make this post. That sign up experience was worse than anything I've ever done to comment on any article.

 

Hmm, the game installer was in a window for me so I could leave it doing it's thing whilst I did something else. Wasn't exactly difficult to mute the installer audio through the windows volume mixer either.

No issues installing to my E drive either. Strange that people are having issues with it.

 

Zing

 

If this was a hard install/setup the late 90's early 2000's game setup/mods would have melted your head.

If this was any easier the AI co-pilot from the SIM woulda set it up for you.

Clicked download. Told it to install on my 2nd SSD as a dedicated Windows SIM drive.....part 1 downloaded. Opened the game to start the long download, minimized it and as another person said You can use the volume mixer built into Windows to mute the game. Pulled up twitch watched my favorite streamer. The game finished the download in like an 1hr or so. Closed everything out, started flying.......ez ez. Unless you're gaming on a potato or having to many ID-10-T errors.

 

I was all good with this rant until he complained about how long it took to download with his 50Mb connection...
50Mbps / 8bits = 6.25MB/s
use your head it takes 16 hours at that speed to download the game... so the time it took him was 100% accurate... if you want it to download faster get a faster connection...

 

100gb at 50mb = just under 5 hrs https://downloadtimecalculator.com/ 4hrs 46min. I'm like start that **** and go watch netflix FFS.

 

your math is off 114GB should be 5 hours maxed a 50Mbps, I have 160Mbps and it still took much longer than that.

https://downloadtimecalculator.com/

I didn't know you could mute individual apps, I looked for that functionality as Ithought it would be possible but clearly failed so thanks using the correct term 'mixer' showed me way.

Still given the length of install and how unstable and prone to failure the launcher is, because this wouldn't just be happening on release, the game would have been tested, you'd think they would have considered an audio mute button on the thing.

Just tried to load it up and it asked for the game disc

 

Yes, music was annoying but figured out how to mute it using Windows volume mixer panel.

But the thing that really annoyed me was the GPU usage during the install - on my GTX1070 it was using about 30% just to display the download window, and when I minimized the window, that GPU usage seemed to go up, not down. Absolutely crazy to design a long download like that which uses live 3D graphics engine while it downloads.

 

Now its not asking for disc but can't even play the game, just keeps looping around to press any key..... this is on my laptop that was mostly painless compared to my games machine when it came to install, apart from 1 download lockup.

 

Also 50mb near fiber isn't really fibre (sounds like vdsl bt package 52/10 option)

Then again my 410/40 docsis is technically not fibre but it can do 1000/50 if I wanted to burn a hole in my pocket to get that

I agree the downloaded should be background and pop back up once it has finished, but seems interesting to make an article about it

 

Always makes me laugh when people question the need for an article. It's the internet, it's free to read, and you are free to not read it. The fact that people would sign up to the forum specifically to berate the author as a 'retarded baby' (post now removed, along with the author) is just baffling to a well adjusted human.

The author of the article is a professional game reviewer, who was so appalled by his experience of the installation process he felt the need to write an article about it. Reading the article is optional, but the fact that Mr. Lane doesn't feel the need to make this a regular series does imply that it's pretty bad.

The last MS Flight Sim game I played was version 5 back in the early 90s (CH Flightstick Cheesecake), so it's unlikely I'm going to experience the joys of this one. Hence I enjoyed the article, knowing that I'll never feel that level of frustration about the game

 

My apologies i had 314 in the calculator instead of 114. Oops

 

The "suspicious wossname" section of my brain wonders if the download-the-game-while-the-game-is-running thing is to directly stop people from refunding it.

Steam give refunds with <2 hours of gametime clocked. If you need the game running (and the timer ticking) just to download the thing... and it takes 3+ hours to download... well, you're already stuffed for a refund before you even get the chance to actually play it, aren't you?

I don't know how the Microsoft Store does refunds - or even if they do. I presume its to try to get people who want to "test" it to sign up to XBox Game Pass?

edit: I would quite like this, but it can wait until it's on sale in the future - and maybe has some fun planes like the SR-71, F35, Eurofighter or Superguppy in it.

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-says-...flight-simulator-wont-affect-refund-requests/