"Could FH5 be more broken?"

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C. Bing, Episode of Friends (if it was made in 2023).

I despair. Ever since the start of Series 18 of Horizon 5, the game has frequently failed to launch. Although it’s done this in the past, it’s got worse during this season. The game often crashes somewhere in the loading screen, and it’s not unusual for it to take four attempts to get FH5 to run. But wait! There’s more!

It’s now told me four times that I don’t have a valid profile even though I make sure that I’m logged on to the MS gaming subsystem before I start. This is a habit since the Great Crash in Horizon 4 over two years ago.

The other day it claimed the English language pack was not installed and switched the game language to Chinese. When I ran the game and went to switch the language back to English, the game crashed while I was in the settings menu. When I did eventually manage to change the language back to normal, the game refused to pass the screen where it says “Loading… Please wait” (it did this twice). A check of Task Manager showed that while the game might’ve been running, nothing was happening. (I have no idea why this step in included, but if it has something to do with being online, no connection was being made.)

I’ve tried netsh winsock reset from the command prompt several times. I’ve restarted the laptop several times.

But on other occasions, the game works. It was all right on Friday afternoon when I did the Festival playlist, and it was all right yesterday afternoon when I tried doing the daily. It was not all right this afternoon.

It’d be nice to get an answer about all this. Some of the problems may lie in Horizon 4 and 5 being xbox games with PC ports that sort of work (although FH4 is far more stable). Some of the problems appear to lie with the servers (MS’s Azure network), which, I think, were the cause of the Great Crash of FH4 in December 2020 and the Lesser Reset last year when I lost seven months of progress in FH5. (Why was the game never saved in all that time? The opportunities for it to do so were plentiful.)

I assume that FH5 will remain wonky until the update for Series 19. In the meantime, I may be able to play the game, or I may not. It’s an absolute lottery.

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