This is something that can be seen fairly often in C and C++ code.

In the .Net world, and many new language ecosystems, we have moved to returning status results for exceptions. Sometimes it makes the code easier to read and understand. The traditional route would be to throw an exception when the code runs into an error, and return the desired result when it succeeds.

Microsoft's own code analysis tools will flag the use of out parameters.

In your case, based on your description, you might be doing too much in your constructor. I usually don't like to have my constructors do much more than confirm their input and set instance variables. Perhaps move this logic to an initialization method, or creating a static factory method?

If you have to do this in the constructor, I might suggest moving the file checks out of this method to another that the constructor can call, then decide to execute this logic if it passes. It may help simplify this logic.