Monarchs Glen

I purchased at a store Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising. I head home with my $30.00 purchase in hand and plop down onto my computer chair for a nice simple install and patch. But that is not what I get ... what I get is absolute BULL SHIT!

Steam. Bane of existence and absolutely unnecessary in the whole chain of events I mentioned above. It would seem I need to actually download the game ... from Steam ... whose servers are ... and I quote ... "Too busy to assist me right now".

Mother fuckers. Seriously ... I wanted to kill me some Tyranids. I wanted to murder Orcs!

Now ... I get to sit and wait for the game to download ... THE GAME I PAID $30.00 FOR IN A STORE!

Can someone please explain to me the logic ... not the WANT OF LOGIC ... but the actual logic behind this bull shit?

I am thinking about returning it and demanding a refund from the manufacturer.

I have never been so fucking pissed about something so minor in a long time. Steam ruined Empire Total War and now Dawn of War II for me. Frankly, Commander and Conquer 4 sucked balls too. Not a big fan of the whole "Crawler" thing. Kind of gay actually.

Whatever ... there is my rant. Anyone else get shit on by Steam or another game company?

Reylan Talonspyre wrote:Now ... I get to sit and wait for the game to download ... THE GAME I PAID $30.00 FOR IN A STORE!

Can someone please explain to me the logic ... not the WANT OF LOGIC ... but the actual logic behind this bull shit?

Marketing.


Star Wars Galaxies is the same $65.00+ tax for the game, then another online fee of $15 month to play.

Steam had a large update AND free Portal today. I was getting an average of 300kb/sec download today. (I average 1.5 MB on uTorrent for comparison.) Sucks ass major.

Was there nothing printed on the box about needing Steam? Seems that there should be.

Gerien, you are right. Nothing on the box and worse yet, nothing in the EULA.

It should be labeled that you are in fact purchasing a Game Disc but you must download an Install Disc.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Steam is one of the reasons I'm backing away from PC gaming...

I quite like Steam. Lots of people seem to bitch about it...but there is no need to keep disks lying about as your steam account will know about all your games. When you reinstall a new windows OS, install Steam and then get it to re-get your games.

They let you play games for free for period...i've yet to experience the real issues with it.

Does seem weird that you would need to download stuff from steam straight away to play a game you bought. I know there are games out there now where you need to be online and connected to their servers to play at all ( cant remember the name of it ) but its an alarming trend.

As for the Starwars Galaxies comment about...thats an MMORPG, thats how they tend to work. You pay for the box, then subscribe cos your apparently paying for development - personally I'd leave SWG alone and just wait for StarWars: The Old Republic Let bioware have your money not the evil fucks that are SOE

I remember when 9600 baud was an incredibly fast download

Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM.

Software companies are introducing more and more draconian methods of 'stopping pirates'. The reality in crap like Steam does jack squat to stop pirates and just harms consumers. Steam was suppose to prevent the illegal distribution of copied games, but I can point you to a dozen places to get Portal right now.

UBISoft is far worse. To play singleplayer game like Assassin's Creed 2, you must be connected to the Internet ALL THE TIME. If you lose your connection, your game restarts from your last check point. There have even been cases of DOS attacks on the UBISoft servers and NO ONE could play their games. Unless you had a pirated copy, of course.

DRM is bad. I don't buy computer games because of it now.

thats the fucker....assassin's creed

I don't buy pc games anymore

Unfortunately the days of none-connected game applications are coming to an end. It's not just about DRM, customers want online and social games. The industry is in a bit of a transitional stage at the moment. It ends up being rather silly when companies try to take the middle ground on distribution, like in this case. Things will settle down and it'll get much better though I'm sure.

So now I just found out ... can't use trainers with the games either ... they have to be used with special STEAM trainers.

I fucking hate this company.

Steam actually isn't bad, I've had games that Valve released on Steam dating back to what, HL2? Never had an issue with it, can still fire up Counterstrike anytime I want and load that bad boy up.

not sure what you are talking about trainers.

As far as having to download stuff - what is really the difference between when you buy a game and then have to sit and wait for a 1 gig patch of bug fixes, or you buy your license key and download the game? Half the games being released these days are so unfinished and buggy that they are unplayable until the first big patch.

The last game I bought that uses Steam I think is COD:MW2. I was able to install the game just fine off of the disk, I just had to authenticate myself as having a steam account. I don't see the issue, I'm installing it on a computer that is always on the internet anyways, what do I care if a program runs in the background and downloads updates so the next time I launch it I'm all patched up?

I think some of you are getting way too uptight about a service that is in all honesty better then you think.

Glad it wasn't just me who thought steam was groovy.

I don't mind Steam itself one way or the other.

DRM for stuff like Spore and Assassin's Creed gets me. Limited installs? Must always be online for a singleplayer game?

The concept of Steam is okay. I don't like being required to download an entire other CD to play a game, though. When I buy it, it should be playable out of the box, unless it is an MMO.

BetaFlame wrote: The concept of Steam is okay. I don't like being required to download an entire other CD to play a game, though. When I buy it, it should be playable out of the box, unless it is an MMO.

yeah that is very annoying. Seems just common place nowadays though. Not sure how it got to a position where companies could release games, and expect the public to QA/beta test them.

Trainers, like the ones that let you cheat at a game. When I do RTS, I learn to play using trainers so I can understand the units and whatnot.

Now, the benefits to Steam are the deals and the security and playability online.

But honestly, that is great. I bought all of Dawn of War for like $60.00 and got DoW II as well.

Not bad at all.

But frankly, I don't really play online. If I wanted to be social, I would go talk to people. Now, I have to make a Windows Live account, make sure I am logged in to some Microsoft thing, then I can play.

It is just a hassle.

Plus, what happens if I am disconnected from the internet? The answer is nothing actually. Just run the game with Steam set in offline, but I have to manually do this.

I don't know. It isn't on the box, nowhere in the EULA or other documentation.

I just find it kind of annoying.

PLUS I really reaaaaallly want my trainers.

In Belgium we have limited download bandwidth. Very sucky, but once you cross the limit, you're doomed as go go on smallband.

Steam makes it impossible to play a game without downloading latest patches. If you have a downloadlimit, you sometimes want to stop downloading to prevent getting put on smallband. If you can't play a game because you can't download a 1GB patch, it can get really frustrating.

Gili wrote:Glad it wasn't just me who thought steam was groovy.

I like it. Certainly better than Windows managing my games. (And don't get me started on Windows Live or the EA Download Manager.)

EA Download Manager is balls.

Reylan - I'm not a fan of what they did with AC2 either.
I don't think that has/had anything to do with Steam though.

Steam is just a downloadable content delievery system, the publisher behind the game controls what type of DRM(s) it uses and how it authenticates, etc.

Most of the games I buy I do so with the full intent of playing them online, I don't do much single player - although I will with StarCraft 2.

I could see how having to have an internet connection to play AC2 would be shitty though. But again I think you will find that in most households, the PC that has the game installed IS on some form of high speed or broadband internet anyways, so I can understand the concept they were going for.

AC2s main platform was Xbox360 and PS3 though. PS3 at least has built in WiFi, although alot of people with the older 60GB systems won't connect to the Playstation Network because of the loss of the OtherOS feature in their new Firmware.

But the main problem with that kind of DRM is if you have a Wireless hiccup, you just lost an hour or more of progress. WTF.

I honestly do most of my gaming in Emulation now. My PSX finally died on me, and most of my favorite games were on it.

Yay ePSXe.