Anyway lets go through the effort required one by one, patching World at War to v1.4 requires downloading and installing 3 huge patches with a cumulative size of over 700MB. Of course one of the patches adds more multi-player maps but its still huge. On starting the game you have to create an account with the developer and you can start actually playing the game.
Dawn of War 2 was unbelievable in this regard, it installs Steam (then Steam updates itself), then it installs the game itself, then it installs Games for Windows LIVE (GFWL), then Steam updates the game, when you finally launch the game GFWL updates itself. Whew... then you can finally play the game after signing into Steam as well as GFWL.
GTA 4 requires online activation after installation finishes (in addition to SecuROM) and requires an account with Rockstar Social Club before playing and on first start it updates GFWL as well as the game itself while the status is shown as updating GFWL. So after creating all these accounts and downloading the patches it almost feels like setting up a new system from scratch and installing all the drivers and updates.
What is going on here, are all these companies into email address harvesting or something? You can't properly play a single player games without signing into three online services.
Now to the actual single player games themselves, since when did single-player gaming become an add-on to games and multi-player the main component? GTA4 is the only game out of these which can be called a single player game, others contain small single player campaigns with the main focus on multi-player gaming and maps (as the change logs suggest).
Image courtesy VisualPharm.
2 comments:
I absolutely agree than video game companies are getting more and more paranoid to the extent that they have ported license key authentication to Steam. Steam updates everything to the latest patch before allowing you to play. I had the pleasure of sitting through hours (and I mean literally hours) of ‘patch upgrades’ recently. We have been on a gaming spree lately, Dawn of War II, Left4Dead, NeverWinter Nights 2 and Total War. Out of these, only the older game NW2 was a straight forward install.
But the killer punch was delivered by the fact that once a game key has been used on Steam, you can’t use it again i.e. games can’t be handed down or sold as used. This is a platform killing move from PC game developers – I am big fan of picking up used games and then pass them on once I am done with them. I am a hard core PC gamer but I must admit that this feature will force me to finally throw in the towel and move to a console. From the forums, a lot of PC players are of the same mindset. I sure hope that some common sense prevails in the developer community and they don’t end up shooting themselves in the foot.
Yeah, its getting silly. Most publishers heavily discount PC games in India. I really applaud the strategy and I think its working too. They should stick with it instead of pouring money into copy protection software that doesn't even work.
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