Seriously, I just spent $60 to purchase a physical copy of the game. The dvd information shows it as having over 5 gigs of information on it. So..... WHY AM I HAVING TO DOWNLOAD THE GAME FROM [censored] STEAM!!?? (Caps and language for emphasis on frustration I have with steam.)

This is seriously delaying my enjoyment of the latest installation of the Elder Scrolls series.

it delays u for an hour at most. have some patience.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1258133-installing-from-disc-instead-of-steam/

Ah, such nice quick answers. Thanks much.

First if I have to truly download the full game from steam, despite owning a physical dvd, then I will have to be waiting a very long time. Since I live on a university campus, the internet service to the campus apts is severely limited. I am not sure exactly how much bandwidth is available, but it often slows to a crawl when even only a small portion of the residents are online.

Having read over the linked FAQ, it seems to suggest that steam should auto-install from the disk after activation. This is not what has happened for me. I did the activation and registered the game to my steam account, the installer then "prepared" the Skyrim files for installation, then went online to start downloading the full 5+gigs of the game despite the dvd sitting there in the drive. The whole time once steam was active, never did it go back to the dvd (as observed by the drive remaining quiet and the activity LED remaining off).

I really hope I don't have to download the game anyway.

Edit: MOG FTW!! Final Fantasy VI rules!

I didn't have any problems installing my copy from DVD. It only took about 12 minutes to install the whole game and a couple of seconds to download the update from Steam.

weird my game installed from the disk and didnt download a peep from Steam?

I'll just give it a go tomorrow while I bang my head into my calculus studies.

well i have been going for about 8 hours..... **** steam...

Here I sit, having just finished the first extended movie of the Lord of the Rings. Steam has spent the entire time downloading and so far only 58.8MB has been downloaded. At this point I am giving up on the damned dvd and letting steam do its own thing. I will just have to wait till next week before I can play the game...

Dude.

I just ended up doing something very similar. I shut down steam, then restarted it with no disk in. Steam then updated its own platform files (not sure if this was what was holding it up). Put the disk back in and selected "uninstall" to undo whatever it had done to this point. Then I restarted the disk auto-play again to get back to the install menu and told it to install again. This time it installed the majority of content from the disk. Now it is just downloading what I assume is an update since the game launched. Total size of this update appears to me to be only 200MB or so.

Mine wanted to do this same crap, download the whole game from steam even though I bought the game at retail. It was taking forever. I found that command line to install from disk... but it should do that by default and only download from steam if you lose your disk or something. At release steam servers were barely spitting out between 5 to 50k at times and it was going to take 8+ hours. I'd have ordered from steam if I wanted steam, it's kind of BS.