I pre-ordered Fallout New Vegas off of amazon.co.uk while I was at university to be delivered at home today since I was coming home for the weekend. When I got home and checked the box, I saw at the bottom that it said "Requires Internet Connection And Free Steam Account to Activate".

Usually this wouldn't be a problem, I love Steam. But at university I can't login to Steam because they block the ports that it uses.

So basically i'm worried that I will get back to university, try and install the game and it will tell me I can't because it can't connect to Steam.


Am I [censored] out of luck?


Or maybe would it work if I activated the game on my Steam account while i'm here at home and then used offline mode at university? At the moment I can play games in offline mode at university, but i'm not sure if it lets you play newly installed games in offline mode unless you go into online mode first.


Any help/advice would be great guys

IT only needs a connection to activate. My internet was cut off when it released, so I tethered off my droid long enough to download the decrpytion keys. Played four or five hours before the internet actually came back on. Even still my internet is really intermittent, yet never once have I had any problem launching or playing with the internet down.


So yeah, you can do what you planned. Activate where you are, toggle offline mode, play at Uni just fine. Once it's activated NV does not require any sort of internet functionality.

First of all, thanks for the reply.


So do you think it would be alright to use a different PC to activate it? Just otherwise i'll have to bring my PC back home sometime this week. I can activate it now on my brother's PC now and then install it again on my PC at uni. But i'm thinking because my own PC won't be able to connect to the Steam servers at all, that it will automatically assume that I haven't activated it on my own PC even though I have activated it on another PC.

Hopefully that made as much sense as it did in my head ahaha.

Nope. You don't activate the CD, you activate the install.

Right I see. Where does it install to? I know with other steam games, it is installed in the steamapps directory, and that it's possible to simply copy and paste it onto a portable storage device and then into the steamapps directory of another computer and the install will work. I could try this but I have a feeling that it isn't installed in the steam directory but in it's own folder.


DRM is such a pain, meh. I bought a game but can't play it without lugging my massive gaming PC around If amazon had told me it required an internet connection I wouldn't be having this problem

Possible, maybe. Legally dubious? Definitely so I'll shut up about it

If it's anything like GFWL, without an internet connection you won't be able to access your saves. However, the saves are on your machine, you just have to move them from (IIRC) My Games/New Vegas/Saves, to My Games/New Vegas.

You don't have to advise me how to do it, just tell me where it installs the games files to. Personally I don't think it's really a legal issue. I bought the game, I just want to actually be able to play it, but because of a lack of information on Amazon's part I can't actually play the game without going through a huge amount of hassle! What a pain.

Ironically the only reason I bought this game was because I knew it would be a decent single player, which I thought I needed since I can't get an internet connection.




Okay thanks for that, I will have to keep that in mind. More examples of developers making it hard for people without a connection to actually play their games.

Thankfully, steam isn't the cluster[censored] that is GFWL.

Steamapps and the saves are on your computer. Steam Cloud is disabled since it screwed with the saves. And not in a good way

Instead, it's worse.


(Note, I like Steam for the things it does well. But as a gun-to-your-head DRM scheme for a 110% completely offline game, it's moronic. And G4WL never deleted our saves. And never actually got in the way.)