I'm happy they used steam: Automatic updates, no cd required (so cant loose it either) and easy access.

YAh what a comparison GFWL you dont even have to have running to play fallout 3, steam has to be open and running for skyrim, just leave it at that.

These mods won't be free, will they?

In Fallout 3 you didn't and a handful of other games. But with the majority (Arkham Asylum and City, Red Faction: Guerilla, GTA4, F12010 and 2011 etc) You have to be logged in in order to even save or load or in some case even start a game.

What possible benefit does GFWL even offer? At least Steam -despite it's faults does at least have a number of useful benefits. GFWL has next to none.


They will be free. Thats been confirmed for us. Not least because we'll still be able to use Nexus and other similar mod sites. They're just using Workshop for more streamlined downloading and installation, something a lot of people new to modding struggle with.

@Johnnybegood:

"Because [censored] you!" --Bethesda

The Steam integration exists solely to inconvinience paying customers. Witness the breaking of the 4GB patch earlier, and breakage caused by autopatching. It's my second biggest annoyance with this game after the rage-inducing user inteface.




How do you get viruses with mods when they typically don't even have executable files in them? FYI: You don't.

You should think ahead before executing a binary file you got off the Net in any case. If you don't know what it does, don't run it...

Despite understanding why Bethesda are using Steam, having moved from the UK to work in South Africa for 5 years, I also see its limitations having had to wait 6 hours for the game to load before I could play it. And I have one of the better Internet connections here. Most people have 35 kbs connections. What's more you have a download limit per month, every time you exceed this you have to pay a top up fee approx $ 30 for 4 GB.

Which means not only is it time consuming but that it can get quite expensive just to buy, download and play the Game. I don't think First World Game Developers take this into consideration, where high connection speeds and good Internet deals are very much taken for granted. I'd be interested to see what the sales figures are like in Country's like these, I have a feeling that they are low to medium, but could be vastly improved if they were to find a way to work around this. You only have to look at the population numbers in India.

By the way having played all the TES Games since Arena, I have to say its a great game, and I'm really enjoying playing it.

That has so nothing to do with Steam, but with the release of a patch. And before your comment "but Steam forces you to yadayada". There is something called Offline mode. No auto-update there.

Excuse me. I'm from the past, where once you bought your copy of a game, you owned it. Never could get used to the "new, improved" model. Never will.

In the past we leased games, we did never owned them.

Suprisingly true.

If you actually read the EULA, that bit we all just click to say we've read when we hadn't done so, you'll find that while you may own that shiny bit of plastic, you have little to no ownership of the data contained on it.

I've been buying games since the eighties, and in the time before shrink-wrap EULAs you owning the physical copy of the game, and being able to do whatever you wanted with that particular copy was the norm. At least here in Finland. Whether you find the "new" practice morally acceptable or not, depends highly on how far your "head is up the jarl's back end", to borrow an ingame phrase.

This business with "you only buying rights to use the work" is a practice invented by the music industry so they could sell you the same item multiple times in different formats. And not surprisingly the software industry has lovingly embraced the idea.

ETA:

Oh, and to pre-empt the "anti-entitlement" brigade: Yes. Adjusted to the money of the time, if I'm paying the same amount for a game that I did in the eighties, when I owned the copy, I do consider myself still "entitled" to own that copy. Otherwise I'm getting ripped off.

This is true of just about anything made of information, including books. EULAs are nonsense and it's surprsing that any of the clauses dealing with elements other than distribution ever get enforced. A lot of them really don't. For example, the reverse-engineering prohibition always puts in a clause about it potentially being void. That's because it usually is. Reverse engineering is a generally protected practice because it's often the only way to build compatible products.

Steam makes a good attempt at enforcing the provisions already present in most licenses and already implied by copyright law in many cases. The reason many of us don't midn it is because it provides extra features like the ability to install software onto any machine without discs.

@Sahara: You're quite right; companies in North America don't care one way or the other about how easy their products are to use in countries like South Africa. This makes sense. Such countries are far from their target market in terms of size. That said, I did meet quite a few gamers when I was there in 2000. It didn't matter as much then if you only had dial-up speeds, though.

I agree. Steam is a big mistake and they`re becoming just another brick in the wall. What was wrong with the freedom of Oblivion or FO3- people paid for that.

The sad thing is, it don`t stop piracy as I`ve seen plenty of evidence of people easily getting around this. And people are actually not paying to be hamstrung by it.



It actually hurts the HONEST BUYER MORE. Especially for an Offline, single player game!!

If you want to use Steam so badly, Bethesda, make it OPTIONAL, not FORCED, so those of us who don`t want it don`t have to have it and we can still pay you for your games.

this is a genuine plea to you, Bethesda, i don`t want you people to lose out, but don`t punish us or we WILL find alternatives.

Everyone is getting caught up in the details of this situation. "your internet svcks, your PC svcks, you svck, Steam is great and if you don't like it that means you're a backwards [censored] who isn't up on modern technology."

Obviously everyone using Steam will have different experiences based on tech specs of their connection/machine. But, people, this is all about priniciple. I bought Skyrim on disc, where it says on the package, "Internet connection required for activation." I'm cool with that. I'm even cool with using Steam to access mods. I have a number of games on my PC from Steam. It has it's place.

But, what I'm not cool with is being FORCED to go through Steam EVERY single time I want to play the game that I bought on disc so that I can play it whenever and where ever I want. If I'm at the top of Mount Everest and want to break out a little Skyrim, I should be able to. If my internet goes down, I should be able to play the game I bought on disc. If I'm stuck in some backwoods airport with no Wi-Fi, I should be able to play. Nowhere does it say "Internet connection required at all times to play." And before anyone says "well, it's called 'offline mode'", you obviously have never experienced the long-running 'offline mode' issues that Steam has had for over four years. I have, and let me tell you, there's nothing more infuriating then not being able to play a (theoretically) stand-alone game because Steam is having issues.

If I wanted to deal with Steam's issues, I would have downloaded the game from them. I didn't. I bought a hard copy. And yet I'm still stuck dealing with Steam's issues. Even if Steam is your BFF, you love them and have had great success with them, this trend should bother you. I understand that it isn't going away and that this is the future of gaming, but I still don't have to be happy about it. For PC gaming and it's rich history of modding, innovation, and individuality, this is a slap in the face.

And what about gamers who don't have easy access to high-speed? Are they now going to be cut completely out of gaming? Latest stats claim that 30-40% of the US population does not have access to high-speed internet. Good job Bethesda, you've outcast 100 million potential customers...just in the US.

I understand why Beth is doing this, and if Steam were problem-free, everyone had high-speed internet, and if everyone who bought the disc could play their game anywhere, anytime they wanted, then I could care less. But this is not the case, and I hope that Bethesda realizes the big picture repercussions of their taking the easy way out by using Steam instead of setting up their own site for registration/patch/mod access.

Using Steam means Bethesda doesn't have to hire all those computer/IT people to push updates/patches out to the world. And they can reduce the number of computers/servers they would need to push those patches out to the players.

I'm sure Steam gets a certain amount of money for each copy of the game that's sold through them, which is probably less than hiring all those IT people and purchasing additional bandwith/servers.

It's about the money.

+1000

Totally agree.

I even thanked Bethesda for not using steam in FO3 in the past. Seems like my heartfelt thanks were not appreciated.

I have personally no problem with Steam but I do not indeed understand why it's forced upon players. It does not one bit to prevent piracy, that's for sure.

There is a topic here to discuss Steam and all its implications. Please us it.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1286613-unofficial-steamdrm-discussion/